Kook The Cat

So, back again with a new update! At this point, the game is now prototype stage functional outside of a few bugs!

Well… Minus achievements, and a few loose ends I need to implement… at this time of writing this line on the 6th, I also have yet to implement saving/loading haha. (September 17th update here, I added saving and loading! Yay!)

Though yes! You can now collect the ties! The main function has been implemented!

This post is gonna be a bit different though, as I finally have a new video showcasing everything, and I also kept notes throughout this time!

NOTES:

September 9th, 8am

Spent all of the 8th making a better UI layout. Resized many boxes, made the controls screen split into horizontal sections. I also worked on an audio slider system from a tutorial. Wasn’t a fan of it using a slider range of 0-1 and a float system. Used chatgpt sadly to convert it to an int system. Not gonna lie I don’t understand most of what’s going on which sucks, but I barely understand audio and the DB system regardless so I’m not gonna hate myself too much. I did try google but it wasn’t exactly gonna be much help for such a specific thing that only I’m stupid enough to want lol. I then converted it to be between 0 and 200 for anyone wanting to go beyond 100 for some odd reason.

Randomly as well I began thinking about the sky shader. I really want a shader that can use textures for everything. After searching for 3 hours once again, absolutely nothing. I’m assuming it’s impossible. Also still can’t fix the seam in my HDR skybox…

Just fixed an annoying bug I’ve had for awhile now that I just fixed. That being buttons remaining in a highlighted state. While highlighted you couldn’t click anywhere to un-focus them, and hitting spacebar would activate them again for some reason. This was super annoying with the tie list buttons now that you can click them while the game is paused. They would remain highlighted and change the tie as you jumped. Turns out on buttons/sliders theres a “Focus” section, you just need to change the mode to “None”. Why is this not default? It’s incredibly annoying and I can only see it being used on rare occurrences. It’s like how auto jump was on by default in minecraft. I am very angry today I think I’m having a mild breakdown for some reason. I got the audio system done after getting distracted so many times. It’s 11:53am, I’m in a weird sleep cycle. I’m taking a nap.

September 10th, 10:48am

I added a loading screen! At different percentages it says different fun messages similar to minecraft classic! The background is also a mesh in 3D that spins around since I found textures to be too blurry and distorted. I also plan to add A tie in the center maybe? Have it swap out with a few others as it spins in a circle?

I artificially slowed the loading times by using 24 library models from Blue Maple! All with their horrendous collision! Godot actually handles it pretty well! Especially without the collision!

September 11th

Today I didn’t get much done. I attempted to figure out save/loading. Every tutorial I looked at gave suggestions, but there was always a reply of “Hackers can do this and blow up your computer.”

It was terrible. I was also struggling using the easy savefiles addon. I couldn’t do anything with it. Turns out the automatic installation put it in the wrong folder. I figured this out ONLY after attempting to make a blank placeholder plugin myself to see why it’s not showing up. I’ll figure out more tomorrow!

September 13th

So yesterday, I tried to figure out the Easy Savefiles plugin, though I ended up giving up on that due to there being no real documentation, and it being too complicated for me at my current knowledge level. So instead I began learning about making my own save/load system. I went for a JSON method to test it out and it was pretty basic and pretty cool! Though I ran into one error with loading I can’t seem to figure out. So now I’m attempting to learn resource saving. It’s a bit tricky when the main/only example everyone gives is player health, something I don’t have. I know that’s weird but I tend to only learn things if I can apply them directly to what I’m doing, otherwise I spend the entire time thinking “Okay that’s cool, but how do I make this tie related thing?”

UPDATE AT 8:12pm, I managed to get a system to work… sorta… It saves tie info, and it sorta loads? But it’s not loading onto the actual resources, or updating the world. So it’s basically storing info into a file, then loading just the save file itself. Not ideal but I guess better than nothing?…

UPDATE AT 11:29pm, I managed to get it to work at 100%, give or take a few bugs I’ll most likely find later on. But it IS working… I just hope it continues to do so switching between scenes…

At this point, I stopped writing down updates, so I don’t fully remember every detail. But I took everything and just improved it best I could! Cleaned up various things, added small details, and fixed various bugs. I also modeled the castle and a few other small details!

September 17th, 3:40am

OH, also update for September 17th, 1:25pm. I sorted out the raycast going through walls! I had two settings disabled, one of them being the world collision layer. My bad!