Introduction to the Team and Game

Hey there, and welcome to the very first devlog for our Game Project for the Game Projects course at Howest - Digital Arts & Entertainment.
We’re a small but dedicated team of six developers who are working together to make this game come to life. Our team consists of:

🎨 Artists - Nora, Paula, and Chris
💻 Coders - Viktor, Twan, and Kobe

We’ll be working on a two-player couch co-op platformer boss-rush game. Since we’re on a tight schedule, we won’t be developing a full game, but instead, we’ll focus on creating a vertical slice. A vertical slice is a polished segment of the game that showcases all core mechanics, visuals similar to a demo but more focused on quality over quantity.

Now, what is Ribbit Rampage exactly? Two players each control their own adorable frogs. They will need to work together to avoid becoming the hungry heron’s next meal. The heron will try its best to catch the little critters by performing various attacks. The frogs are quite resistant, though, and they fight back by croaking at the heron loudly! When the two frogs croak in unison and make their soundwaves collide, they will cause a sonic boom dealing even more damage.

Of course, this is just the foundation, we have plenty more mechanics planned. But for now, let’s have a look at what exactly we’ve been doing on this week.

Art

Our artists have been hard at work researching, experimenting, and prototyping, here’s a look at their progress!

Art Bible

It’s important to have a coherent and consistent art style throughout the game, we decided on that style and our artists have already started on a first draft of our Art Bible. The Art Bible is a document that defines the visual style, shapes, colours, and overall aesthetic of the game to ensure consistency. Let’s go over some of the topics.

Silhouette and Shape Language

It’s important to be able to distinguish friend and foe. We drew up some silhouettes of the frog and the heron to have a look at their contrast. The roundness of the frogs signify friendliness, while the more spiky silhouette of the heron signifies danger.

Shaders

We want our game to be 2.5D, meaning that while the gameplay happens in a 2D plane, our characters and objects are 3D models.
To have a clear distinction between fore-, middle-, and background, we quickly decided on giving our models a clear outline. We researched this topic and ended up finding a very nice shader that does that job for us.

Furthermore we wanted our game to have this painterly effect. To achieve this look, we did some more shader research and came across the Kuwahara Shader which makes our 3D assets look painted.

Animations

We also spent some time looking into cool and realistic jumping animations for our frogs. Since the frogs will be jumping around the arena, it’s quite important to have a nice looking jump animation, as this might be the animation the players will see the most.

Level Design

Since we are creating a platformer game, level design is quite important. We made some initial mock-ups in Photoshop and then translated those to Unreal.

Sound Waves

The player’s main attack is literally croaking loudly and sending out soundwaves, but how do you visualize sound waves? One of our artists spend some time making some RFX Prototypes to try and visualize these sound waves and the sonic boom.

Code

Not only the artists, but the coders have also been at work, let’s see what they came up with.

Game Engine

As a group, we decided to use Unity 6 as the game engine for Ribbit Rampage. Since our game is primarily 2D, we felt Unity was the better choice over Unreal Engine, which is more optimized for 3D workflows.

During prototyping, we quickly realized that the Unreal’s C++ documentation was not as extensive as we would have liked, making the development (and prototyping) more difficult.

While Unreal Engine is a really powerful engine, Unity’s flexibility and ease of rapid prototyping made it the ideal choice for our project.

Prototypes

Before committing to any final mechanics, we need to prototype them. Because if they turn out to be really unfun, we need to come up with new ideas, or adjust the existing ones.

Heron Attack Pattern

Our heron has several attacks, some that target a specific player, while others force both players to coordinate and work together to survive. But how do these attacks actually play out? Are they fun? Are they feasible enough to code? Do their co-op mechanics actually make players work together, or does it feel tacked on?

Through prototyping, we answered many of these questions. The results weren’t always what we expected, but that’s part of the process!

Frog Movement & Jumping Physics

Basic movement implementation is usually straightforward, but frogs don’t move like typical platformer characters.

Movement is one of the most fundamental mechanics in any platformer. Since players will spend most of their time hopping around, we wanted the frogs’ movement to feel satisfying and fluid. We wanted to nail down their movement, so we prototyped it!

Other

We also prototyped other mechanics, such as player revival and input handling.

Couch Co-Op

A couch co-op game wouldn’t be complete without the actual… couch co-op. This was one of our first prototype ideas, testing how to implement local multiplayer. We did this prototype in both Unity and Unreal Engine to really understand how it works in both engines. With this experience we realized that Unity’s local multiplayer tools were much easier to work with.

See you in our next DevLog next week!

Credit

Prototyping doesn't allow us to spend a lot of time modelling or texturing, that's why we used Sketchfab to acquire some test models to prototype with.

Frog model and Jump - [Frog Jump]
Swampy Test Models - [Swamp Models]