Great to see you again, for another week of our Devlog!

This week we tried to answer some more questions about parts of the game we weren't sure of yet. We've done a lot of prototyping in Unreal Engine, and our artists also created some great work which we will showcase here.

Characters

These were some of the silhouettes that give a general idea of how the two characters should look. The bottom two rows are more worked out versions of Big Tim and Slanky Tim that will show us what the feel of the two characters will be like.

In the following sections we want to (very) briefly explain our current character designs concerning their abilities. Please note that the abilities aren't completely set in stone yet. Although we've done some prototyping on these abilities, there needs to be more testing to figure out what's best for the game.

Slanky Tim

Ability 1: Dash

This ability dashes the player forward to allow for quick repositions. We want to keep the cooldown of this ability low to add more fun by allowing the player to quickly navigate across the map.

Ability 2: Frost Grenade

The frost grenade's name pretty much describes what it does, a grenade that when exploded, slows all enemies hit for a certain time. AOE damage will be an important asset in this game, so we thought a grenade might fill that role.

Ultimate: Overload

This ultimate empowers both the players by buffing their kit. Currently we only increased their movement speed, but it's easy to add more buffs to this so they feel like real monsters during the ultimate.

Big Tim

Ability 1: Push

When activated, Big Tim pushes nearby enemies away, and also pushes himself backwards. This allows Big Tim to get comfortable up close since he can get out of trouble with the press of a button.

Ability 2: FlameThrower

Just like Slanky Tim, we found that Big Tim needs an AOE ability. The flamethrower is made for close up battles against a ton of enemies, it's a flamethrower after all.

Ultimate: Electrify

Electrify empowers Big Tim's bullets by charging his bullets up into electric ones. When an electric bullet hits a target, it chains to a nearby enemy dealing damage to both.

Enemy AI

This week we also tinkered around with the Behavior Tree system of Unreal Engine, to see what it's all about which will help us design the enemy attack patterns to fit into the game. Currently the enemies move to a random point in a certain radius, but this is easily expandable by simply creating new tasks the enemy has to execute based on certain true or false conditions.

Map Blockouts

The design of the map is also very important to the game, so we've made some more layout drawings to give an idea on how the map elements will play together. To really test things out, we even made a first blockout of one of the layout drawings. This will give us a better idea of scale and also allow us to prototype in a more final version of the level to paint the picture of the full scene.

These were the highlights of this week, and although this isn't everything we did in the past week, we hope it gave you an idea of our design process. We find it important to answer questions we have right now, rather than already trying to make a fully functioning game. Using this knowledge we get a much better understanding on what would make the game fun and how the game would look best. 

Thank you so much for joining us once again, and we'll see you next week!