About the Project

If you've ever gone rafting, kayaking or used a paddle in general, you know what Paddle Panic is like! Paddle Panic is a couch co-op game, where you and your friends take on the biggest challenge of all: Mother Nature! Each of you get a paddle, a raft and have to make sure you stay ahead of the stream and don't fall into the inconviently placed waterfall behind you. Alone, the raft is near impossible to control, but with two you stand a chance. Try to sync up your movement and maybe you'll stay ahead?

Who We Are

We're a team of young, passionate game developers from the Howest University of Applied Sciences, following the DAE curriculum. With Paddle Rush we're trying to create a game that can be casually enjoyed with friends, relatives or anyone that wants to challenge the stream! With this game, we aim to simulate a fun yet challenging rafting experience, with the right amount of goofiness and chaos that any good couch co-op game requires. If that's what you're after, then settle in and enjoy the ride!

The Unreal Prototype

Deciding on an Engine is difficult. Any good game puts thought into their choice of engine. This is why we prototype a version of our game; to make sure that we make the correct choice of engine. For our first prototype, we have chosen Unreal Engine 5. We choose this engine because of its robust nature, it is easy to iterate certain game elements in the engine and we need UE's physics engine in order for our game to work correctly.

What Went Right

• Our first prototype was necesarry to find out whether or not the unreal water system could work well with our proposed paddling physics. Unreal's water system is a built in plugin that helps developers work with water physics without too much hassle, handy for our game!
• To that end, the prototype works very well. The boat is kept up by the water and it even moves downstream naturally. This proves that Unreal might be a good choice to pick, since it provides a lot of the useful physics out of the box already.

What Went Wrong

• Well... it's not as out of the box as I made it out to be. Unreal's water system works very well yes, but setting it up to be natural and as we want it is not easy. It takes careful calculation to make sure the boat stays up... otherwise you get something like this:

• However, after a bit of debugging the boat now floats in the water, and reacts to our paddle code. This means nothing is lost, and our first prototype is complete!

The art side

Stylistic choices in tandem with coding

We decided on art related stuff together, to sync up views of our coders with artists. For example: what kind of vessel should our players be rowing from? Canoe, wooden barrel raft, or a bouncy rubber one? It depends on readability, camera angle dictating how much of the props and scene would be visible, and the fun of gameplay. We'd settled on a plastic raft as it's bouncy mechanics are fun to play with, as well as being more visually distinct against the water.

We're going for a clean, stylised artstyle that provides a nice, but not too distracting backdrop to the gameplay. It's constrained by firm limitations of time and workload balance.

We started gathering reference right away, and quickly decided on a soft toon shaded environment. The shapes would be simple and readable, but with enough flat/straight edges to avoid looking too round or blotchy with our shaders. Keeping the texturing style very simple would lend itself well to cranking out dozens of fun, varied obstacles to surprise the players with! To match the props and environment, our tech artist would create a stylised water shader.

In our first week, we already tested out some things with our first design prototypes. The first one was the camera angle of our game, as it would also provide the first visualisation to our idea.

And the second was a gradient texturing technique that would allow for tiny file sizes, easy color alterations, and super speedy texturing with consistent colours. 

Final Thoughts

We will continue to post more prototypes over the coming weeks, with more interesting thoughts and ideas. So, stay tuned and thank you for reading our dev log!