Introduction

Hello and welcome to the first devlog for C.A.R. Car Arena Rumble.

We are a group of 5 students at Howest Digital Arts and Entertainment, and over the course of the next few months we'll be working hard on making this game.

Our group consists of 2 programmers: Mathias Radder and Vincent Van Denberghe, as well as 3 artists: Ronan Bosman, Yana Bryon and Margot Vandenbussche.

C.A.R. is an arcade PvP game where up to 8 players can duke it out on a stage. Players drive around, trying to bump each other off the stage by launching into them, while taking care not to send themselves flying off.  Along the duration of the match, items will occasionally spawn throughout the arena, modifying your car when you pick them up. There are 2 types of mods: defensive and offensive. Defensive mods don't directly damage other players, while offensive ones do. Matches range from 3 up to 8 minutes, making it perfect to just pick up and play!

In this devlog, we'll discuss the results of our research, and motivate why we made the decisions we made.

Art Style

For the art we are going for a flat-shaded polygonal style. Since the camera will be zoomed out quite far, any small details in the cars would be lost, so choosing an art style that doesn't require much detail to begin with is perfect. Below you can see what a car could like in the game. Our artists are now hard at work creating the art bible, so they can create a wide variety of not only vehicles, but also props for on the stage.

Engine Choice

The programmers went back and forth quite a bit between Unity and Unreal. They each have their advantages, but Unity has 1 up on Unreal, its components and prefabs offer a level customisability that Unreal doesn't offer.

For the render pipeline we chose the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), since the other choice, the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) is made for creating cutting-edge graphics aaaand yeah, we don't need that. With an art style like ours (with not a lot of fine-grain detail), URP is the better option.

Our biggest obstacle will definitely be figuring out the physics, making the crash, launch, while not letting it go out of control. This part will require a lot of testing and fine-tuning to get right.

Mechanics

Main mechanic

All players have 2 ability slots: a set ability, and one that fills up when they pick up an item. The set ability is our main mechanic, and will have players launch themselves forward, smashing into other players to send them flying. This will be very tricky to get right, as we don't want to discourage players from using this ability if it sends them flying too far, or too weak that it barely sends them flying at all.

Secondary mechanic

The other mechanic are spawnable items that drop on the stage. Items will spawn at set location around the stage and give a random item to the player that drives over them. To offer some variation in the gameplay loop, we thought of different types of times, both offensive and defensive. Offensive items, like the battering ram or flame thrower, directly deal damage to enemies without having to launch into them. Defensive items don't deal damage but hinder the other player's movement, like an oil strip.

We think these items will make the game hectic, but fun, but that is exactly what we're going for!

For next week

Next week we'll have a more detailed prototype ready for you guys to try out, so look forward to it! In the meantime, take care!