=BGMC17= Wiggly Fish

BGMC 17: WIGGLY FISH

GOALS:
-Swim around
-Eat things smaller than you to grow bigger
-Don’t get eaten by things bigger than you

Controls: Move the mouse around to steer your critter. Critter movement causes forward momentum to build. Wiggle the mouse back and forth to get the critter to swim forward. Eat things by getting them into your mouth-parts.

Here is the prototype I have so of the swimming mechanics. Quick feedback from the audience on this would be fantastic! I think it already feels quite nice, but I need outside opinion.
WiggleFish1.blend (613 KB)
(NOTE: Due to mouse logic, the steering will not work quite right in the embedded player. Use the standalone player for the true experience)

-does the movement make sense? Is it too hard to steer/orient?
-does it feel intuitive? are you able to learn it easily without exhaustive instruction?
-is the sound effect moderately annoying, or extremely annoying?

This will be something like a low-feature clone of the ‘Cell Stage’ of Spore (and many other little games that have sprouted out around the same concept). Game play should be light, relaxing and casual, and of a coffee-break nature (that is, you should be able to fire it up and get a full game under your belt in around 5 min). Content will be highly random, so you’ll never quite know what you’re going to be running into at any given time.

Now, time to go see what everyone else has been working on :RocknRoll:. Good luck everyone!

Haha good luck! Please make ducks o.o

Cool, this reminds me of Spore Origins, a java mobile game released some years ago that i used to play on my old phone, it was really fun the way you could “upgrade” your little cell.
[edit: just read your post to the end and notice taht you already has spore as a reference xD]

Great concept!! and easy to do also!

Do you know agar.io ? this is a web game which is pretty much the same idea

I want to have some form of evolution/mutation happening as your critter grows.
I’ve been playing around a bit with physics constraints, and this may be the way to sprout (attach) new parts to the critter’s body. These should have some affect on game play (eyes increase vision/light level, fins/flippers increase speed, feelers/claws make food easier to catch). The beauty of this is that the extra parts will affect the physics of the whole body, so a lopsided critter will sort of drag off to one side or the other, and have a hard time going in a straight line.

These mutations will probably be random, or maybe based on what you eat (gotta K.I.S.S.). It will be fun to watch your fishy get ever-more derpy as random body parts start forming around it :). What you wont have is Spore’s little make-your-own-critter-lab. That is just beyond the scope of this project.

I do really like the idea , I like relaxing games:)…good luck!

That sounds pretty great, I’m excited to see what this game becomes.

Most of the rest of the day was spent working on, of all things, the soundtrack.

I began with this watery tune from Equinox, swapped the midi instruments out for digital synths, and added some more chords and a beat to it (the oldest trick in the book!)

The song will be split out into its individual tracks, which each relate to a ‘mood’: PEACEFUL, EPIC, DANGER, as well as the main melody and the beat track. These can be weighted to various objects, and checked via proximity to your character, and the critter’s size, hunger level, etc, to adjust the volume of the appropriate track, which are all playing simultaneously in layers. The result should be a reactive dynamic ambient music.

Nice concept and work so far! Looks like it will be a lot of fun.

To make it more interesting to play, you could use double layers of eating for player and AIs - first one is visual - if you hover a visual layer, you can’t eat opponent. Visual layer collides others and plays animation for starting to eat, but while it doesn’t reach the small cube in center of player/AI called core, the opponent is not eaten yet. This would allow you to escape large animals while being almost inside of their mouth, but not being able to escape when you are in his neck already. This may sound similar to agar.io(where you must hover whole opponent to eat it, not just a part). I think this game will be interesting. You may want to add a score system and add it to Game Jold for online high score storing so everyone can see results of player(in this case I want you to make a Linux export).
Good luck with further stuff!:wink:

For now, eating is done pretty much like that. Food has a health value that drops when it collides with the mouth (a sensor object parented to the critter). When health drops to 0 its munched and you gain food energy (whatever we’re calling it) based on the mass of the food. Food will also be drawn toward your mouth when it’s close enough (based on the physics used in my orbital physics sim) which should make it a bit easier to get things in your mouth. At the moment, fine-tuned steering toward a specific point is a little tricky (not that that’s a bad thing though!)

