Introduction

Hello and welcome to our game project, made for the course Game Projects at DAE in Belgium
Our group consists of 2 artists, Cleys Pjotr and Erhart Alex, and 2 programmers, Wullaert Liam and Lambrecht Phaedra.

Murder Cleanup WIP is a couch co-op game, where the players have to work together to clean up their murder and evade the police

There were multiple murders committed in the quiet town of Timbunny, are you fast enough to clean up those murders or will you get caught by the Night-Knight police?

Programming Research:

Leaning to which engine?

We are leaning towards using Unreal for this project as it offers us an easy-to-use Niagara system. Art-wise it is easier to go with unreal since it has fast rendering and uses deferred rendering as the default. Its use of C++ helps the programmers get taught to work with C++ compared to Unity's c#.

Camera struggles

The biggest struggle that we had to overcome at this point of the development was Unreal's use of split screens with local co-op games. This deemed to be quite the challenge to overcome, we had loads of documents that found ways around this problem. The best way to solve the issue that we found in those documents is to use the "create local player" node (see gif below).

Art Research:

General stylized style 

The game can not be too high poly as that will take away from the cute cottage-core theme we are going for,
So it will all be made with low poly meshes. We decided to share the camera between the players, which makes it so that they can go far away and zoom out a lot, which is another reason to keep it all low poly.
The feel we want to give the player is that it is a cute and fun game but something is lurking in the background,
giving the something bad happened feeling is done by adding the horror aspect to it and using "blood" and body parts.

Indication to the player

We had to check if we wouldn't overwhelm the player by showing too much at once.
The reason we need to double-check this is because we have quite something to indicate to the players.
A list of things that need to be indicated is the timer (balk and actual timer), intractable (mainly for destroying body parts), blood and body parts.
We checked this by drawing it out and putting it all in a scene (image below).