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[Release] Do You Believe in Dot Gobbler?

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EDIT: It's done! (Well, playable): https://janschaser.itch.io/do-you-believe-in-dot-gobbler

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Do You Believe?

 

Since it's the final Wizard Jam, this is the last chance I get to finally work on an idea I initially wanted to do many jams ago.
I'm making a Katamari Damacy-inspired Dot Gobbler game in which, instead of rolling giant ball, you are Dot Gobbler and instead of dots you must gobble EVERYTHING. As you gobble up the things around you, you get bigger which allows you to gobble bigger things. Also, in this game Dot Gobbler is some kind of alien/superhero I guess? I really just liked the image of Dot Gobbler wearing a cape if I’m being honest.

 

(@Synnah I hope you don't mind me stealing the 'Do You Believe' name from your game.)

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Gob The Future....?

 

All the gobs we can get for this final jam!

 

I love that poster.

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Progress! It's still pretty rough at this stage, but I managed to set up some basic third person walking and gobbling.

Since the game is in third person you can't really see Dot Gobbler's face most of the time so I decided to render a second perspective to a Render Texture in the bottom left corner. The bottom right shows the last object you picked up.

Also I haven't yet decided whether I want him to get bigger every time he gobbles something or if it would be better to make him grow in stages. But the idea is that getting bigger allows you to pick up bigger objects. The tree is obviously a bit too big at this stage, my next step is to make more props and plan out an actual level.

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Love it! imo he should grow in stages. It provides a little goal and reward for the player during the smaller, 30sec, game loop. It gives a clearer Idea of what you can eat. You might have tried to eat a tree and couldn't, so you won't try again till you "level up". It also allows you to put greater emphasize on the size change visuals and sound.

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Ahhh! Excellent! I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a Dot Gobbler/Katamari mashup. But yes, I don't mind you stealing 'Do You Believe' at all! I mean, I just stole it from Cher.

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So, I ended up neglecting this Dev Log for most of the jam. I realized that my idea for the game was simultaneously overambitious and not fleshed out enough which made me kind of anxious about not being able to finish the project in time (which I didn't, haha) and I sort of abandoned it for a while.

But, this is the last Wizard Jam and I regret not having participated in more of them, so I'm not giving up this time. I'm taking advantage of the flexibility of the jam and trying to get something playable made in time for showcase weekend.

 

This is my very hacky setup for the end of the game, I'm using Unity's built-in Character Controller, which is locked to always facing up on the global Y-axis, so I had to make the earth rotate underneath it (the texture is just a placeholder):

 

Here is a selection of small to medium sized gobblable props:

cityprops.thumb.png.e2bc3209f623d7fbf29f0086664382a0.png

 

On 12/01/2020 at 5:56 PM, RKSanders said:

Love it! imo he should grow in stages. It provides a little goal and reward for the player during the smaller, 30sec, game loop. It gives a clearer Idea of what you can eat. You might have tried to eat a tree and couldn't, so you won't try again till you "level up". It also allows you to put greater emphasize on the size change visuals and sound.

Thanks for the design advice! This is honestly the part of this that I'm struggling with the most, I'm a lot better at making pretty walking simulators than designing actually fun mechanics. Your suggestion definitely helps.

 

 

On 12/01/2020 at 7:07 PM, Synnah said:

Ahhh! Excellent! I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a Dot Gobbler/Katamari mashup. But yes, I don't mind you stealing 'Do You Believe' at all! I mean, I just stole it from Cher.

Thanks, I'm glad you approve of my Dot Gobbler-shenanigans.

 

On 13/01/2020 at 12:12 AM, brendonsmall said:

I would like to commend you on the subtle yet effective use of "Butt Shadows(TM)" on the dot gobbler. This is looking cool!

Ha, thanks! The Butt Shadows™ (now sadly covered by Dot Gobbler's cape) are actually just Unity's post-process ambient occlusion. I'm using an (almost) unlit shader with a hint of PBR mixed in and the AO to give everything a bit more definition. Initially, I used texture sheets with squares of different colors to unwrap the meshes onto but I found a workflow using vertex colors that turned out to be quicker. I decided to keep the visuals as simple as possible to make it easier to model a lot of gobblable items in a short time.

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Good job! It's pretty fun even in it current state. I went inside the Idle Thumbs podcast room and started munching paintings and go too big to leave LOL.

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I just realized that I haven't actually posted a link to the game in this thread, so here it is:

https://janschaser.itch.io/do-you-believe-in-dot-gobbler

5e39fbd515616_DoYouBelieveinDotGobbler_2020_02_05_00_12_10_162.thumb.jpg.34eb95f16f8ba62dd7c15d155cf7a4c4.jpg

Thanks everyone who played it and said nice things about it!

 

Wizard Jam was a blast. My first Wizard Jam got me to release a video game thing I worked on for the first time, and this one got me back into doing game dev after a bit of a slump, so while I sat out most of the jams, I'm glad I got to be a part of the last one. Still, I hope it makes an unexpected comeback one day.

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This is really cute! Not much gameplay, of course, but it's still satisfying to watch DG get bigger and eventually gobble up entire buildings. The ending was a really funny idea too!

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