Kook The Cat

So this is the first post for the Kook The Cat blog! My name is Toothy Deerryte, and this should help document and archive my journey for the 4 fans the game will have! And for the 2 fans that would want to know development history! (Being real though this is mainly for me to look back on lol)

I used to use Unity as my main engine, and 3-4 years ago in 2020 I attempted to make a project called Tie Hunt. It was based off an old Roblox game from 2011 that I loved but shut down, then I recreated in 2019! (And shut down!)

Here is a video showcasing the first Unity build! It had a second update build with better scenery, but it wasn’t anything special. I may show that off in a future post though just for fun! Though this video used to be update #1, now it’s negative 1.

So… I’m not exactly a programming genius, and I doubt I will be anytime soon, or even after Kook The Cat is completed. It’s gonna be a mess…

After Unity, I switched to Godot as my engine of choice! It seems perfect for the games I want to make, and is also nice for the art style I plan to use. That being my semi low poly, PS1 esc, Invader Zim, Group 5, DSI flipnote art style.

I need to get a better name for it… Anyway Tie Hunt Devlog #001!

In this, I was super excited that I added slowed down walk/sprint speeds while jumping, and reducing jump height while crouched! It took many hours and multiple failed attempts testing out dumber ideas at first haha.

What does this have to do with Kook The Cat?! Nothing really! These early posts will focus on Tie Hunt. A game that I’m using to improve as a programmer! It’s going to be a simple achievement hunter game, but should help me not only pick up programming to an extent, but also teach me the ways of the engine itself! The game will also be put on steam for free so I can learn the ropes of all that as well! Especially achievements which I love to add and collect!

However… I AM gonna use this post opportunity to showcase early concepts and attempts! Starting with Kook The Cat!

So, Kook The Cat was originally planned to be an animated series! It didn’t get very far however since at the time I was using a crappy minecraft animation software that could barely handle the basic scenery of flat terrain and a few hills! (And a huge 9967×9967 image for the ground. That might of been a factor…)
The series didn’t actually have a name yet, so I nicknamed it the “Toxic Series”. It was called that due to in canon, half the world was nuked billions of years ago, and never quite recovered. One side would have life, the other death!

Here’s some early concept art, I failed to fill in the tail white, but with white backgrounds you can’t even tell! (This site will have a dark theme one day.) It started off as a basic drawing in flash, then made into 3D! I only had basic shapes to work with in that minecraft software so yeah…

This iteration was from around January of 2019!

A few misc screenshots I recovered!

Here are a few screenshots of the early house! I still have these project files somehow…

WIP screenshots.

This was all enough to crash the program multiple times lol. It also looked horrible, and was a pain to animate… So the series was quickly dropped since I couldn’t get grass in without fps dropping further. Back then I always had trouble taking my ideas, and making them a reality, especially on the quality that I had in my head. This caused me to stop production on many projects and nearly give up for good on multiple occasions. But then I learned Blender and now if it’s not to my liking, it’s just a skill issue lol.

Lastly, the (Currently unnamed) robot character! This was designed by my friend Demon’s Eye!

I also attempted to make this in the minecraft program! It’s scary to imagine how long this took me since as mentioned earlier, I just had basic shapes lol. (Cubes, spheres, cylinders, pyramids.)

At this time, I had yet to 3D model it. I hope it turns out better than this haha.

To wrap up the animated series saga, yes. The series at this point takes a lot of inspiration from Adventure Time. Maybe too much haha. Though with everything I currently have planned it’s going to hopefully stand on it’s own. It’s obviously gonna be compared to Adventure Time still, I fully expect that haha.

The Blue Maple era! So back on June 29th 2013, I had a minecraft adventure map called “The Legendary Flint and Steel”! What was it about???!! Uhh… Well there was this legend… of an unbreakable flint and steel… I think… It was dumb.

It was a bunch of random concepts and areas thrown together, loosely tied together as a walking simulator, until at a certain point you fought mobs?… Then you didn’t again?… I tried to clean it up and finish it sometime in 2019/2020, adding many new areas actually! Though it became a complicated nonsensical mess that was SUPER unfun to play haha. Many interesting concepts, but everything with the project was directionless.

