In the first week of our prototyping sprint we did a lot and yet it feels like next week will be our real start, but let us clarify. This week was mainly a lot of decision-making, we decided on what engine we will be using, the art style, etc. Furthermore we brought every team member on the same page on how every mechanic of the game will work.

There were several questions we had to ask ourselves in this early stage. Unreal engine or Unity? How is our level actually going to look, visually? What kind of art style do we want to go for? Should we use cel shading for our graphics, and if so, for the whole game or just characters, like so many games do? Would orthographic view look best or is it better to stick with perspective?

We answered this array of questions by testing, discussing and documenting our work. As for the game engine we made a small prototype in both Unreal Engine and Unity, and decided upon ease of use, platform portability, documentation and other small variables. The decision was harder than we expected, because both engines had some things are powerful and equal at this point, but when we listed all the pros and cons, we decided to go with Unity.

As for the art style we've started making an art bible, which is about halfway done at the moment. However, we already have a very clear idea of how the characters will look and how every different stage of our level will play. We also decided to try out a cel shader which we will possibly have our first try at next week.

Most of the game mechanics were documented in our tech document this week. Although some things still need to be finalised and ask for a little more discussion, the core of the document is finished and will be used as fallback later on in development when needed.

This week we made two demos (one in Unreal, one in Unity) mostly to decide what engine to use and to get the core mechanics working, but since we are new to both Unreal Engine and Unity, we struggled to get all mechanics working. We still got a lot done though. Next week we will try to implement all core mechanics into the game, since we now know which engine we will use and the direction in which we want to go. Nonetheless we added the two builds of the prototype on the website, and are happy to announce we got multiple controller support working, as well as a basic camera concept, since we found out that a perspective view was the way to go. We also got a little happy accident in the unity project where you, as a player, can jump off another player and since we had some fun in the playtest with it, we decided to keep it and added it to our feature list (it's not a bug, it's a feature!).

Apart from all this productiveness, we also made a nice logo, had a meeting on Wednesday, made a discord channel, started using hackn’plan, made this blogpost, found out our team is awesome and last but not least found out what needs to be done in the next week, our last week of our first sprint.

We still need to add more core mechanics to our Unity-project and finish our art bible and tech document and playtest our core mechanics as well. We also have to add an extensive list of tasks in hackn’plan, which are for the moment mostly documented in the tech document and in the art bible. Lastly we want to put some time and love into the UI of the game. It will surely be a busy, but fun week!

The Food Fighters Team!