INTRODUCTION

Greetings, thou whomst traverses the internet and welcome to our game project we are making for the course Group Projects at DAE Howest. First things first, the team! Our group exist of three artists, Leon, Tamy and Jasper. Two programmers Pieter and Sintija. And last but not least the sound design team. Also known as Jake. The game we’ll be making for you in the upcoming few weeks is called FurnaceFeeders!

Become a robot in a place where scraps mean everything, and friendship means nothing. FurnaceFeeders is a couch/pvp game where you control robots working in a maze-like, steampunk inspired factory. And like the title suggests, feeding your own furnace with metal scraps found in the factory. But beware! Scraps are a rare recourse and your competition fierce you’ll have to fight fiercely to keep your oven going!

WHAT IS OUR TARGET AUDIENCE?

Our main target audience are casual players, from young kids to young adults, however, given the nature of the game- a player versus player party game with focus on having fun and accessibility rather than difficult gameplay, every age group could potentially enjoy it.

Because of the competitive aspect and MOBA-like elements where players can learn the best routes in the map and the most effective way to use abilities, we believe it could also draw in more competitive players, however that is not the main aim. Because of the easy-tolearn controls and straight-forward objective everyone could enjoy it, from younger kids (5+years) playing with their family to teens and young adults playing with friends.

 THE NITTY GRITTY OF THE ART

The road to achieving a coherent and working art style is long and entails many steps. If you’ve already had some experience with creating anything worth calling art, you might know what the first step of our process was… yes, the creation of a mood board. Here we collected the primary inspirations for our game and this made sure that we were all thinking on the same line.

After harmoniously combining all the different patches of creativity, the foundation of the art direction became visible.

Now for the view point, our game could be played top down but we all agreed that an isometric top view used in games like Overcooked would be more appealing. Moreover, this gave us the chance to dabble with 3D shapes and spaces.

For the shape language we wanted primarily simple readable shapes that simply looked good. For the environment, we wanted to create a somewhat boxy impression so that it would contrast with the characters, which were created with more rounded shapes. This would make the rounded character stand out of its environment. This is especially important because of our game design in which everything is displayed in on screen. This means that the character and is environment will appear pretty small on the screen. Thus, to ensure a clear gameplay, we had to make sure that the character was popping out of the screen.

Other elements we took into an account to make the character pop out were the colour choice, the design of the HUD and the proportions of the character relatively to its environment.

For the colour, we sticked to the basics. We used blue for the character and its complementary colour orange for the colour accents of the environment. The level itself will be made out of mostly greyish tones. This will ensure that the level stays in the background and that the character will pop out. To add these colours, we decided to use gradient textures. With this technique, we won’t be able to add much texture detail, but since this is a one screen play, the players won’t be able to see these details anyway. The advantage of this technique is that it allows a fast workflow.

For the design of the HUD, we first considered to make the playable area a square and to display the HUD of the players on the two sides of the screen. However, this would result in a smaller playable area which would impede us to add more interesting detail to the map. So we  tossed it around and decided to integrate the HUD in the playing area itself. Concretely, we would display each player’s information on his or her own furnace.

A final decision we took to make sure the character would stand out, is to make it slightly out of proportion with its environment. In such way, the character is bigger than the walls surrounding it but smaller than the furnace – since this is one of the protagonists too.

WHAT TYPE OF CONTROLERS ARE WE USING?

We considered the normal computer keyboard and mouse controllers but we quickly found many obstacles. How could we let four players play the game on the same computer? We could implement mouse and keyboard support, but it would be very clumsy for the players. Therefore, we concluded that the game would preferably be played with four controllers. Maybe we can add mouse and keyboard support but this is something that we still need to work out in the coming weeks.

COMING WEEK

We will elaborate on the art of the game in our so called “art bible” and refine our level design to eventually end up with the most unique and fun level. Of course, we will also deepen our knowledge on the relevant elements of our couch co-op game. The programmers of our group will mainly work on a playable prototype of the  game. So you guys can already have a small taste of the game.