Recap: 

Before we get into it, we don't want you to miss out on this gem one of our programmers encountered last week while programming the movement:

What was on the menu during the past week?

Engine:
What engine will we use?
After giving both engines a proper whirl we've decided to go for the Unity engine, this is mostly due to our coders familiarity with the engine. We tried to make sense out of Unreal but we felt hamstringed quite fast due to it not being very straight-forward and intuitive. For a project over such a short time period, we felt it was too great a risk to continue with Unreal over the familiar Unity. 

Gamemodes: 

We wanted to keep our gamemodes relatively simple and yet interesting, so far Diner Bash features 3 classic examples: 

3 gamemodes, indicated in the classic american diner style

FFA : Classic free-for-all grudge match in true last man standing fashion. 

2v2: Team up with a friend and work together to defeat the others. 
While designing this game mode we played around with a few ideas most notably of which was the Revive mechanic from popular Battle Royale games such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Apex Legends, however this got cut in favor of our current plan which we feel a lot more excited about. 
In our 2v2 gamemode the players get put on each others head, the player on the bottom can control the movement while the player on top does all the firing. Coordination is the key to succes.

1v3: Finally the 1v3 gamemode was originally designed as a boss-fight. One player would get massively buffed and the others would have to team-up to try and kill him. However we asked ourselves: "Is this fun enough to be a different mode?" "Are the mechanics of this mode different enough to be interesting?" 
Our answers were pretty convincing: "No." It simply wasn't unique or fun. So we changed it up, we kept the format but changed the gameplay completely. Now upon entering this mode the 1 player that gets put on a solo team will turn into a massive rampaging ball that kills anything on hit. The other players will have to run and survive until the game mode swaps or work together to defeat the ball of death before he kills everyone. 

Camera angles and UI:

To show off our artists great works without taking away from the actual gameplay overview that a top-down camera provides.

In the picture above we see the end-result.

• Good overview for each player
• Space for UI/HUD
• See clearly the setting > sell diner feel

What kind of characters are we going to use? 

A question we asked ourselves very early in the design process, and now we can provide you with an answer! 
This game is sure to make you hungry, so come prepared! Below you'll see some early versions of the characters our design team came up with. They all look rather grumpy, but it's because they just got done playing Diner Bash and they all feel betrayed by their friends. 

We also did a quick art test to have a grasp of the final result

What are next weeks specials? 
Next week we'll go into production, it's a fresh start from the backdoor coded prototype we currently have and the team is very excited!
We'll be working according to our tech doc and artbible to provide you will all the features we feel our players deserve.

Keep an eye out for our blogpost next tuesday and we'll tell you all about them!

Kind regards,

The Diner Staffs.