Our second prototype is out !

And with it, a lot of new features in our project, but also a complete questioning of our development pipeline. We may have changed our minds about the Engine that could be the best for our project.
We also came with new gameplay ideas to make the wind wharacter funnier to play.
More on that in this devlog !

Unreal Vs Unity 2 : The Repentance

After long discussions with the team, we came to the conclusion that Unity could be a handier Engine for the purpose of our game than Unreal.

Unity has the following three advantages against Unreal :

• The physics : It is not a secret that Unreal Engine offers the best in term of physic simulation for a game engine. However, a so performant system comes with a lot of complexity. Unreal could be a judicious choice if our game had highly complex physics, but the physics of our game are actually pretty simple. We only have to play with the gravity and some basic forces. And for that, Unity does more than the job and is more user-friendly for physics that Unreal. We could use a backhoe loader to plant a nail, but if we could use a hammer instead, wouldn't be more judicious ? In this case Unity could be our hammer !
• The Cinemachine camera : We imagine our game with a single screen and a single camera that follows both players. It asks a lot of calculation to calculate the camera position at any frame and to try to keep both players in view. In Unreal we should have to develop that from scratch, this is possible to do but it will cost us time and we will take the risk to make errors in the code. With Unity cinemachine, we only have to setup some parameters and the engine do the work for us with a pretty convenient result !
• The local multiplayer : In our game, each player will have to play with their own controller. So, we have to implement local multiplayer in our game. For the moment, we weren't able to do that in Unreal, but it was way easier to implement in Unity. Since our game can't exist without local multiplayer, if we don't find a way to add local multiplayer in Unreal, Unity should become our default choice.

We can also add that the cable component has a bug in Unreal Engine 5.3.2. Which is the version we use. This bug make the cable component unusable for our purpose. Unfortunately, the cable component isn't anymore an argument in favor of Unreal.
Eventhough Unity has Shader and particles systems, these tools from Unreal seem more convenient to us, so Unreal has still some good points.

In any case, we will continue to prototype on both engine, in order to get experience and to discover THE ONE!

Mechanisms, mechanisms and more mechanisms !

Activating mechanisms will be a central part of our puzzles in term of gameplay. We prototyped three types of mechanisms :

• Mechanism that can be activated by player's orb: These mechanisms work pretty well for the moment, we will now have to test them in a real puzzle to see if it works in term of gameplay.
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• Pressure plates: We took a long time to figure out how our pressure plate should work. We tried to answer to a lot of question. Could the physical object activate the plates or only the player ? What happens if more than one entity is on the pressure plate ? When we leave the pressure plate, does it deactivate the mechanism. And we came to this conclusion, any entity can activate the plate. The pressure plate is activated if at least one entity is on it. When the plate is empty it decativates the linked mechanism. By designing the plate like that, it males it interesting for different usecases than the other mechanisms.
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• Permanent Fan : We also developped fans that can be activated by the wind player. When activated, any physical object that goes into the airflow of this fan is pushed in the direction of the airflow. It will be an interesting puzzle mechanic.

A first enemy ?

We developped a first basic enemy :

• He follows the player when he sees it
• He goes back back to his start position if he does not see the player anymore.
• He explodes (is destroyed for the moment) when a player is in range for an attck
• He is destroyed when touched by a pleyr's orb.

Creating the platforms.

We created a brand new mechanic for the wind player that could make him way more interesting. He is now able to create platforms along walls. When a platform is created, he is not able to move anymore, but it could be and usefull way to help the oder player to advance (or to trap him...)
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If you read the document until here, thanks a lot for your attention and we hope that you are as hyped as we are for this project that could be amazing !