Some may know that my overall goal is to create a small game on my own. So I decided to follow Mirandas lead and created this topic as some kind of documentary for my progress and ideas! :)
Title:
The great Catnapping
Genre:
Action-Adventure
Setting:
Own world - near future/ Sci-fi
Story short:
You play as a young woman who´s cat gets catnapped by an unknown creature while you...Oh, well take a catnap!
(I didn´t know that catnap was an actual word before I googled it.... I just wanted to use the word kidnap and make it suitable for a cat :´D)
Story extended (motives etc.):
Warning: I got a thing for dramatic and darker themes! (Sensible topic: loss, death)
The main character is a young woman who has moved to a city far away from home to attend a special kind of university. She is gifted a cat by her parents so that she´s not all alone in the big city. As her parents where on the way to her to bring her some things for the new apartment they had an accident in which both died. This makes the cat the last thing she has received from her parents and brings her to get even more attached to it. As both parents work for Anima - a big company which is known for great payment and working conditions, but also for cruel methods when it comes to insurance cases - the accounts of the parents are frozen until later investigation. This forces the MC to move to a very cheap and run down apartment and to work while attending university. (This part should be told by interacting with certain objects in MCs room)
One day, after coming home late night from work, she is greeted by her cat like always. Tired she lays down on her sofa, her cat on her belly and falls asleep. Suddenly she´s woken up by the noise of shattering glass and can only witness how her beloved cat is taken away by a unknown creature. Angry and determined to get her cat back, she grabs her baseball bat from high school which conveniently hangs on her wall and is on her way to get her cat back! ( I don´t know if I should animate this part or draw it and make a comic like Blizzard did in their Warbringer videos) And yes, there is a reason why the creature is after the cat!
Mechanics I plan to use:
ssmurfmier1985 Hey Miranda, here´s my Devlog! I´d love to hear what you think! :)
@fide what an awesome start of the story, I love it!! 😃 I was wondering how you would make finding your cat interesting and I think you nailed it, makes perfect sense 😊
Great concept art too, that great 2D drawing skill you have will come in handy during the whole process.
And the mechanics sound great, you could do a lot with that. Also I think it fits within what you're trying to achieve with your game.
By the way, are you from Germany? Fenster sounds like German for window to me, but my German isn't very good so I might be wrong. Just being curious here 😉
Looking forward to following your progress!! 😎
ssmurfmier1985 Thank you for the feedback! I´m glad that the motive of her is within reason :D
Thank you! My artskills were really helpful so far and I need them in some other occasions,besides concepting as well. For example, I want to draw a bunch of "photographs" for MCs apartment which will give away the backstory upon interacting with them.
Besides those game mechanincs, I might add a small platforming part too, depending on how smooth everything else goes.
I´m from Austria! :D I usually use a mixture of English and German when I name things or make notes, depending on which word is shorter.
@fide ah I was close! 😬
Pretty cool idea with the photos, I like the interactive element of it. If you want to explore and learn more about the story (I usually do, I check every corner!) then you can, but if you don't then you can skip some parts. Smart and cool aproach 😊
Where does this creature reside? Are you following it to a forest? Is it in the apartment?
What kind of clues will lead you to the cat?
Will there be any other threats besides the creature itself?
Is this a stealth game?
Looking forward to seeing more!
jgonzalez Thanks for looking into my topic!
As the creature jumps out of the window the MC is supposed to look out of the window as well and sees that the creature is on their way to a nearby abandoned factory and and how it enters through a broken window.
I don´t plan to give any other clues for finding the cat. I also can´t think of any right now.... If you have some suggestions, I´d be very grateful! :)
There is supposed to be another enemy type, mutated humans you are about to encounter while on the way to the factory. Why they are mutated and why the MC is not will be explained as well.
