Introduction

Welcome to our devlog! We are a team of six gamedevelopment students from Belgium who are excited to share our progress with you.

Our team consists of 6 students studying at Digital arts and entertainment: Dejonckheere Ward, Haelvoet Wout ,   Larsson Felicia, Tempelaere Bram,  Tieu Joan and Vanstechelman Mauro

This semester we will be making a local PVP game together.

Limbloss is a physics-based PVP fighting game that challenges players to chop off opponents limbs, slice their opponents, and use ragdoll physics to push them off the platform.

ArtStyle

Limbloss will be a game that appeals to casual gamers with its stylised art style. The game's characters have exaggerated proportions that make them and seeing limbs better readable, which is crucial in a PVP game where the main focus is slashing off limbs. The stylised art style also allows for more flexibility in incorporating goofy and unrealistic elements into the game, such as the detaching of limbs.

The stylised art style is perfect for Robot Brawler's longevity, as it has the potential to stay appealing to a larger audience over time. This is because stylised art styles tend to be more timeless and less prone to becoming outdated than realistic styles. Additionally, stylised art allows for more creative freedom in designing characters and environments, which can help keep the game fresh and exciting for players.

Overall, Robot Brawler's art style is a perfect fit for the game's target audience and gameplay mechanics. The stylised approach allows for more flexibility in character design and helps the game stand out from other titles in the crowded gaming market.

In addition to the stylised character design, the environment in Robot Brawler will have a distinct visual style. To make it clear to players what objects and areas they can interact with, the environment will be less saturated than the interactables and player characters.

Furthermore, objects that can be interacted with, such as weapons, will have shiny materials and textures to make them easily noticeable to players. This will help players quickly identify objects they can use to their advantage during gameplay.

Forward or Deferred Rendering

URP (Universal Rendering pipeline), HDRP (High-definition rendering pipeline), and the Built-in renderer, are rendering pipeline presets in Unity – which need to be defined at the start of a project. All of these support deferred and forward rendering.

The HDRP supports the most, but seems tailored to more realistic games, which we don’t need. So HDRP seems a bit overkill, as well it might be negative on performance, especially if we don’t need most of what it offers.

The Built-in renderer does not support decals, two-sided materials, and the visual effects graph for making particles.

Forward rendering generally looks better and with less artefacts and can render translucent/transparent materials. But it will be less performant than deferred when many lights are involved. Though we will not be using many lights, so forward will be best.

Though deferred is said to have more options when it comes to rendering, and most of forward’s “selling points” has been that it is optimal for VR (in UE documentation), so I’m not sure if the better visuals and better performance (at least in a case of few lights and relatively simplistic scene), is a good trade-in for the extra features of the deferred.

 Conclusion: Forward is best, if we end up using Unity, URP is best. 

Particles

Target Audience

By next week we plan to assemble a tech doc, art bible and have a playable prototype ready