Introduction

This week the artist worked away at the art bible, getting a good chunk finished while the developers were prototyping different mechanics to better evaluate their fun-factor.

Art

Ahh, the art bible, the cornerstone of our project with regards to all things artistique. Without it, all art made by our various talanted artists won't click and would fall apart like a incohesive mess of polygons and colors, yuck.

Moodboard

While making the moodboard, it was decided that we will stay very close to the overcooked artstyle. It also helps that the game has a similar camera perspective and indoor setting to what we had in mind. Therefore, overcooked 1 & 2 is an excellent reference.

Colours

Colours have a proven and scientific impact on our mood and emotions. Not only that, but they also play a key role in keeping a good overview and making the most important elements pop out when things get hectic in the game.

For the colours, we will be sticking closey to the way Overcooked used colours in their game. We will obviously won't copy the colors one for one, but we will adapt the rules established in their games. This is with regards to saturation for the characters and objects elements, the difference between the environment and important elements like objects and players.

Shapes

Shapes play a big role in the overall look and feel of the game. Pointy edges and shapes radiate an ominous and dangerous vibe, while rounded edges give of a warmer, friendly vibe.

So for the shapes, Sina looked at all the shapes used in Overcooked 1 & 2, analyzing how they got abut them so she could get a good idea of how our shapes might play out. After she came up with the general shape guide, she tried them out in Maya to compare them to each other and get the proportions just right.

Scale

Wouldn't it just look silly if the fully grown trees were smaller than the toy cars? It most certainly would, but that might just be what you're going for. Eitherway, every art bible needs a good reference of scale so that everyone knows how big / small each model should be. This avoids the issues where the players head is sticking through the roof of their little home because the project had no propper scale guide.

For the scale Sina also the objects from Overcooked 1 & 2 and tried to match them with similar sized blocks. Through this she figured out the proportional relation and scale between all differnt kinds of objects.

Prototyping

With the responsibilty of finding out if all the mechanics we had brainstormed over the last few weeks in the developers hands, they got to work on making prototypes testing out the mechanics feel and fun.

First things first, they set up the local multiplayer logic in Unity, which thanks to Unity's new Input System is so easy to do that even my grandma could do it (cheers granny).

After that, Jef worked on the mechanic of possesing / spooking an exorcist as a ghost. We had the idea that a ghost could enter an exorcists body and challange them to a button mashing duel. The loser of the duel would be "spooked" and left immobilized for two seconds. And yes, the ghost can also get "spooked" after losing the duel which only he had the opportunity to start, you'd be spooked too if you just tried to mech-like take control over a human body. Since the game is ment to be played on controller, as to get the full experience, we added nice and responsive haptic feedback (which a GIF cant convey, obviously) when the player is mashing away at his X/A button.

Below is a GIF showing this whicked insane mechanic in action!

Wrapping up

Ofcourse, not everything we've been doing the past week got covered in this devlog. We intentionally left out all the boring, administrive work which has me almost falling asleep just thinking about it. But what has to be done has to be done of course!

See you all next week when we'll share more of the art bible progress as well as all the cool gamepaly mechanics and features we've been working on.

Cheers!