No, I want to make it an action game where you should fight the enemies, but I´m not sure if I´m able to do it.. I think a meelee combat system might be very challenging :/
@fide I think giving subtle clues to guide the player is important, otherwise it may be difficult to know if you're going in the right direction. Maybe the creature leaves foot prints behind, the cats collar is seen, etc. Melee combat can be a challenge but it's doable. It involves plenty of properly timed animations. You can keep it simple by making the mutated humans a bit more passive, kind of like zombies where the player has more animations and ways of dealing with them.
jgonzalez Thank you! I will make the creature loose some of his scales on the way!
I didn´t plan to make the mutated ones too aggressive anyway and if this easens the combat system aswell, perfect! :D
It will be a long way until I start with animating the MC and the monsters. I plan on modeling and planning the levels at first. I´m not too good with modelling at the moment and want to practice before I struggle too much with humanoid models. Also, I still need to watch the Animation learning flow, before I can start animating.
It will take a lot of time in general until I´m able to complete this project, but I´m sure it will be fun working torwards it! :)
@fide in this early stage there is still so much to discover and dream and think about, I find it a pretty fun stage so far :)
For me wanting to learn game animation gave me the idea for my own game, I wanted a place to be able to actually play with it :-D
Also, doing an actual challenging project will reveal in which areas I need to learn more and do more courses for (spoiler: for everything!), as well as practicing with problem solving. Because there's bound to be some challenges that you don't expect and require some creative thinking, great way to learn more!
Was wondering, what made you decide to make your own game?
My boyfriend and I are passionate gamers. 4 years ago we decided to make a small game on our own, along with two of our friends, just because we love games. My boyfriend is a programmer and our friends are too. One of them has a creative sense as well and the other one is good with project managing. I was supposed to be the creative head, doing most of concepting and modelling. We didn´t get far. We had a concept down and discussed the mechanics we needed, but the more creative friend and I still had to learn how to use blender and we had absolutely no clue how to make an asset game ready. The others tried to get familiar with Unreal in the meantime. Long story short, life came in our way (University and work) and we abandoned the project.
About a year ago, just a few months before I joined CG Cookie, I started to annoy my boyfriend that I finally wanted to make a game. Unfortunately he wasn´t very motivated since he had a lot to do during work and didn´t want to work on the computer while he´s home. So I decided to make a small project on my own :)
(My boyfriend agreed to help me a bit with the scripting at least! :D )
@fide Thanks for sharing your story, it has been a long time dream I see. Cool to see you're still going for it despite hitting a road block and few years back.
Maybe your boyfriend will get more excited once your game gets more shape ;) it's nice to have him to help with scripting at least :D
Good luck on your journey, I'll be keeping an eye out for your updates :)
ssmurfmier1985 I hope so!
Do you have any other motivations for making a game? Or a reason why you chose making a videogame over making a short film to make your animations come to life?
@fide I love games! Always played a lot of games, still do, even though I suck at them (I die a lot haha). I love the interaction with another world and getting lost in the story, being able to experience it through playing myself. It gives me joy and relaxation.
As for choosing game animation over animating a (short) film, I like that it's not static. You make a lots of animations and blend them together to something the player can actually use. I like that you have to think about the player experience, responsiveness and the challenge of making it work for the gameplay. Also, things like combat animation just look wickedly cool :D
Ever since I joined CG Cookie I can't seem to shut up about it having a Game Dev section and how cool it would be to make my own game (was driving some people insane with it haha). It was Game Animation that inspired idea for the Cyber Forge game level, but making a game was already part my passion for CG :)
ssmurfmier1985 Thanks for sharing! ^^
It´s nice to see that video games inspire others as well ^^
I don´t know a thing about animation yet, but I can imagine that animating for games is a bit more dynamic. If you like nice fighting animations you should take a look at RWBY!
You´re not the only one who annoyed someone with CG Cookie :D My boyfriend had to endure a lot when I first joined the site and he still has to when a new course appears which I really fancy, like the sci fi door!
mmalhomsi Glad you like it!
mhm... that´s hard... My favorite franchises are the Souls series, Monster Hunter and Kingdom hearts. Some games I really enjoyed storywise were Nier: Replicant, Nier: Automata and Undertale.
