Introduction

Hello there user scrolling through our first ever devlog and welcome to our humble itch page

You might be wondering, what exactly is our game all about? Good question, Haunted Havoc is a local couch coop 2v2 party game, where you play as a ghost hunter or a necromancer, you must collect ghost and blast them at the other team. when you hit another player, they get knocked out of their body and become a ghost. but don't worry the game ain't over just yet, your teammate can revive you by sucking your ghost up, and shooting you back in your body. However if the enemy gets to you first, they can suck your ghost up and use you as a projectile against your teammate which means its game over for you (don't worry though, you get to play again next round). The goal is to make sure your the last team standing.

our wonderful group exists out of 

our two lovely programmers: Jelle and Ryan

our amazing artists: Ibrahim, Simon and Jonas

and of course our local sound engineer: Odin

we as a team, aim to develop a truly exciting couch coop experience and we welcome you along on our journey in the form of these devlogs. 

since it's the start of development, there's a lot of questions that need answering. In our first devlog (yes, the one you're reading right now) we aim to show you some of the answers we found through rigorous prototyping and hours of meetings. And in the process, give you a sneak peak into some of the mechanics and feel of our game. 

General Stuff and decisions 

One engine to rule them all 

During the first week of development our team aimed to answer a very important question, which engine do we use. We made a prototype in unity and in unreal and quickly realized that unreal engine was best fitted for our need. Our artist prefer it because it has a better particle system then unity, our programmers prefer it because its easier to manage player controllers in unreal and our sound engineer thinks its the best option because of metasounds and other build in sound tools.

Art

size of the battlefield 

our artist have been hard at work figuring out just how large the map should be, this is an important choice after all, since it will decide the flow of the game. They made a bunch of rough blockouts and we eventually settled on a 30x20 meters map.

Coding

shooting mechanic 

a very important mechanic for our game is actually shooting the ghost and ironing out the quirks of how it works: how far does a ghost fly, how long does it take before you can shoot another ghost, how do we make it feel impactful. These were all burning questions on our minds. So we build a prototype to test this and we eventually landed at a result our team was satisfied with.  

some questions we were able to answer about the shooting mechanic:

Q: is shooting instant?

A: yes!

Q: Shooting button layout?

A: right joystick to aim, trigger to shoot

Q: How do players die?

A: If they are collected by a player as a ghost and shot against a wall.

Q: How do you revive?

A: Collect a player and shoot it to a dead body.

Hoovering 

another very important mechanic is hoovering up the ghost, and there were also quite a lot of questions that needed to be answered: how far is the range of the pickup, can the player hoover the ghost or does he first need to knock them out, how fast do you hoover up ghost. we build another prototype which you can find in the video below.

some questions we were able to anwser about the vacuum mechanic:

Q: How do you collect ghosts?

A: You knock the ghost with a button and then the ghost get sucked to the player if the players stays close enough to the ghost.

Q: Who has priority to collect the ghost?

A: The player who knocked the ghost first

Q: How long does it take to collect a Ghost?

A: The ghost get knocked back for 1 second and then get sucked to the player the smaller the distance how shorter the duration.

Minor game rule stuff

There's a bunch of other minor game rules that we figured out this week that aren't necessarily big enough to warrant their own bullet points but are hugely important to how the game feels, plays and functions, in this part of the devlog I will briefly go over a few:

Q: How long does a round take?

A: 30s - 1 min

Q: Can players collide with each other.

A: Yes!

Q: can the players push each other?

A: yes, with the same button as collecting ghosts

Q:where do players spawn?

A: on opposite sides of the map left and right

in the next episode of our amazing devlog:

our programmers will further prototype the essentials of our game, our artist will continue work on their art bibles and prototype art styles and our sound engineer will work on his sound bible and prototype how music will work and interact with the gameplay, seeya next time!!!!!!