Food is basically an HP and Stamina bar in one. The lower your food gauge gets, the slower you’ll move. As you move, you’ll slowly burn off food energy. When your food gauge reaches its max, you grow to the next size, your maximum food (‘stomach’) increases, and you repeat the process.

This is what I’ll be working on today. That and figuring out exactly how to implement dynamic music without it becoming horribly cumbersome project.

It looks great already. I’m looking forward to seeing it with more developed characters.
Good luck!

I was too lazy/tired to record a demo video last night, so here is progress since yesterday:

Our critter has turned into some kind of 8-bit crawfish with googly eyes. Clicking will flex the craws inward to help you grab food, or dance if that’s your thing :wink:
The dynamic music is working surprisingly well. Properties on objects act as weights for the different moods. That weight factored with their distance to you is set as a ratio based on the rest of the tracks, and volume is mixed accordingly. I probably wont be able to have every object affect music like this, but for now I’m satisfied with the results.

Next will be eating, and spawning in random objects/creatures to play around with.

Looks very fun:)

Thank you all for the feedback! I’m having fun making this BGMC (as opposed to the other two I’ve attempted so far…)

Today I work on props, and other AI critters, and feeding mechanics. Other critters will either be indifferent to you, be afraid of you (flee), or be curious/friendly toward you (follow). Things that are larger than you will most likely just want to eat you, but that might not always be the case. Friendly followers may be helpful as cannon fodder (I don’t have to outrun the monster, I just have to out-run you!), or an emergency food supply.

Some of the graphics are mouse-drawn by me, but a majority of them have been borrowed from all over the internet. Most are probably not exactly ‘free to use’ images, but this game will probably never be seen outside this competition so I’m not worried. I just take little credit for most of the graphics. We’ll give the credit to Al Gore. Excelsior!

The growth mechanics are not going to be what I initially planned. At first, I wanted a dynamic growth that took place more gradually over time. There are just too many complications to go with that for me to bother with it in the time that’s left. So you will have incremental growth: The critter will mutate into a new bigger critter once your hunger bar is filled. This may even be more satisfying for the player, as you get those nice “DING!” moments.

There will be a central ‘safe area’ you will begin in, and be able to retreat to if you need to. At least until you get too big to fit into the opening :wink: That will have a few hand-placed props in it, and maybe some kind of endless food-spawner you can fall back on. Outside of that though, the world should be made of procedurally-generated Stuff.
Since problems can arise from an ‘endless world’, there will probably be a soft limit to how far you can swim from your home, which will increase as you grow. Once the critter goes outside this boundry, Something Big and Hungry will spawn in and come down on you fast. If you manage to get back within the boundary, it will give up and swim away. The classic Invisible Walls.

Work goes slowly but steadily.

I will probably not post many updates from here on in. Mostly, because I want to retain a sense of wonder and discovery with this game, so I don’t want to spoil anything!

Good luck to everyone else, and keep on Blendin’!

I wanna see this game done. I like agar.io(simple, but fun game) and as far as I get it, this one will be similar(p.s. there was a plan for me to make a “Agar3D” in Blender:D

@Nines
Controlls are awesome, but it would be even better if the game would “tolerance” a certain level of y axis mouse movement for steady movement!
Good job so far!

Hopefully I will have a little time to at least put enough into this to pretend its finished.
Things got busy and I haven’t had any chance to work on this the last couple days. And the next couple days after this are going to be just as busy.

The BGMC is cursed. Cursed I tell ya!

That procedural music is awesome! Do you think you could do a tutorial or post code/Logic?