We, Group 12, are proud to announce that we are working on a game called "Grave Rave". Group 12 is a team of students all studying at Howest Kortrijk - Digital Arts and Entertainment.

The team

The team consists of 5 students. In the art department we have Noel and Timmy, on the programming side of things we have Sarah, Beau and Sybren. Together we will be working on this project for about 5 months.
We got the instruction to make a couch co-opgame for our course "Game projects". 

Concept

During class we had some time to already break down some basic ideas for our game. So everyone presented what they thought to be a good idea for a game. 
The very first concept of our game was simple: 2 players in an arena battling it out by painting, using some sort of gun, to color critters into your color. These critters will then attack the opposite base. 
We found this to be a solid base for our game, so we went with it.

On a normal - at that time we had no idea what crazy idea would pop out of our brainstorm session - tuesday afternoon, we came together to further iterate on the basic idea of our game. During the ongoing brainstorm we somehow ended up with what we want as a theme for our game. That's when things got out of hand. The theme that we discussed and are really confident about is: The players are necromancers who like a certain musicgenre, they have staffs that emit soundwaves to convert zombies (who spawn in the center of the field) to their musical preference. The zombies will then try to destroy the Boombox which is the base of the opposing player, because it's playing music they don't like. The player whose boombox gets destroyed first loses the game. 

Some great iterations came out of this theme so we kept it as crazy as it is. We believe great couch co-opgames are the weirdest ones, the ones that make you laugh. 

What went wrong?

For this project we work with a tool called perforce. To set up this tool with our Visual Studio solution from the Unreal Engine, you have to open the connection from Visual Studio itself. We all saw the solution but it said "(unavailable)" next to the files, so we couldn't access code. We couldn't help but freak out. We had no idea what we were doing wrong.  Eventually after losing about 2 hours on this, we found that you had to open the Unreal engine and access it from there. 

What went right?

The idea. Everyone was immediately on board with the most crazy idea. We are all so happy to have such an awesome team and are hyped to finally start on this masterpiece.

What are our plans for the upcoming week?

We are working on some early prototypes of the game. We are still choosing which game engine would be best so we will be working with multiple engines this week. 
The artists will make some very basic character and arena meshes. The programmers are making the most basic pieces for the game, like character controller and zombie AI's. 
With all of this we will make iterations to see what ends up with the most fun results.

Endnote

Hold tight because by next week our first couple of prototypes should be finished. We'll give you an update as soon as we have enough information. 
We are very excited to start sharing this story with you guys and we will make sure to keep you updated every week. 

Group 12 out.