Mammoth Slayer
Hello, my kids and I are submitting our 6th game. When we started - I had all these ideas how we would quickly do something cool. In the beginning, I thought we would be doing something between an adventure game and an RTS. In the end we landing on a sort of incremental game? Maybe? Maybe it's better just to call it a simulation.
- Pickup meat from mammoths and take them to the food hut to feed your village.
- Visit the upgrade tent to have better accuracy with your most recent tech
- Visit the research tent to get better tech. Rocks (start) --> Slings --> Spears --> Bows (shoot spears).
- You can research more good stuff, but doesn't help you in this version. :)
Space: Throw or sometimes drop
* We finalized what our game play loop was really going to be last night and have been attempting to refine. Originally I was thinking of some simple RTS, but we're sort of heading for some incremental game where you try to maximize your village population.
* The GridMap has failed us. It appears there are artifact black horizontal/vertical lines due to some bug. Tried a few quick fixes we searched on, no go. We did this in part because we wanted to push boulders off cliffs onto Mammoths. I'm thinking we should revisit with just a flat ground, and then place Sprite3Ds down on top to give a nice looking terrain... although when layering the 3D sprites, there will be risk of improper ordering with the more optimized draw call.
* My 12 year old is really doing great with GODOT and really moved things along!
* music: lmms
* sfx: bxfr + audacity
* version control: gitlab with CI/CD deploys on main branch to itch.io! I need to update this to push to itch.io on a new release branch in case we do some more work. dev --> main --> release vs. dev --> main.
Goal
As usual, play balance is something we didn't really have time for... but the way we are scoring is the number of villagers you end up with when you run out of food. We attempted a few last minute balance tweaks.. who knows. It is interesting when playing your own game to start to develop strategies to do well. (You have more patience for your own)How to play...
Basically run around picking up rocks (or spears) to throw at the mammoths. Kill them, then take their meat to the food hut to keep your village going.- Pickup meat from mammoths and take them to the food hut to feed your village.
- Visit the upgrade tent to have better accuracy with your most recent tech
- Visit the research tent to get better tech. Rocks (start) --> Slings --> Spears --> Bows (shoot spears).
- You can research more good stuff, but doesn't help you in this version. :)
Keys:
Arrows/WADS move aroundSpace: Throw or sometimes drop
Mini-dev log
* We decided to take a new technical route for the game - attempt to emulate Cat Quest visual style. While this wasn't so bad, I thought we were going to be able to use the bone animation system in godot. But not so without doing a viewport since it's really a 3D game. So then I thought we'd animate in Krita, that that turned out to be a headache for us. In the end just ended up doing some basic animation player in godot to move some Sprite3Ds around. This whole episode took half a day.* We finalized what our game play loop was really going to be last night and have been attempting to refine. Originally I was thinking of some simple RTS, but we're sort of heading for some incremental game where you try to maximize your village population.
* The GridMap has failed us. It appears there are artifact black horizontal/vertical lines due to some bug. Tried a few quick fixes we searched on, no go. We did this in part because we wanted to push boulders off cliffs onto Mammoths. I'm thinking we should revisit with just a flat ground, and then place Sprite3Ds down on top to give a nice looking terrain... although when layering the 3D sprites, there will be risk of improper ordering with the more optimized draw call.
* My 12 year old is really doing great with GODOT and really moved things along!
Tools
* engine: GODOT 4.7.2* music: lmms
* sfx: bxfr + audacity
* version control: gitlab with CI/CD deploys on main branch to itch.io! I need to update this to push to itch.io on a new release branch in case we do some more work. dev --> main --> release vs. dev --> main.
Comments8
Some feedback: I think if the artstyle was applied to the UI elements the game would be much better. The basic font seems a bit off. Another thing, having a tutorial would be nice where we learn to make our first tools. My first attempt the village ran out of food while I was trying to chuck rocks at a mammoth lol.
Faster early upgrades or a smaller, weaker mammoth to hunt first would help players get into the game. The berry bushes also looked like something I could gather from; a small food supply from them could give beginners more breathing room.
I'd prefer mouse aiming and left-click throwing, with weapons flying toward the cursor. Dodging mammoths, retrieving weapons and aiming another throw could make the hunting more engaging.
@ao-85 , glad you enjoyed!
@wewrutuwertrer / @thanatosisanoob / @ansjofaye , about the art, I really love my daughter's work. I'm hoping to find some good workflows to take her real world drawings into games. I remember seeing the TV show Jane and the Dragon and really liked their "crayon rendered" world. About the font - thanks, I bet my kids could make a great caveman font for us.
@welovegames , we didn't get much balancing time... I'm interested to think more about it - want to write some scripts to try and figure out balance.
I will say this, there are 6 additional frivolous upgrades for your amusement only after the Sling -> Spear -> Bow techs which actually do something. The other tent helps improve accuracy. I was thinking we should have added a special 'win screen' if you managed to research the other frivolous techs and call that another game end state.
- Upon repeated playthroughs, I do think we should have increased the time it takes to research the "tech" as you progress.
- Spears can be very effective, although you have a limited amount that drop near your tents after researching them. And when you miss, you have to go re-collect them.
- I did wonder about doing something for mouse aiming... or even improving our miss system. I think our projectiles go too far after throwing if you miss. Mouse aiming + clicking would give it a bit more of a traditional incremental game feel I think?
So one of my other misadventures for this game was creating the 'brain' for the mammoths. I thought to myself and said, I have hunger, anger, and health. I will create a 3D environment, stick some collision objects for "forage", "attack", and "run-away" -- then I will have a ball that represents the 'state of mind' of the mammoth. As the mammoth takes damage anger goes up, health down, and they are always getting more hungry. Anger has a cooldown. (I was thinking to add an anger/rage increase due to blood lust if it got to attack you). Finally, if at any time that ball isn't in one of those specific collision states, the mammoth is in a "bored" state. This sort of worked, one cool thing was if I turned on the collision shape debugging - I could sort of see the state of mind of the mammoth. But in practice I had trouble creating the collision shapes well - not to mention the balance of the brain. One of my thoughts was I could perturb each of this collision shapes/adjust size to give each mammoth some randomize individual behavior.
- Since I didn't get things working quite as I wanted, I ended up just leaving things as-is as I felt it sort of worked. Probably should have gone for a much simpler state machine for the mammoth logic where they don't just keep trying to attack you...
- The bushes were actually for the mammoths. You'll notice if a mammoth goes over a bush, it will eat the fruit. (your villagers are on a strict carnivore diet) --> But I think that may have be a good way to make it easier at the beginning especially, allow your player to also gather fruit. I could increase the fruit re-populate time as time goes on to make mammoth hunting more important.
Thanks so much again for your feedback!
But I still haven't figured out how to properly fight the mammoths((
On the other hand, I conquered the skies—and then fell off the edge of the map.