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[DEVLOG] "Warm Kitty"

A topic by smallcatstudio created Jan 28, 2020 Views: 278 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 7
Submitted

Hello everyone! I'm working on my first real game for this jam!

With the theme Cold, it immediately made me think warmth, so I decided to make a game where you play as a cat trying to get warm in a cold apartment. There will be mischief to be had, of course. The working title is Warm Kitty, but I definitely need to figure out a better title. Any reccomendations? 

So the first few days have been very slow going but I do have something, so I figured I'd start a devlog now so it catches everything from the beginning. So far I have a "cat" model in Blender and a test scene in Godot so I can figure out physics and mechanics. This cat model probably isn't great for anyone who actually knows Blender but being my first non-cube model I think it's decent. I think I might just make the art style polygonal so I don't have to smooth him out too much. 

For some reason in Godot the boxes fall through the floor when you jump on them? That's something I still need to iron out but it mostly works so far! The cat can move and knock around the cubes, so the next thing on my list is to do other mechanics like being able to bite and drag things and adding a swipe so you can knock things off shelves like a true cat.


Submitted(+1)

Oh man! I am looking forward to playing this! I love playing as cats!

Submitted(+1)

DAY 4!

I have been trying all day to make sense of creating a paw swipe so you can get up to some real shenanigans. I think I'm getting somewhere? Turns out 3d is a lot more complicated when it comes to positioning and moving things in the code. Most of today was spent reading docs and posts online to try to wrap my head around the different spatial things like transforms.  Heres the basic logic that I think will work:


I'm slowly fleshing out the real code for this, but the foundation is there. That's probaly what I'll be spending tomorrow on and hopefully I'll have a working swipe soon!

Submitted(+1)

DAY 5&6!!

This was a time of suffering. I spent the last two days trying to figure out the first half of my swipe code. Transforms and translations make more sense to me now, but that knowledge was hard won. I would get one part working and then the other part would break and I went back and forth like that for way longer than I should have. The Discord server was an absolute blessing for this and together we finally got it working but we had some amusing things on the way there.


Like I said, we did get the swipe working, now I just need to make it reset itself and mirror it for the other paw. At least it isn't still dragging the cat into the void. I fixed that by setting the paw and cat to different collision layers so they don't see each other but everything sees them. That way I don't have to code in the physics for hitting something with the paw and can just use the engine's physics. 

I'll probably spend tomorrow designing the main level so that I can give myself a break from coding hell.  I set myself up a Trello (right here, if anyone's interested) so I can keep myself organized and focused. 

Submitted(+1)

It's as if half of the fun of making a game is dealing with bizarre challenges like this! At least, this is what I'm telling myself lol

That's great you figured it out! I love the concept of this game! Why on Earth did I forget about the Discord server? I have to get up on that!

Also, I had no idea you could share a Trello page!

Submitted

DAY 7!

I decided to take a break from coding for the day and work on assets. Thanks to the discord I found a Kenney's asset pack that will work perfectly and I began importing it into my project. I've been having to add collision to each object myself, so I'm picking and choosing which ones to add based on need. I did run into an interesting issue that makes my pillows dance, so that's fun.


I am pretty sure it's an issue with the origin of the mesh being on the corner of the model and not in the middle so I'm going to have to put these models into Blender and move that. That should fix it. I think.

I have a plan for the general layout of the apartment, based on my old apartment. I need to start thinking about win conditions soon and how to program those, but I'm not entirely sure how to start with that. This weekend is probably going to be slow progress but I think I'm in a good place to have something playable next week! 

Submitted

I did run into an interesting issue that makes my pillows dance, so that’s fun.

I love the kind of bugs you can run into in game development! They’re much more entertaining than the typical NullPointerExceptions or whatever.

Looks like it’s coming along quite nicely.

Submitted

Day 10?

I took most of the weekend off but got back to hard work today! I finally finished the paw swipe mechanic (just need to mirror it for the other paw).

I figured out something even better for the origin problem that I was having than having to go into Blender for every single model. Turns out Godot calculates based on the center of the RigidBody, not the child mesh, so you can just offset the mesh from the Body! With that knowledge, I'm not nearly as intimidated by having to populate an entire apartment with physics objects. 


Speaking of the apartment, that's what I did today! The cat now has (most of) a home. I still need to add most of the walls and the little physics items, but I think I got a lot done today.  I have a foundation where I can start building win conditions into the game and be mostly happy with stopping there. Before this I was a little worried about finishing in time, but now I think I'll be fine. 

Submitted

Looking good! Can't wait to play the final product