Introduction

Huzzah! 🧙‍♂️✨ Salutations, mystical beings and enchanted souls! Welcome to the captivating spectacle of 'Tower Trouble,' where magic meets mayhem, and our two wizarding duos engage in a whimsical quarrel!

In the mystical game of 'Tower Trouble,' our wizards find themselves entangled in a battle of bewitching wits. Armed with wands that emit suspicious noise, they fling everything they can find at each other's towers in a quest to prove which tower is the fairest of them all. Why, you ask? Well, that’s just how wizard turf wars are decided.

As spells clash, towers crumble, and chaos ensues, you're invited to join us in the development of 'Tower Trouble.' The show is about to begin, and trust us, it's a magical quarrel like no other! Draw your wands and ready your scrolls!

Prototyping in both Unreal and Unity.

Behold fair denizens of the digital interest realm! We are Yenzo and Alexander, the Technomages of our team(and not that kind of techno). In the mystical world of programming and logic, we cast not only variables but also spells with lines of code, conjuring the very essence of magic in the digital realm. We decided to start by prototyping our game (core) in two different engines to have a better look at how it would play by using different mechanics of the engines.

The main goal of prototyping in Unity was to get the main gameplay and “idea” on the table so that every team member has a sight on how the game could be played by visualizing it, some core mechanics are presented so that we could see how it looks. Further on we will have to wait and see feedback to know how we should continue

The prototyping in unreal didn’t go without its struggles. Due to using a specific version of Visual Studio, there was a bug where building an unreal project just wouldn’t build because one function was seen as private when it should’ve been public, but after manually changing the engine itself I could freely start working on the unreal part of the prototype. Firstly we implemented the local multiplayer in C++, a lot of the documentation for it is in blueprints so we did have to figure out how to implement specific blueprints in C++. Setting the spawns of our 4 characters lost us a lot of time cause the characters seemed to have their own mind and randomly spawned where they wanted but that was fixed after a while. Then we made the throwing and pick up ability without any problems and pretty swiftly.

Art -  style and pipeline considerations

Hi, we are the artist team. Wiktor, style wizard and Alexander, tech art alchemist. 

To start the artistic journey for this project, we each made different visualizations for what the game could look like. One was happy and upbeat, while the other was more grungy and dark. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to attempt something in between. Choosing a slightly dark wizardry vibe that emphasizes fun and speaking to the imagination. Think the likes of Magicka and Orcs Must Die!, but with a wizard theme and higher quality graphics and FX. We are gonna go for a more stylized approach to broaden the visual appeal and to make the pipeline manageable within our timeframe. One side of the map will be order and whimsy, the other will be chaos and decay. Now that we know what the style entails we can start creating a style guide and pipeline specifically tailored to this project!

For our pipeline we’re considering using a base color trim sheet with gradients to unwrap onto. We’re gonna be looking into adding color variation and procedural edgewear in a shader. For the procedural edgewear we started researching backing a curvature map to plug into the shader, masking it later using useful parameters and vertex painting, giving us full control over the details of our materials, while putting in less time compared to a full workflow where we texture each individual prop. Additionally our style might utilize tinted shadows, which is foreshadowing an important topic in next week’s devlog: render pipelines!

Sound - Sound palette, and some technicalities

Hello gentlefolk, I'm Valentijn and I'm the sound sourcerer on this project.

The first question to ask is always: how can each element of a game work to emphasize its core - and make it more fun!

For this first week of prototyping, there were 2 questions I wanted answered. First: What is the sound palette of the game going to be like? I looked for inspiration to Magicka, an IP that has a very interesting take on its magic system and which needs to handle a lot of action on screen going on at once, in the same vein as our own project. So, I dove into my libraries and here’s a sample of what I came up with:

Next I wanted to figure out how to tackle horizontal resequencing of music in both engines, since this is pretty much a core feature in most games. In Unreal I went into metasounds and created a graph there that first plays an intro and then randomly selects one of three musical loops indefinitely. I recreated this setup in unity and it works okay but it can definitely be expanded upon in the future. Here’s the end result of that: 

Next up for me will be figuring out vertical resequencing of the music and finding ways to increase the overall intensity of the game over time as the towers are more damaged.