Hello and welcome to the first blogpost of the game: High Stackes Tag!

Me and the team have been working on prototypes this week.

Testing features of the UnrealEngine4 and the Unity Engine.
Mainly the material editor. As well as a movement prototype and an invisibility mechanic prototype. Trying to see the capabilities of both engines. Unreal Engine did not fail to impress as it has an intuitive even if slightly buggy integration with visual studio and P4V. Unity should recieve some love qua programming by next week but UE4 seems a definite winner at this point.

Movement prototype
Doesn't have a lot of features. Yet it gave valuable insight in the structuring of Unreal c++ classes. And will make future prototypes much smoother.
It also caused the testing of a camera, wholy incomplete mind you. But it gives a good idea  what we want for this feature. As well as a sneakpeak into future problems like a camera for coop play, how can we go about that.

Invisibility prototype
For this prototype we changed the opacity of the mesh according to the inverse of the velocity in comparison to the maximum velocity.

Gun game prototype
The gun prototype is done! We still have to test it out but it is playable with 4 controllers and it will give us valuable feedback that we are going to use in further development. The development of the prototype took around 3-4 hours and it wasn't hard to make. The user interface is really simple but the gameplay elements are there. We set up a top down camera for this one, but we will work on that and iterate and see what we like.

Materials prototype
With this prototype we wanted to try out different kind of cel shading methods to see which one we liked the most and was the most efficient and fast way. We tested out 3 shaders in unreal: a normal 2 toned cel shaders, a 3 tone cel shader, a toon outline shader.

The original idea was to combine the cel shaders with the outlines but that didn't work the way we wanted it to.

Our art bible and tech document ,describing our train of thought on the project , have been brought closer to completion, this is important of course so we are all on the same page about the vision of the project. As well as a condenced piece of info for a person joining the team.

That was it for this weeks dev blog, see you next week! :)