spacecats-dev

[spacecats-dev]

Came in like a wrecking ball~

Hello, fellow space cat-dets! Sorry this update is a little later in the week than usual. Remi ran into some unexpected life emergencies that pushed back our mid week updates - but like a proper, devoted Cat Dev, he landed on his feet quickly and ran forward with everything!

With that said lets get to the newest updates shall we?

Jan threw Remi into the deep end of the pool and made him learn what it was like to really start thinking like a programmer, by making him fully create an entire obstacle type by himself. So Remi decided to go with the one he had the best idea of, the breakable obstacle type!

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The idea for breakable obstacles in Meowstronauts is for other players to knock you into them to slow down your velocity. They are one-time collidable objects that are best to be avoided! You can see above how it greatly slows the player’s descent!

Aside from this, our weekly session was a more behind the scenes one, in order to teach Remi how best to further develop this project both as a designer and a developer. Let’s see if we can get some more updates soon!

Until then! See you later Space Kitties!

[spacecats-dev]

Hey those aren’t cats!

Wow what a crazy week that just passed for us cat-gineers at Mewasa! Jan and Remi took a little break from ourkitty space program to work on a game jam hosted by Epic games for their April game jam!

So the theme for this game jam was “Spring into the future”. As the theme was announced Jan and Remi quickly discussed various ideas, including a game about a robotic garden and even a character who ran with moon shoes that changed color who 'springed' forward. But after a few hours of discussing and brainstorming they decided the best direction was a game based around a little robotic bunny who springs forward and is trying to get back to his future! Thus the idea of Grabbity was born!

Grabbity is a cheerful journey through a floating platform world with the happy robot rabbit called Grabbit, who is trying to find the path back to his mother egg to teleport back to his future!

In this game you control a rabbit hopping from platform to platform in an over the shoulder view. You must Aim carefully and charge your jump, then release the button to take a leap of faith!

A quick Play through here!

And a more advanced Let's Play of more levels here!

Jan and Remi teamed up with a few people on this journey, including Bartosz Kaminski, Yoeri 'Luos' Vleer, Adrian 'Ad' Martuneac, and Henry Yamada

With this team of people helping on this journey we were able to build something truly great!

You can check out our game submission here!

Or click here to download a playable build of the game!

Stay tuned as next week we will be back to our Kitty Aero Space Program once more! 

[spacecats-dev]

Cats on fire!

Another great and productive night of kitty aerospace engineering was had! We made a bunch of progress on our Cats this evening!

Remi took the driver seat once more with the ever thinning... EXCELLENT patience of Jan mentoring him!

So lets break down the new updates!

Kitty Heat Resistance Hud! We had a chance to setup our initial UI. Each cat is just like a little spaceship: the cat's little space suits can only take so much heat until they go poof in a ball of fire in the atmosphere above. So this is where the importance of the Cats’ Heat Resistance comes into play! Heatsinks can be thought of as the player's Shield or overall health and will slowly tear down.

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My Cats on Fire! If the player hits objects or is falling too fast and gaining to much velocity, the players heat will begin to rise rapidly. When it reaches 100%, the cat catches fire and is uncontrollable for a few seconds. During this time it either takes a few seconds to cool down or the player must try to collide into a ice comet/rain cloud/water source for an emergency cooling.

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Cool your jets and hit the turbo! This is where we really decided to mix things up! We added in 2 very important features for our cat and power up types. We added in a boost ability - to increase downward falling speed. This means you can boost ahead when other players or obstacles are in the way, but it also means that you’ll heat up much faster, and start burning more quickly! That would be the case however if we did not introduce our first power up type, with the exciting placeholder name of “Cooling”. Cooling is exactly what it sounds like. We’ll leave it to your superb intelligence to figure out how that fits into the rest of the mechanics we’ve already outlined!

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Updated Spawning System! This is still ever changing but since we now are introducing the power-ups in game we had to update our Obstacle spawning system a bit to include them. This is still very early and just for testing purposes. However we now have a bit more control over the amount of spawning and distance of our objects. We hope to have an all-in-one system near the end with easy parameters to tweak!

Progress is always happening! If you’re curious what’s planned for next week, check out some of the tasks on our public Trello board!

Jan & Remi will also be taking a small break this Thursday through Sunday , for the April Unreal Game Jam. They plan on crunching out a small fun project together! You can check out that information here!

See you all next time, Space Cats!

[spacecats-dev]

A Cat’s Terminal Velocity

A great and productive night was had! We made a bunch of progress on our prototype in one evening. Remi took the wheel on this development cycle with the excellent mentoring, guidance and patience of Jan.

So lets break down what we had a chance to do!

Set up the cats’ basic movement! Cats are using physics, of course, so we set up controls using the physics simulation, with hooks to add variation in cat handling and speed and all that. To make sure we hit our absolute hyper-realism target, we did some dilligent research into the terminal velocity of cats - turns out, other people have already published academic papers about that. Thanks, other people!

Kitty Physics! Once we had some basics for the acceleration, velocity and handling set up, we added some logic to make the cat bounce when it hits something. This allowed us to tweak the cat’s reaction when slamming face-first into a wall at high velocity. In the long-term, we really want to capture that zero-g cat aesthetic. Good thing for us, there are some great references already! Thanks again, other people.

Game Design updates! Obstacle types and behaviors have been added to the GDD. For now, we made some prototype obstacles - just spinning cubes really, let’s be honest here - and will spend some time later this week refining ideas.

Obstacles! This is still very early and just for testing purposes, but we set up a basic obstacle spawning system, which makes sure that the player has something to avoid on their Daring Descent Downwards. Extra fun was accidentally produced when we realized that obstacles could also collide with one another, causing some nicely unpredictable chaotic behavior.

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Progress is constant, if not all that fast - both of us are working, so we only have about a day and a little bit per week to work on this project. If you’re curious what’s planned for next week, check out some of the tasks on our public Trello board! 

See you all next time, Space Cats!

[spacecats-dev]

It Begins...

The cats are coming in, the latest journey of two friends who are developing games together, learning together, outer space and cats... You can follow our development live on our Public Trello board! https://trello.com/b/nMFb5LhV/space-cats-tasks Jan Kaluza - UE4 guru, feline enthusiast and bearer of all the hats http://www.broad-strokes.com/ Remi Crespo - Game Designer who is looking to push his creative muscles and develop some fun games by smacking his keyboard and yelling at his screen! http://seforin.com/ Follow us as we bring in the CATS! http://bringinthecats.com/