Destruction, we meet again.

Welcome again to our second(!) DevLog, we're proud to make a few announcements today! Go on, take a peek!

The Engine has been decided!

We've decided to go with the Unity Engine! We believe this is an easy-to-use engine even though the destruction wasn't looking nice in the previous DevLog... however, we've improved it for the first ever build! Very exciting! Don't worry if you can't play the build at the moment, we have some sneak peeks right here!

The Destruction *BOOM*!

Look at all that rubble! I bet you'd like to know how that got spread, don't you? Look no further we have a small GIF for you all!

The Camera

We've also made a fluid camera that tries to keep all players on screen, this way you won't lose yourself or your friends! Although you might want to lose your friends depending on the situation. ;)

Did we succeed at making it FUN?

While playtesting, I really loved seeing the props turn into pieces. Felt really satisfying! We'll hopefully go into Production phase soon which means we'll be able to push out more quality over time!

Now what about the art?

We have been working hard to figure out what art style we want to pursue. 

Since this game is all about destroying, we dont want you to run short on things you can destroy. Currently we are developing a large list of assets you will find in those beautiful homes to bash into pieces.
Rooms will be filled with themed assets -> beat yourself through kitchens, living rooms, garages, hallways, storage rooms and many more.     We opt for a simple art style - that way you dont get too attached, we want you to break it all!!
Texture wise we will mostly use gradients. This allows us to quickly unwrap and texture our objects and adjust colors as needed. We will create a high amount of variety so we gotta make it efficient. 

Our Objects will all have a soft feel to it

We will keep them simple so they are easy to read while viewing them from top down.
Here is a quick breakdown of how they are textured:
We create the smooth object and instead of carefully unwrapping it we slap it on a texture map, these can be very small, as small as 64x64 pixels! Then we stretch the vertices along the gradient to define highlights and darker areas.

This map only has 2 colors but we could easily fill it up with more and still get the same result.

I know I know, what about the characters?  We unfortunatly dont have much to show yet character wise, but we know what direction we want to take. The characters will be mainly defined by their head as thats what you see from above. So the Proportions will be very head heavy.
If you know games like "Moving out" or "Overcooked" you can get a rough idea of what we are going for.

Another thing to keep in mind are the tools you as the players can use to break everything.
We will provide you with a variety of tools that you will have to find while breaking through the houses.

Overall I hope you are prepared for cartoonish proportions and lots of fun breakable assets to discover. 
We will keep you updated!

Things that will be tackled next:
- First few assets imported to the engine
- A placeholder character
- A first look into particle effects

End of #2!

We hope to see you next week for more progress on this very destructive adventure of ours!

Let's break it!

- Matthias, Jeroen, Lukas, Lennart