“The prototyping - phase 1”

GetShipRekt! is a couch-coop local multiplayer game developed by a team of 3 developers and 3 artists. The name of the title basically says it all; battle your opponent(s) 1v1 or 2v2 style by blasting their ship with your cannons while defending your own by tactically using shields and manoeuvring around!

Gamepad controllers are supported.

Made possible by DAE.

So, to start off; Quinten tried making a prototype in the Unreal Engine to test out the main aiming ability of the cannon. He mainly tested this to see whether it’s possible to make an indicator for the cannonball’s estimated trajectory. The prototype seemed successful with clear results of a parabola-like trajectory coming from the cannon’s front.

Quinten also made a smaller second prototype, also in Unreal, to test out basic player controls on a surface, this being one of the ships. He did encounter some problems, but it worked out in the end. He mentioned that when creating an object and attaching some components to it with a certain order, that order of components, when changed, would not be respected by the blueprint.

Another problem arose when attaching mesh components from c++, they always appeared invisible. Simply adding them to a blueprint and triggering them on beginPlay in the c++ class instead seemed to have fixed this issue.

And lastly; apparently Unreal Engine 4 doesn’t have a line renderer and the only known solution to bypass this problem is to use static meshes. Spline meshes do not seem to work.

Kristof kept himself busy with the improved input manager in Unity and tried creating playercontrols. The basic controls are set, but this has not been tested so far as Quinten tried something similar in UE4.

The camera still remains a sensible task for Dennis, who is currently still trying to figure out what angle works best. Since the game will be competitive, we cannot allow one team to have an advantage over the other because of a shared, unfair camera view. However, he does have a system that shows most options for the camera without it being splitscreen. He did manage to screw up by changing the prefab, which deleted all the saved camera angles, but recreated them again.

Dennis also implemented his own version of a framework.

Our plans for next week will most likely be:

- moving character on a moving ship

- rocking the boat

- character pushing and carrying stuff

- destructible ship (parts)

- camera issues

The GetShiptRekt! team