The plot brings me to tears… (You were given the flint item which was enchanted with Unbreaking.255, the item was gone on this copy. Your goal was to find the steel I guess, then… what did I think would happen? You would just end up with regular flint and steel, I wasn’t advanced enough to do anything more haha.)

This mirror… super convincing!

The book was titled Goal #1. I think each level I was gonna add a goal book?… I never did…

This whole area was supposed to be some large, futuristic-kinda dining area that got sabotaged. I was planning on making an animation with workers up on the lava pipe, then a shadowy figure pull out two creeper eggs like playing cards or something. That’s why that tiny area in the wall exists!

The library… easily the best location I’ve ever made. I haven’t been able to recreate another version with a similar vibe, I’ve tried. Most likely going to be a location in Kook The Cat. Maybe even Tie Hunt?… In this room, in that weird semi floating cube near the top with a small bit of parkour, you would find a sword! THE sword for the map! It had it’s own legend and was the only change in the texture pack that I made myself! It had blood on it! OH two other changes, were some new flint and steel textures actually! Photos from google I squished down…

I mean… it would of been hard to tell if I didn’t spell it out.

Don’t tell OSHA!

Exausted after a few minutes of running through 3 big rooms? Here’s a break room I guess! (By the sign you could tell my redstone was flawless!)
The little fence area had an invincible villager with some trades, I forget what they were. The dispensers however dropped some supplies, one being a powerful axe!… For some reason? This was 1.7…

Immersion breaking hallways! WHY DID I DO THIS??? Like seriously I can’t think of a single reason unless I though like, yeah this is a simulation now… like what??? I think at one point all of this would be taking place on a passive spaceship or something… for some reason… Why did I add the break room if this was all for lore???

The prison room… Why was it so large??? I remember I gave up on placing vines since it could be used to skip the parkour… Not to mention my brilliant exit sign, it glows red sometimes because redstone ore…

The liquid controll room… sorta?… Fun fact, this was when trap doors couldn’t be put on one another, I did it with MCEDIT. If you opened one, the entire bridge would break soft locking you lol.

And this is where it ended… these are like the apparatus vents from Portal… the map was just turning into Portal… I forget where these were gonna lead, maybe I had no real plan after this which is why I stopped?

So… then the remake happened…

You were an ordinary Minecrafter… though one day some griefer decided to block your only exit outside of this pit your house is in for some reason… You left your diamond pickaxe in your mine, Gonna have to grab it to escape!

One sorta seamless teleport later… maybe after grabbing your pickaxe?… I was still working this bit out… The exit back out has changed… Herobrine????? No, though I still used his tunnels!

You exit the tunnel, this isn’t your house! This must of been a glitch… this strange tunnel somehow linking your mine to the door of this odd place… After some pillar parkour, you find a lever, and place it on the green block!

Incomplete hallways!

This place! Now without the joke about the safe path for some reason?… Lame!

An improved library! Now with proper stairs!

Woah! A… minecart?… Why?…

After that Bioshock opening to the city I stole from another map and didn’t build, you can now enter it… For… I don’t know I ran out of ideas… I wish I had more control, like… what if…

…
…
I made it into a game…

Blue Maple. Originally just called The Legendary Flint and Steel again cuz… okay. I decided to take these incredibly flimsy and nonsensical solid plans, and make it into a horror game! The first thing I introduce is a blue coin, which will later turn into what I call a Blue Maple! It would be a walking simulator/collectathon! Walk around and collect these coins, but also horror I guess!

I imported bits of the minecraft map into Unity for early testing!

I made quick work with the project! Following many tutorials and not truly learning all that much… Unity was my worst enemy at this time as well!

Third video and my flaws are beginning to show as a game dev. I’m using scripts made my someone else that I don’t understand in the slightest for the cube pickup system, and I can’t even get a basic menu to work since the character controller I downloaded has something wrong with it, and I don’t understand a thing…
At this point, I don’t realize this is an issue, I actually think I’m gonna make it through without properly learning a thing… And I also think my loose ideas from that minecraft map is a solid game plan.

