So it goes! Our first week of prototyping and developing is behind us.

The game we're working on is set in the stone age where you play as a team of 2 against another duo who both have the same goal: survival. Grow the size of your fire  through any means necessary, resources are limited and so is the time. You don't only win if you make it to the winter season, you'll also need to have a big enough fire to survive through it! At the end of the game you get points based on your overall performance and choices you make to increase the might of your bonfire.

During the first week of development we were already able to answer the following questions:

1. How will we handle co-op play?
   1. This was the main question we were asking ourselves, as none of us really had done anything like this before in any game engine. However, after a bit of research we've found that this is really straight forward and really easy to do using Unity's new Input System. After a bit of messing around, we have a working system that can handle the input of multiple controllers. We've decided to limit it to 4 for now, as there is no use in making the teams too big.
2. How would we make controls for a  set of playable shoes both fun and interesting to play?
   1. One of our ideas involved a mechanic based on 2 characters being linked together while having to do a set of tasks. Whether that be moving or parkour, they would have to do it together. Now to make this idea a bit more interesting and unique, we decided that these characters would be represented by shoes. While prototyping we found that getting the chained-together aspect alone was hard enough, but we faced another problem in the form of how the shoes would have to move... Shoes can't just slide around, so they'd have to move in a different way (ie. hopping with an interval).  At the end of the day, we decided to explore more manageable ideas that were also interesting as we couldn't see how we could make this work; technically, stylistically and mechanically.
3. How would a small combat system with basic blocking and attacking be fun?
   1. In parallel with the "shoe prototype", we also explored the idea of a ; PvP, team based, CTF (Capture The Flag) idea. The only thing we were really hesitant about was how the PvP aspect could be made fun. So, to answer this question we made a barebones version of the game where the controller support is implemented and players have the ability to swing at each other and block attacks. This will allow us to see how the combat feels as well as getting a feel for how comfortable the controls are.
4. How can we keep track of all the players on the screen and what camera angle should we go for?
   1. We also wondered which camera angle would be best suited for this project. Every time we answered this question, the answer was always leaning towards a more top-down point of view. This allows the players to see what's going on on the map without much trouble, which is very important in a co-op multiplayer game. So our camera angle will be top-down, maybe with slight variation, but at its core it will be top-down. Now, the actual implementation we went for uses Target Groups that Unity's Cinemachine provides. It's a nice  and quick way to keep the players in frame.
5. How does importing Mixamo animations into Unity work?
   1. Since we are planning to use Mixamo to animate the characters in our game, this seemed like an important questions to answer as soon as possible. So we made a small prototype in Unity where we imported a very early test version of one of our characters. Then in Mixamo we imported that same character and used the auto rigging feature to rig the model. We then chose a simple walking animation and imported that into Unity as well. Applying the animation to the character in Unity was thankfully pretty simple so the question was answered fairly quickly.

In week 2 of development we will try to answer more questions related to the overall style of our game, the implementation of a score system, the working of the seasons and furthering the gameplay loop.

Seeing how this is the first actual game all of our amazing team members are working on this process will be supervised by the professors at our university!

The team consists of 5 people of which we have 2 programmers and 3 artists, Rity and Birgen being the former and Iris, Cem and Trygve the latter.

Stay tuned and follow us on this journey to see our caveman dreams come to life over the next few months!