Hello!

We are now officially 4 weeks in the development of our game!

Our project has been greenlit, and the production process has started! We now have a clear direction on how everything will look and feel. First of, we will implement the necessary features to build the game, and then we will focus on player experience. Make sure that everything is readable, good player feedback, and everything else needed for a good time!

Jackie's Debut

The main player has arrived on the field! After a long process of trial and error, we finally came up with a design for the main character. It had to be based on our artbible and fit in the previously set color schemes. By looking at examples from other games (thank you, dota 2 character design guide) a readable design was made! We proudly present Jackie's concept design:

A 3D blockout has also been made in Zbrush and will be tested out in the game. A clean sculpt is also on the way, and rig and animations are soon to be added.

Jackies's Field
We have jackies debut, but we were also thinking about the design of the field Jackie plays in. We've explored a few designs for the arena. We are not sure yet which will become the final design, but here are the sketches we have, a top view of the arena and a 3/4 view to have a better idea how it will look in 3D in our game.

Development, Low level <-> High performance

As mentioned before, now that our prototype has been greenlit, we're now making the game using Unreal C++.
It has proven to be quite the challenge as both the developers are quite new to this. 
Nevertheless, its also proving to be a very educational process.
We're quite stoked to work in C++ because its known for its high speeds with the trade off that its rather low level.

Movement but Fancy!
In our prototype version of the game, all movement was done via blueprints, this now has changed to C++. It was quite tricky to understand how all of this worked in C++ but we got it to work! 
Such simple things are shockingly a tiny bit more difficult to get it up and running via code but here it is!

On a side note, we've also started the development of the smashing logic, it has yet to be finished.

Insane ball calculations!

The ball was also completely redone this week! Now ball calculations are done with C++! Sounds crazy and looks smooth!



Fly like a butterfly sting like a bee!

We even found some time to make the dash. Now you can be flashy already at the start of our development!

Unreal engine, Very real (skill) issues
Unreal is in fact a very popular and prestigious engine but nothings perfect.
We've had a lot ( no joke ) restarts and engine crashes. 
This could also be to us not knowing any better right now but it's a funny side story to tell. 

See you next week!
- Team Hyper Neon+