For this module, we were organized into groups combining Game Design students and Animation students, with the task of creating a vertical-slice for a narrative-focused game.
Initial Team Meeting
The first thing we did was meet and get acquainted with everyone in the group, as well as talk about what roles we typically worked in. Once we'd all gotten to know everyone, we started suggesting different ideas for what game we could make.
We quickly set up a Miro board to keep track of these early ideas and discussions. Initially we struggled to settle on an idea / concept for what the gameplay or narrative would be, but we did end up deciding on a general art-style.
Since most of the animators in the group came from a 2D background (only 1 with experience in rigging and animating 3d characters), it was obvious that it would match their skillset better to do 2D character art.
On the Game Design side though, we were all mainly familiar with Unreal Engine, which has very limited 2D capabilities. We felt that by limiting the 2D to characters and keeping the gameplay in a 3D context, it would act as a good compromise. For these reasons, we settled on aiming for a 2.5D art style.
After our first meeting on campus, the group set a regular day and time for weekly meetings going forward. We decided to each spend time coming up with any story / gameplay ideas on our own until the next meeting, where we would pitch different ideas and settle on one.
First Weekly Meeting
Leading up to our team's first weekly meeting, we each brainstormed different story ideas to base our game around. Since the game would have a narrative-focus, we wanted to settle on this first before designing the gameplay itself. We mainly used our Miro board to keep track of our ideas, with one in particular quickly becoming the most developed.
Though there were a few ideas we all liked, the majority of the team decided to go with an idea pitched by one of our animators.
The concept was based around elements of the "Red Riding Hood" fairy-tale, with the protagonist named "Red" traveling alongside her wolf companion to visit her grandmother. A large focus of the story would be Red entering and exploring a mirror-dimension called the "Night World", where villagers from a town have been transported and transformed into monstrous creatures. The villains behind this would be a group known as "The Huntsmen", who Red would encounter and fight throughout the story.
The gameplay would focus on hack-and-slash combat against enemies in the Night World, with some of our initial ideas including fighting alongside Red's wolf companion.
For art style, we looked at a lot of different inspirations.
Assigning Roles
After we'd settled on the core ideas for our game, we started assigning roles for each team member. We decided to appoint a few team members to lead roles, for managing broad areas like scripting / programming, art design, narrative design and animation.
I was assigned Lead Programmer for the project, so my responsibilities will revolve around planning the implementation of the game's core features, as well as managing and dividing up the work with the team's other scripter.
To finish off the meeting, each team member picked a small task to work on corresponding to our roles. Our goal was to put together a small number of assets and basic mechanics as a proof of concept that we could show in our first weekly presentation.
Developing Character Prototype
Since the game would be third-person, our 2D character would need to change sprites based on the viewing angle of the camera.
To prototype this idea, I used Unreal's Paper 2D "Flipbook" Component in the normal Third-person Character Actor instead of the skeletal mesh, and imported some old sprites I made as a placeholder asset.
Every tick, the Flipbook updates its rotation to face the player camera.
The game then runs some math to convert the viewing angle to an appropriate frame number for the Flipbook (8 frames, character facing in different directions).
This was the result:
While the code for this prototype isn't very scalable and will have to be rewritten later, the result has given me confidence that the our idea for the 2.5D art style can definitely work.