…It’s gonna become Portal again isn’t it?… Oh god…

I took a step back to focus on visuals! Making the blue coin I based off Canadian money! Maybe a little too Canadian… I didn’t even have a proper coin design for the games identity… This is a nightmare… Looks pretty cool though!

I HATE THE UNITY TERRAIN TREE SYSTEM!!!!!!!!!!!

The first massive update… I love this NPC design still. It came to me in a dream. Though I’m still mindlessly following tutorials for the most part. The character controller was another one I downloaded off Youtube. This one being more advanced. I couldn’t even pretend to read the code on this one…

HOWEVER I did do some of my own coding at this point! I mashed together a few tutorials, and some of my own ideas to make this key and lock system! One tutorial was for regular doors, and the other was a weapon tutorial that I used to make the key! This actually gave me the confidence that I COULD actually learn programming! Something clicked and It just became easier to understand, even though I didn’t quite get it entirely!

This carried over when Nelson Sexton recommended I learn Godot instead of continuing with Unity for my projects. Even though it’s been an uphill battle relearning programming in general, and having to do it on a software in active development changing bits code every major update. (Not to mention having to morph the knowledge I learned into a new system). I finally had that moment again tonight! And not just tonight actually… For the past few months things have been clicking in place, more and more. And now I know GDScript more than I ever knew C#!

By the way… GOD I hate that one sound though… why did I use it for everything and make it so loud?!??!!?!!! I am not a good sound engineer lol. I have improved though making many sounds for Buak myself! I find music software is nice for things like coin collecting, sirens, and so on!

And one day I will return to Henry… when I’m finally less stupid and can make a proper NPC for Kook The Cat…

I can’t believe at the end of this video… I thought I’d have EVERYTHING implemented, AND have a demo lol. Wild.

THIS update… I KNOW I’ve learned stuff now. At the start I was wondering how having the interaction cube inside the character worked with the new controller? That’s raycasting! I had raycasing before but It was setup so poorly… But I didn’t know much about it back then, I seen it purely as magic haha.

And the start of it randomly becoming Portal with cube and button based puzzles… Uh oh…

Another thing I learned, those lines in the Library are due to mipmapping! (I’ll stop showing off now lol)

There was a v0.08, AND a v0.09… 08 was nothing special, but 09…


Oh boy…

It… was beginning to look nice! I learned how to make custom HDR skyboxes in Blender! So I guess the game is set on a planet now? It’s in space?… Huh??

The fence under the house, I struggled with so hard. Transparency in Unity was a nightmare before I found out you needed it to be a separate material. The Kookies looked super nice though! The trees broke however…

I had nice looking UI elements! The health bar was now maple syrup because someone made a joke about it. Whenever you collected a Kookie or a Blue maple as well, the info would temporarily come down, WITH a multi-frame animation for a shine going past the coin! That I’m most proud of!

But then…



It became Portal… Oh god…

The games identity was a mess. After these short puzzles, it would just become a parkour/walking simulator, with random stuff EVERYWHERE. It was not good…

However… one lost item in the files was the unique Kookie! I forgot about it and it’s purpose!

Now… game devs beware…



You are about to see the WORST mesh collider collision in the world…

The LIBRARY!

And for now… that is it!

After the Game Update 6 video, I made the Tie Hunt video, the first video linked on this post. Then I stopped for QUITE awhile. I made Tales Of The Unturned episode 2 instead! I then began work on Buak, and learned MANY valuable skills for game development! The thing that truly killed Blue Maple though? I couldn’t make the character slide down steep slopes. I’m not kidding. That’s like, built in for the Godot character controller haha.

I just wish all that editor knowledge could transfer over to Godot, but oh well lol. This has been quite the first blog post though! Hopefully big things will come out of this! If these games get completed, that’s two more life long goals complete!

I have been Toothy Deerryte, thank you for reading!