Hello! Welcome to the first blogpost of the game: Sand&Rum!

We are a team of second year DAE students consisting of two Game Development (GD) programmers and three Game Graphics Production (GGP) artists.

• Gilles Styns – GD
• Vitaly Tarnover – GD 
• Yuna Othmer – GGP
• Diego Torres – GGP
• Seppe Willems – GGP 

Our game invites players into the dangerous world of sand-seas! Become a captain of a sand-sailing ship: raid enemy-pirates, defeat sand-monsters, collect all the treasure you can! 

This week was devoted to testing out game engines and preparing the theoretical part for the visuals of the game.

While artists were deciding how to make the sea of sands look as awesome as it sounds, the programmers were working on the main core of the game: sand-sailing.

Unreal efforts and unrealistic behaviors in Unreal engine

After working with the newest version of Unreal engine for the whole day in total, the programmers decided that it is too much to handle: compiling for long time, searching for solutions to simple problems and overall inflexibility of code was quite a challenge.

Result of one whole day of working on Unreal

We don't say that Unreal engine is a bad choice but in order to make more and better the whole team decided to stick to Unity. After just 2-3 hours of work we already had some decent results which brought new questions to our attention.

Sail out: sand-ship steering

One of the biggest question for us was the movement of ship. We wanted to make it intuitive and arcade-like without making the game too easy. First attempts were rather whacky. The player surely has a lot of mobility, but the ship's weight was completely lost. 

The first try on making player's sand-ship movement

After that with some help of math we managed to reach some interesting results which dragged the balance between arcade and sailing simulator on the side of realism. The ship now can't steer fast, it loses speed on each maneuver and we had a bug with 90+ degrees turns. The gameplay got more weight but stopped being fun at all.

Closer to realism, further from fun

But after some discussions and math polishment we have establish a rather flexible movement system that is also exposed to upgrades during the gameplay. We also started to work with gamepad's stick and not just WASD-input. The speed is now depending on the tilt-angle of the stick and the ship behaves well wherever the player wants to steer!

The most balance between fun and challenge so far

We will see if movement requires any adjustment. It is flexible enough to change behavior on the go! The next gameplay part that we are willing to implement and tryout are sand-sea combat and the island system.

Name the game

The name of this game is still not defined. We have quite some good once tho:

• Sand&Rum/Conflict/Treausres/Blood/Plunder
• Sand Sailor(D)s
• Dune Goon
• Drifters: The Path of Sands
• Sabulo (Maris) [Sand / Sea of Sand  -latin language-]
• Arenas Maris [Sea of Sands  -latin language-]

But the true name will appear a little later, so the game itself will define its name.

Controls&Mechanics: what makes sand-pirates fun

Sailing through deserts is fun but might be a little boring. We are still deciding what are those fun mechanics that make this adventure special and what are those game-rules that make don't allow the player to get bored. The game itself is easy to pick up but hard to reach the highest scores. We hope that the player will be able to get better with each time they start a new round. The world of our game is randomized and can deliver a lot of challenges for the player and we will make sure that every accomplishment is highly rewarded.

Both tech document and art bible are coming together quite smoothly. Good thing that the whole team has a clear vision of how this game will be and we all have a strong will to make it fun!

That's it for this week! We can't wait to sail on through this adventure!