Welcome to Reel It In! 🎣💥

Hey everyone! We’re excited to kick off our first dev log for Reel It In, a fast-paced, chaotic 1v3 couch game that blends party-game mayhem with a unique reeling mechanic! Inspired by games like Mario Party and Smash Bros, this game is all about grappling, sabotaging, and having a blast with friends.

Meet the Team

We’re a small but passionate team of six students from Howest DAE, each bringing something unique to the project:

👨‍💻 [Programmers] – Making the game work!

• Arthur
• Ioana
• Balder

🎨 [Tech Artists] – Keeping it functional & beautiful!

• Agnese
• Jens

🖌️ [Style Artist] – Defining the game's unique visual identity!

• Ziqqy

What’s Reel It In?

At its core, Reel It In is a game of high-stakes tag with a twist! One player controls an all-powerful cannon, blasting away at the other three runners. The runners, however, have a secret weapon: the reeling mechanic!

🔹 Reel your friends in to save them—or sabotage them.
🔹 Dodge cannon blasts, or pull someone else into danger.
🔹 Get hit? You switch places and become the cannon!

The goal? Spend as little time as the cannon as possible and cause as much chaos as you can! Whether you're working together or betraying each other, every match promises a mix of skill, strategy, and pure party-game insanity.

What have we worked on this week?

As the first week of development, we started working on prototypes and researching to help us answer the multiple questions we've had during brainstorming. To keep it clear, the next part of the dev log will be split in two sections: Coding and Art.

Coding

Unity 6 or Unreal Engine 5?

One of the toughest questions we faced was: Which game engine would best support our vision? Since the right engine can elevate a game to the next level, we knew this decision couldn’t be taken lightly. To make an informed choice, we decided to prototype our core reeling mechanic first and evaluate which engine suited our needs best.

The Unity prototype

Implementing the reeling mechanic in Unity was relatively straightforward using a Bezier curve. This approach allows for greater stylization but lacks realistic physics accuracy. Since Unity requires most physics systems to be manually implemented, this adds some development overhead. However, Unity's documentation is more comprehensive, and the engine is more streamlined, meaning it comes with fewer unnecessary features—making it a more focused tool for our needs.

The unreal prototype

Prototyping in Unreal Engine was more challenging to research. While Unreal provides built-in functions for most of the required functionality, finding the right tools can be time-consuming, and working with C++ adds complexity. However, the results are noticeably more realistic and higher in quality. Additionally, because Unreal includes a vast array of built-in features, some tasks simply involved tweaking settings rather than manual implementation.

So which engine did we choose?

Unity 6 ✊🌟

After careful consideration, we decided that Unity would be the better fit for our game. Since we're aiming for a cartoonish and relaxed feel rather than realistic physics, Unity's flexibility aligns well with our vision. Given our time constraints, Unity also allows us to implement all our planned features efficiently without unnecessary overhead.

by Ioana

How would we implement multiple controller support?

As we are going to implement a 3v1 game, players need to be able to switch characters seamlessly. This means switching from the cannon to the runner.
As we are using unity, it's not as simple as possessing a character, like in Unreal.

Unity also has its "new" (it's 5 years old) input system which has a nice way of handling different devices.

In Unity you can create a C# file from an input action file. Then you can use it in your class and query for input. Now this file also has support for device lists. This makes it super simple to assign a device to an input action. :D

public void SetDevice(InputDevice device)
{
    beingControlled = true;
    _controllerInput.Enable();
    _controllerInput.Runner.Enable();
    _controllerInput.devices = new[] { device };
}

Here I have a basic prototype: if the player gets hit by a bullet, it will swap the controls of the runner and the cannon. You can see that the player is holding right and once it hits a bullet the cannon goes to the right as the devices have been swapped.

by Arthur

Art

The art team discussed many possible themes to make this game the most stunning and unique game we can muster.
It was a tough choice to make but we eventually ended up with this idea as our theme.

Icy Theme

We are going to use the cuteness of penguins all combined in our characters and use the dangers and coldness of the snowy Arctics to use as our environment elements. 

We see a lot of potential in this theme with almost endless ideas and possibilities that we can add. Hopefully you guys will love the theme and story as much as we do right now. 

by Jens

First dive into shaders

As artists we have mostly worked in Unreal Engine when it comes to shaders and post processing. The first steps taken in the Universal Render Pipeline have been very shaky but already promising. 

Creating a stylized game with a definite style is not easy, especially when the creative minds are more than one.  So how to bring everything together and merge everyone's personal style into one?

A good toon shader!

Toon shading starts from a very simple concept but can be twisted in many different ways to achieve complex and interesting results.
In our case the goal is to create something that aids the player to follow their character on screen, without overpowering the main texturing pass. which will already be stylized.
Outlines? extra shadows? Once our game starts taking shape, we will get back to you on what works best for us. In the meantime, we should try everything out, just to be sure.

by Agne

What's next?

This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to share more updates with you! Next week we plan on working on more prototypes that further extend our ideas and give us a better understanding of how our project is going to look.  This includes a more conclusive prototype of our reeling mechanic, cannon gameplay and environmental setup.

Stay tuned for dev logs on our progress, challenges, and some sneak peeks at what’s to come. 🚀

Let us know what you think and get ready to Reel It In! 🎣🔥