Second and last week of the prototype phase. This week we again started with a lot of questions:

• The most important question was how to make or game more fun/ interesting to play?
• Is Unreal Engine really the best engine for our game?
• Does our art style work, is it not too time consuming?

Luckily we found some answers

• Instead of a health bar we are opting for a points system, it wasn’t fun for the player if he died and had to wait until all the other players were also dead before he could start playing again. We also implemented pickup that the players could collect during the game, if the player gets hit some of his pickups get thrown around on the dancefloor again for other players to collect.
• Last week we had a lot of issues with Unreal Engine, so we decided to switch game engine and make a new prototype in Unity
• The artists did an art time test to see if our chosen style was feasible (We timed how long it takes to make a prop for the game in the right style and import it to the engine)

We ran in to some issues, but we were able to fix most of them:

• Finding a meaningful way to integrate the beat in to our game that wasn't to punishing for new players.
• Figuring out the area of the playfield
• Checking out how to create a HUD which you could navigate through with a controller.
• Finding a good way to synchronize the animations to the input.
• Creation of the prototype character took longer than expected

On the other hand we also made good progress:

• Prototyping went a lot faster in Unity, programming efficiency increased a lot and  combining art and code was much faster.
• The game became a lot more fun once we added controller support 
• We created a test particle system
• We made a block out for our disco level
• Changing the camera angle made the game feel more immersive

What lessons will we take with us for starting the first sprint of our game:

• We found that the development of the game went a lot smoother in Unity, so we are going to stick with this engine for creating the final game.  

(Characters and animations for this build are from Mixamo)