Caterpillar Dissent: Deliverance

> *The only thing more incredible than the life cycle of a butterfly, is that I actually managed to finish this game in time*
- Skleembof, 2020

This was going to be a 2 man effort. My brother agreed to work with me on this as a programmer. I would make all the assets, and he would do the programming. But the thing about brothers is that they're unreliable, unlike the comforting warmth and protection one finds when encased in a shimmering chrysalis.

My brother ditched the project after I'd spent 2 days feverishly making assets. So in the final hours of the jam, I had to go in and write all the code myself, clean up assets and release something playable.
The final product is so much better than I expected, but it is still very much incomplete.

Premise: The Loop

You are a caterpillar who dreams of nothing more than to become a butterfly. Unfortunately, you suffer from a severe birth defect. Whenever you go into your chrysalis, you emerge not as a butterfly but as a disappointed caterpillar. You are stuck in a loop of caterpillar to pupa to caterpillar to pupa forever and ever. You were told you could never be a true butterfly but you are no quitter. Deep down you know you can do it, and so you decide to push through the only way you know how: eating everything in sight.


The game was supposed to be a Katamari Damacy inspired 'eat-em up' where you eat things, progressively getting bigger and eating bigger things. After reaching a certain size you were supposed to morph into a chrysalis, have your score tallied, and then you emerge as a slightly bigger and stronger caterpillar. Unfortunately, I didnt have time for any of that so all you can do is go around eating and growing until you devour everything

Development

I made all the assets, and I mean ALL of the assets. Every single model, texture, animation, and script was made specifically for this game Jam from scratch. The only thing I didn't make was the glorious music.

I made a lot of assets because I was expecting that to be my only job for this jam. When I realized I had to make the game on my own, I quickly started slapping stuff together which led to cutting out a lot of content. I had the butterfly rigged, textured, and animated which I ended up not using. The caterpillar also has a lot of unused animations like a fancy jumping spin attack, but that was cut too.
I planned on spending the last day making small edible props and polishing the level, but I spent it programming so I ended up with a relatively big and barren world with a small number of props.

Gameplay

WASD : Move

Hold LShift: "Sprint"

Space: Roll

Rolling is kind of wild. I didn't have time to tweak the physics so holding space spins your poor caterpillar with enough centripetal force to vaporize it (and if you hold shift its worse).

There are probably going to be some bugs as is the norm for LDJam games, but there also might be some performance issues. I was using substance designer and the unity addon to import the materials, but I didn't know how to use it properly so some materials might be broken.

WARNING

~~If you eat the skyscrapers, the game might freeze or crash. Probably because of the thousands of innocents who lose~~ ~~their lives all at once.~~
~~Everything else should be edible though~~

I think I fixed it. You should be able to eat everything now without any freezing or crashing

Download the windows version to experience the beauty of Caterpillar Dissent: Deliverance in all its glory