This week we finally started prototyping our game. Our programmers have been hard at work trying to create a working build, while the artists have been trying to come up with a kick-ass art style.

Let me just run you through what our game is supposed to be and why we think it will be fun. Our game will have you and up to 3 other friends take up the role of a pirate in the midst of a naval battle. It will be your job to keep the ship afloat until the enemy meets its untimely demise. You will accomplish this by plugging holes, fixing cannons, putting out fires, and if someone has to take one for the team so you can plug a hole with his body then who are we to tell you that you can't do that.

We took a lot of inspiration from games like Overcooked, in the sense that we will put the players in a chaotic environment where they will all be doing different things but trying to achieve the same goal (not drowning). This is what we hope will create a sense of immersion for the player and make our game fun.

To get into some more technical stuff, right now we have implemented a block out of what we imagine our final level could look like and a list of mechanics have been successfully implemented.

             character movement: characters are able to move freely around the ship.

             using ladders: players can interact with ladders to move between different levels of the ship.

             aiming

             different animations and states

             and interactable barrels: barrels can be picked up and carried around.

Because of the nature of our game, (being a 2.5D game with a fixed camera angle) we ran into some problems. One of those things thought us that the deeper a player is able to move into the ship the more perspective issues we will have. For example, the lower floor would be largely obscured by its own ceiling. So, we learned that for our next build we will have to keep this in mind when modelling the ship, and the we may have 3 floors in our final version instead of 4.

Next, we were afraid the ladders would obstruct the player and that people would get caught behind them, luckily this didn't become much of an issue and the ladders work as intended. A similar issue we faced was to make sure players couldn't fall out of the ship, but we managed to fix that with a simple invisible wall.

The last real problem we've faced was a bug with the collision of the player character and the barrel when the player tries to interact with it. This is something for which we are currently still looking for a solution, but this should be fixed by the time we upload our next build.

Over the next week, for our final week of prototyping, we will be trying to expand on what we already have. Make things break on board the ship and let players fix it, have a system in which players can kill each other and respawn, and finalize our art style so we are all set for our very first production sprint.

If you played our first prototype, then first of all. Hi! Thanks for playing! Second here are some questions that we have about our game/concept and it would be great if you could answer some if not all of them.

• Is a pirate ship an original setting for a party game or has it just been done to death?
• What makes our game work? Or what takes you out of it?
• Would a dynamic camera feel better than a static one?
• Should there be less floors in the game (for example 3 or 2 levels instead of 4)?