Our game idea is in one sentence:   A free for all battle mode game where the goal is to hit your opponents to death with dance moves.

This idea is pretty vague so we had to start prototyping to answer some questions:

• How do we make the attacks not just feel like attacks, but like dance moves?
• How do we make sure players do not run away?
• How do we prevent the player from just spamming the attack button?
• How do we keep the game interesting for longer play sessions?
• What artstyle are we going to use?

During our first week of prototyping we found some answers to these questions:

• We added a beat meter which makes move stronger when you are on the beat. This prevents players from spamming attack and makes it more like dance moves.
• We added the crowd which slowly creeps in so players cannot keep running away.
• We also had some ideas for power ups to keep things interesting, but we have not been able to prototype them yet.
• We are going to use postprocessing shaders to create a celshading effect and to give object an outline to create a cartoony artstyle.

During prototyping we ran into some issues:

• The biggest issue was figuring out unreal. Since our programmers did not have a lot of experience of using c++ in Unreal. A lot of time was spent figuring out unreal engine. At the end of the week this was already less of an issue.
• Adding animations this week like was planned was not reached. We underestimated the time it would take to get animations working in c++ project.
• We also lost a lot of time on figuring out how we could get the multiplayer to work in unreal.
• Sometimes difficult to divide the tasks between team members
• The outline shader was glitching with sky in unreal.

Of course not everything went poorly:

• We have pretty good idea of what we want our game to be.
• We have figured out how we want to do the combat and have a basic version of it playable.
• Setting the coding and naming conventions went good.
• The programmers understanding of c++ in unreal has greatly increased.
• We found a good artstyle.

Next week we are planning to:

• Trying out unity to compare working efficiency.
• Testing out animations in both unreal and unity.
• Adding power ups to our prototype.
• Adding a game over state to our game.
• Making sure the core gameplay loop is fun (a lot of playtesting).
• Making animations (State Machine)
• Environment Blockout