Devlog 1: Research

Hello, everyone! 

We’re excited to introduce our upcoming game, which is still in development , as part of a course at Howest University. Our team is made up of five passionate creators , Dimana and Shengyan, our programmers and our artists Bianca, Alex and Daan. 

Toxic Teamwork is a couch co-op game where players must work together to clean up nuclear waste in a factory. However, one player is secretly an imposter, hired by a rival company to sabotage the mission by catching players in his traps around the map. The goal is to collect as many points as possible by completing tasks, while also working together to identify and expose the imposter. 

As we kick off our first development update, we’ll take you through the initial iterations of our prototypes and art bible. To guide our development, we set up several research questions that we focused on this week. These questions helped us determine what worked, what didn’t, and what looked great versus what needs improvement. To keep our updates organized, we’ll divide our explanation into two sections: Art and Coding. 

Art 

Level Design

Our approach to level design focuses on creating a balanced arena that promotes both exploration and constant engagement. The arena is sized to keep players engaged while offering strategic depth - large enough for exploration but small enough to maintain constant interaction. The factory is divided into distinct zones including open cleaning areas and tighter corridors that create natural tension points and opportunities for sabotage. Clear sightlines ensure players can effectively monitor monster movements, spot environmental hazards, and observe the imposter’s potentially suspicious behavior.

The game’s fun factor is amplified by its stylized, industrial factory aesthetic, with metallic surfaces, green radioactive glows, and immersive sound design featuring mechanical hums and suspenseful music during sabotage moments. This design approach encourages strategic thinking, fosters teamwork, and maintains constant tension from both the lurking imposter and the relentless slime monsters, delivering a thrilling and replayable couch co-op experience.

The  background design focuses on extending the factory/postapocalyptic-themed arena in a way that feels grounded and unobtrusive. The background will serve as a rough, less detailed continuation of the world, using desaturated colors and minimal detail to maintain focus on the active arena. This subtle design will help highlight the gameplay area while providing a natural space for player stats and other UI elements, while ensuring the arena doesn't appear to be floating.

Traps

The traps need to be reusable, as they can be activated multiple times throughout the game. Traps like breaking planks or falling objects would not be suitable since they are one-time use. Traps that would work well in our game include spikes, trapdoors, and saws. Simple keyframe animation is the easiest and most effective method for these traps, as they are mechanical and involve linear movement.

Single Press:

Double Press:

Spikes:

Saw: 

Trap Doors:

Hammer:

Coding

Unreal Engine 5 vs Unity? 

We chose to focus on Unreal Engine 5 due to its faster and easier prototyping capabilities. The built-in character templates allowed us to quickly jump into prototyping. Also, our artists found that the vertex painting tools, and Niagara VFX system are much easier to use than in Unity. However, since this is our first time working with the C++ workflow in Unreal, things didn’t go as smoothly as expected, and we ran into several setbacks that slowed down our progress. 

How can we tell the imposter that they’re the imposter without revealing it to others? 

We were initially stuck on how to notify the imposter without anyone noticing, especially since the game is local and played on one screen. But then we realized that we don’t need to explicitly show it—we can make the imposter feel it. Since it's a couch co-op game played with controllers, we decided to make the imposter’s controller vibrate. We spent quite some time tweaking it to find the perfect balance—loud enough to feel, but not so loud that it gives it away.