Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to the first devlog of our magnetic game project for the course Game Projects at Digital Arts and Entertainment!

Our team is creating a local multiplayer sumo game where you and your adversary are magnets!

Who is this team you ask?
Our team exists out of two programmers called Robbe and Sander, and 3 artists called Branco, Miel and Nina!
The wonderful people stated above are going to try their best the coming weeks to create a fun experience that you'll remember!

Over the past week we have been busy researching some important topics that will shape our game the coming weeks!
Some of these questions were, how will magnets works? What will make our game interesting? What do our characters look like?
Let's discover the answer to these questions, together!

MAGNETS!

One of the most important questions was: How will our magnets work?

After using our math brains we started on a prototype in Unity. After playing around with some physics magic, we got to this first result!

This prototype has been made using Unity 2022, but a prototype in Unreal Engine 5.1 is also in the works, more on that next week!
We are hard at work figuring out Unreal Engine C++! 

How it works?

Objects and players can have a magnetic field around them. Fields with the same polarization will repel eachother, while different polarized fields will attract eachother!

To accomplish this, a force will be applied on any metalic/magnetic objects that are inside the magnetic field of another magnetic object!

The players will be able to switch its own polarization at any time with the press of a button.

The Arena

The rest of the week we have been focussing on how an arena for our game would look like.
We had a few ideas: 

1. A platform made out of cubes, slowly falling apart while you two magnets fight it out! You can fix the platform by *working together!*
Yes this means that you will both fighting AND working together in this version of the game! Because if you both fall of the platform, nobody wins!

Need to visualise this idea? Here you go!

2. Another idea we had is a round arena, based on a real sumo arena! With all kinds of magnetic *things* flying through the arena that you can swing or push towards your enemy! Metal plates, turrets, bombs, and more!
No teamwork in this one, only BATTLE!

Characters

Another question we have asked ourselves is how our characters will look! We decided we are going for a cartoony look, and so our artists started sketching!

GAMEPLAY!

We want our game to be fun, ofcourse! So what interesting game elements could we add?

BOMBS! Bombs will be launched in to the arena! Catch them and throw them at the enemy or swing them towards your nemesis and make it explode in its face!

TURRETS! Sometimes turrets might start shooting at the arena. Reflect their bullets and try to hit your opponent! Make these shots count!

METAL PLATES! The arena will be filled with metallic plates that you can suck using your magnetic abilities and then launch at the enemy!

Setting

As previously mentioned, our game will be a sumo wrestling game, with MAGNETS!
But how did we get to this idea?

In the beginning, there was nothing. And then, an idea! A game where the players are magnets. They have to push things! Push each other? Pull things! Launch those things at the oponent??

2 brainstorming sessions later an idea popped in someone's head: SUMO WRESTLING. It all made sense. 2 magnets trying to wrestle it out in a good old game of sumo!

the FUTURE

Next week we will making a full playable prototype for our game! This means there'll be MAGNETS, TURRETS, BOMBS, MAYHEM!

I hope everyone is as excited as we are! We are going back to prototyping our game. We'll be back next week for a new update!

Goooby!