Introduction

Welcome to LeggyPeggy, an exciting cooperative game where two players work together to navigate through a challenging parcour track. In this game, one player controls the movement of Leggy, a character with long and flexible legs, while the other player takes on the role of Peggy, a skilled marksman who rides on Leggy's head and takes care of shooting down obstacles and enemies.

As Leggy runs and jumps through the course, Peggy must aim and shoot quickly and accurately to clear the path ahead. Communication and coordination between the two players are crucial to overcoming the obstacles and enemies that stand in their way.

With its unique gameplay mechanics and fast-paced action, LeggyPeggy offers a thrilling cooperative experience that will put your skills and teamwork to the test. So grab a friend, get ready to run!

The members of this project are :

• Simon Schaep (Game Developer)
• Rune van der Lei (Game Developer)
• Malou De Paepe  (Game Artist)
• Hugo Colauto  (Game Artist)
• Sarah Platteau (Game Artist)
• luke van Klooster  (Game Artist)

ART

What Software will the artists use for modeling?

The artist will all be using Maya, besides all artists being proficient in this software.
It offers more of an all around package for modeling, animation and special exporting options for games.
These export options mainly regard exporting animations as you can animate everything on one timeline and split it up into separate animation files. 

Texturing software - Substance or Photoshop?

we will be using both photoshop and substance. Substance for unique things. 

Substance gives us the ability to share smart materials and stay consistent.  These smart materials are preset materials you could place on your unwrapped model. 

We will use photoshop for making a trim texture  and particle sprites. This trim texture is a texture used to texture multiple things that keep repeating on assets, such as wooden planks. This is because it's easier to make those in photoshop. we can easily move stuff in the trim back and forward. 

Foward Rendering or Deferred Rendering?

we looked into how we will do the rendering in both Unreal and unity. we choose to go in both engines for forward shading. 

We found that forward rendering is the best and fastest with a single directional light, it seemed likelier to give lower performance but gives better results, it produces less shadow artifacts and makes Ao not affect emmisive colors. 

With defered its faster in most scenarios with multiple materials and local lights. More features for lighting

but we chose forward rendering because mainly it looks better. 

4. what is the Target Audience?

12-16 year old teenagers mainly of both genders. These type of gamers in this age category are social, extrovert and communicative. All things needed for our co-op game. They like to have friends over on a fun night to game together on the couch.  Our type of games in this age category are achievers and socializers. These players get the most out of the game we make, because the achievers will get pleasure out of achieving the level, doing it as fast as possible, and completing the obstacles. The socializers especially will get a lot of fun out of it because of the teamwork and the social connection you make with your partner.

Coding

What happens when a character falls?

What happens when a character loses balance, they let go of the other player and might get dragged along. How do we animate something like this. Here comes physical animations! Both unity and unreal have these effects. Here is us trying out both of them.

Does our main mechanic feel fun?

We started making a prototype in Unity. The main purpose was to find out if our core mechanics are fun, we wanted to do this is soon as possible so we would have enough time to adapt and potentially even change the core of our game.

The prototype is almost complete, it currently contains:
- A character that can be controlled by 2 players, using controllers and/or mouse.
   One player controls the movement, the other the shooting.
   The character can die if it takes too much damage.
   The character can move.
   The character can sprint.
   The character can jump.
   The character can shoot in the direction that you're aiming.
- There is an instability meter that indicates how unstable the player is.
   Sprinting, jumping and shooting increases instability.
   Instability goes down slowly over time.
   The higher the instability, the more difficult it is to change direction and the less accurate you can shoot.
- Obstacles that can be shot down.
- Enemies that chase you and can be killed.

We still need to add some more interesting obstacles for better testing.

We also need some more time to do thorough testing, which will be done next week.

We  are planning to make a prototype in Unreal Engine, to be able to compare development time. Our prediction is that it will be slower, since we want to develop in C++, which is known for being more performant, but taking more time to develop.

Till next week!