Introductions

Hello!

We are a group of students at Digital Arts & Entertainment at Howest.
This project tis our first test of working in a team and building a vertical slice from the ground up.

Our game will be a pvp, space variant on sumo wrestling.
Multiple players will have to do their best to bounce each other out of bounds,
all the while being careful of managing their thruster resources.
To make this game more than just a weird form of billiards, the arsenal will be expanded with tractor beams,
force fields, gravity mines and the likes.

Our team consists of 3 developers, 1 character artist and 1 technical artist.
Developers:

• Nevin Amarendranath
• Senne Van Rompaey
• Yerko De Zutter

Artists:

• Witse Belmans
• Braeckman Gert

This week's progress

This week we needed to figure out how far we wanted to take the physical accuracy of motion in the vacuum of space.
Quite quickly, it became clear we couldn't just let velocities ramp up to near lightspeed on each subsequent impulse.
We'll definitely include some drag and speed limitations to keep controls manageable.

While doing the old 'floaty floaty bump bump' is our core mechanic, we needed other options in the player's arsenal to keep things interesting and fun.
Luckily the sci-fi space theme is very flexible for coming up with a wide range of gadgetry, such as tractor beams, wormholes
gravity mines, energy blasts, etc.

Circling back to the most important issue, making the controls feel good, we also needed to decide on which type of controls
to focus on. While keyboard input works, it's undisputable that gamepads serve way better to input exact thruster orientations,
almost to the point where using a keyboard is just nonsensical.
This, on top of the larger screen sizes offered with console gaming, and the party-game direction we want to take this project in,
makes it a no-brainer that our project should be developed primarily for consoles.

Because games are made for people, after all, we also spent some time thinking about who this game will actually be for.
We decided on targeting high-school kids, gathering at one of their friend's houses, pretending to do homework on group assignments
but actually just hanging out, having a laugh and just absolutely annoying each other during a couple of fast rounds of Sumonauts!

Coming up next week

By next week, we'll have nailed down the workflows we want to follow, both in the tech and art departments.
We should have a clear view of how we'll organize our project, have an art bible in place, and all code conventions and folder structures
will be agreed upon.