Technical Research

Overall, I think the best game engine to go with for our project would be Unity. This is because it is a little simpler to use than Unreal and has greater capabilities than Godot, I also have the most experience with this engine and have created multiple games with Unity before. Unreal would be a greater engine for graphical capabilities which would make our game look much better but I and other team mates don't have much experience using Unreal. I plan to learn Unreal engine in the future to become more diverse in game programming as well as try different programming methods such as blueprints. Some sources I could use to help me learn Unreal someday is Codecadamy, this website is perfect for learning different programming languages which can help with learning an engine alongside it. Godot would not be a great engine to use for this project because of it's limited 3D capabilities, external tools are required to bring Godot's 3D system to its full potential. Godot is also still rather new and so needs to be improved in the 3D side to be considered to use for major 3D projects.

Controls are quite important in games, they need to be easy to use or customizable so each player can change key binds to preference. Since I will be programming the movement mechanics, I have to make sure that the key binds I assign are reasonable, easy to remember and feel good to use the mechanics with. Firstly, I have basic movement to do. This is simply the player moving around the game, the key binds for this will simply be WASD which is standard for most games on PC. The player should also be able to sprint and slide with the controls being shift to sprint and control to slide/crouch. The controls for sprint and slide/crouch can usually vary a little as I have seen different combinations for this before such as control for sprint and shift for sliding/crouching shift to sprint is the most common way to sprint on PC.

The grappling controls may get a little bit complicated, since the player will have a gun to shoot, the controls cannot be any of mouse buttons in the final build unless another button is pressed to equip a grappling gun. I can either do this or have the grappling gun available to use at any time as well as the regular guns the player has to use by using key binds such as Q to swing and E to pull. This also may not work in the end due to my team mate developing all of the combat for the game and taking quite a few key binds. I think the best and simplest option would be to use a key or hold a key down to equip the grappling gun first and then use the left and right mouse buttons to control pulling and swinging. The idea is to have the player switch from their regular weapons to the grappling gun as fast as possible with ease.

IDE's are programs that code is written in, I will be using Visual Studio for this project as I am well experienced in this software. Visual Studio is also closely tied in with Unity and has great compatibility when it comes to programming in Unity. This software also has many tools and features that assists me as a programmer such as the auto complete tool which can speed up the coding process as well as a fixing tool that helps with resolving errors.

Unity is exclusively C# and Visual Studio has a few tools that work around C#. Since Visual Studio works so well with Unity and C# as well as all of the coding team for this project having experience with this language and software, we will be using Visual Studio to program in. There is always the option of a blueprint like add on for Unity but we are more centered around programming in C#.