Introduction

Hey there! Welcome to our game project for the course Group Projects at DAE Howest that we’re going to be working on for the next months. We’re so glad you’re here!

Who are we you might ask? Well, our group consists of 2 programmers; Laurens and Bruce and 3 artists; Maaike, Maksym and Lisa. We plan on creating an awesome and fun 2D co-op platformer game in the coming weeks and hope to bring you along on the ride with this Devlog we will update on a weekly basis!

Game Idea

Mountain Climbers is a 2D co-op platformer where 2 players are connected by a rope and must scale a mountain. They must time their jumps or swing each other around to get to the top. When the player clings onto a wall, their grip meter will deplete. Watch out! If it’s fully depleted, the player will lose grip and fall off the wall, this can make you lose your progress and kill you. You’ll have to be quick and smart with your partner about your movements. Go and reach the top!

What style are we going for?

The artists in our group want to have a fun art style that is reminiscent of the rubber hose animation style from the 1930's, but the environment should be calmer and serene. This way the focus can stay on the characters! We want the style of our game to be both the rubber hose style but also have a painterly feel, which is why theres a difference in the character style and the environment style. Our characters will have complimentary colors, while the environment will be mostly analogue colors.

2D or 3D?

ISeeing as how we liked the style mentioned above, our team decided very quickly we'd want to go for a full 2D style. This would make it easier to have our characters have that funky animation that the Rubber Hose animation style has. This also means we don't need to use any modelling software, just our good friend photoshop!

Unreal or Unity?

After testing out both engines, and also deciding what style we wanted to go for, we decided to go with Unity.  Unity also offers us a lot of tools and features like a great Graphical User Interface (GUI) and more, that we will be able to use to finish the project in time.

Here's a gif from in Unreal, where we used some sprites we found:

And here from in Unity, where we tested out the rope mechanic:

What about the controls?

Seeing as we want this to be a fun couch co-op for anyone wanting to play, we'll be including both keyboard & mouse controls, and controller support.  There won't be a thousand buttons you'll need to press, more like the usual movement buttons along with  a few interact/ability buttons. Implementing controller support is fairly easy to do, but this also gives us more audience range.

Plans for next week

Next week we plan to continue prototyping! Our devs will try to implement all the mechanics of our game and the artists will continue working on the Art bible and start having a clear design for the characters and environment.

See you next week!