Hello there! Welcome to the first ever devlog of Robbin’ Hook. As you can see by our lovely title, we have already defeated the blank page. Robbin’ Hook is a dungeon crawler focused on traps for both you and the enemies, where you play as a tiny human trying to bring down the lazy, fat and greedy mouse king. The last two weeks have been spent prototyping everything we need to choose our game engine, art style and workflow. The programmers prototyped the basic mechanics for the gameplay such as traps and AI while the artists on the team figured out an art style and whether it is possible to make this style inside a game engine.

1. Art & Shaders

From the very start of this project, we were influenced by the works of studio Ghibli and so we decided to adapt some parts of their animation style. In our project we will try to keep different styles for different purposes. Backgrounds and static objects will be rendered in a normal manner and keep their realistic proportions. All the gameplay elements, on the other hand, will be rendered in a cartoony cell shaded manner with a black outline. This goes for everything that moves in the game; the player, the enemies, the traps, particle effects, … We divided the work between us and each got to work on a specific part of the art-side of the project.

On the shader side of things I looked at my options in both Unreal Engine 4 & Unity and prototyped a shader setup that would give us the desired result. It is possible to have different render styles in the same frame in both engines but unreal came out on top as the more flexible of the two. While the shader in Unity looked a bit cleaner and gave satisfying results a bit faster, Unreal allowed for coloured lights and made it easier to render outlines with a consistent thickness. While I believe I could get the same result out of Unity, it would take me a lot more time and require me to learn the shader language in a short timeframe. Unreal just has their shadergraph and that’s pretty cool if you ask me.

While I was slaving away shaders, Bryan spent his time figuring out what the rest of the style will look like and compiling it into what will in time become our art bible. All our reference images were added to one reference document and expanded upon where needed. Some concept art for the character and some enemies was also made. This helped a lot in agreeing on what our shapes would look like in the final product. Bryan added more images for shape, mood, colour etc. etc. During a later meeting that week we all sat together and discussed some details to put into the style guide. By the end of this week we should be somewhere around 50% finished with the guide. The content of this document, however, is still subject to change in the future since we will have to adapt our art based the results of our prototypes.

2. Gameplay & Programming

Prototyping systems in different engines can be a lot of work. So it’s a good thing we have two programmers! Since we are testing two engines they each ran off in the distance and came back with some working mechanics in different engines. Since Unreal Engine is a little harder to get into both Nicholas and Keanu spent some time learning it to make sure the prototypes for each engine where of the same quality. This also made it easier for us to decide which engine to use in the end.

Nicholas worked on the hook mechanic in unreal to make sure it was doable from the get-go. Keanu made some traps in unity to get a feel for the engine and the workflow. After a short discussion we decided all together to build our final prototype in Unreal Engine. During this period we also figured out what the camera angle would be like, for now.

3.  Conclusion

After two weeks of testing and discussing we have some stuff to show! Our prototype can be downloaded and will have a simple version of the shader visible. To us, the gameplay in the prototype is fun and shows off what we want to accomplish in the final product. We have decided on an engine and art style. Next week we can start on production! This means rebuilding our current mechanics and shaders and starting on quality characters and environments.