Welcome to week 2 of our devlog for SKalley!

We have made quite some progress and a major change since our last devlog and we would like to share some of it with you.

Art

Our artists have started working on the Art bible. This will steer our art style in the right direction, but it also serves as an emergency buoy for whenever they need to get re-inspired or get lost in the artistic world. We will be using this bible throughout the rest of our project, so this is a very important document to have properly finished at this stage of the project development. As a sneak peek, here are some of our current design choices.

Moodboard

Colour

Our game environment and assets will make use of flat colours. The structures & Obstacles are mainly less colourful. Meanwhile the Pickups will be popping out, just as graffiti art pops out the eyes of people. it makes for a nice contrast.
The colours of the pickups also represent its type of use, it helps the player identify what kind of consumable at a quick glance. This is especially useful in a game with lots of visual information.

Character proportion

The proportion of the character will be cartoony and stylized, inspired by Gang Beasts and Legend of Zelda series. The character will be on the shorter side, compared to the environment and assets. The size of the character's head will be quite large in comparison with the rest of the body.

Camera positioning

We thoroughly iterated through various camera iterations to test how our game would play the best with as we won't go for a split-screen approach. Another thing to take into consideration was how the camera angle will affect the controls, as seen in No.6 where the camera is placed sideways, but that means moving upwards will feel awkward at this angle, unless we change inputs
After many tests, we have possibly found a suitable camera angle, no.2 & 3 are currently favourites within our team.

Level design

After some extra quick meshes, we could also experiment with potential level design and wall layouts, we noticed quickly that there were a lot of options for us to try out! Here's an example of one such design. We also put emphasis on verticality.

What's next?

• Finishing the Art bible
• FX Design choices
• Explore the texture pipeline

Technical

Game Engine switch:
We first want to discuss the elephant in the room. We are switching from Unreal to Unity for our game engine.
There are several key factors as to why we decided to do this switch.
First, we are not aiming for a realistic art style unreal engine seemed like overkill for the scale of our project.
Secondly, everyone has been having very annoying issues trying to delete & rename files in Unreal which led to cluttering of the project if we didn't clean them up.
Thirdly, we had some serious delays just trying to fix connections between c++ classes and its blueprints, losing this much time is trivial if we want to make a successful game, Unity is in general a lot more easier to tame with Perforce.
Lastly, writing C# is generally easier then C++ code.

Programming

For this week we aimed to have a playable build of our project, which we succeeded in. But we also did some testing regarding how our environment should move. Should the walls only move? Or with a treadmill that keeps trying to push you off and punishes you for bad mistakes? Or a Temple run mode where you move forwards all the time?
We generally found the treadmill one the most appealing and the best choice out of the three. Below is a short gameplay of what we have.

Mechanics

Controller scheme:

Pretty basic controller inputs for now, but we plan to add one or two more in the future! Now you may have noticed but if you read our first devlog, you will see that there is a new mechanic called "Dash"

It does exactly what it would do, dash the player a certain distance forward, but it is not only a tool of movement, it can also be used to knockback fellow skaters!

Pickups
We also had the idea to bringing consumables to the game, the spray can gives the player a speed boost! Gotta go fast!

See here a demonstration of the Dash & Spray can pickup in action.

What's next?

• Switch over to Unity and learn the workflow over
• Add a Pickupsystem
• Game Design Document
• Audio integration tests
• 4 player gameplay

And with that, we finished the 2nd devlog! Thank you for reading this!
Until the next devlog!