I think jackalopes are neat. I want to make a 3D game. I like cute things.

The obvious conclusion is that I should make a cute 3D jackalope game.

So that is what I am doing.

The creation of the GDD was its own whole ordeal, BUT it is coherent right now and a very useful guide that tells me what to do and helps me keep everything realistic, which will be very much needed if I want to have a complete project by the end of the semester. 

First look at Dulce

Everything started with a free tree fbx file for scale, and a square prism.

One important thing about the game design is that the protagonist is a small creature, and the whole world looks tall and big from their perspective. I couldn't work with the mannequin in the third person game package that Unreal has because of the big height difference, so I had to make a placeholder model.

Once I had that, I could start doing the core mechanics. I did the character movement with a static version of the bunny, but then they brought up that animations do in fact impact the gameplay in a bigger way than I had expected, I realised I could not just... Avoid it. So I started looking for shortcuts and ways to make it less painful.

I thought I could rig the model directly in Unreal, but if there is a way, I did not find it. I resorted to using Maya's autorig feature, and it worked well enough.  The controls for some reason do not translate to Unreal, and while I got stressed momentarily, I figured out I did not need them at that moment. I downloaded some animations from Mixamo and retargeted them to Dulce -which worked surprisingly well. The enemies are very simple, right now the model is the same Dulce model with a translucent material, and they just follow the player. 

Pick up Mechanics

After having the movement done, I went to work on the picking up objects mechanic. I overcomplicated it, as per usual. However, this time it was because I tried to do it the easy way, and then the easy way became too hard to accommodate,  so then I had to delete everything and do it the boring way that I did not want to do. It's not even boring, I am just lazy.

Once I had the blueprint for a collectible, I could create children of it and make different collectibles. Right now, you can get small shards of light, and big pieces of light. I had combat as a wishlist item, but when I figured out it wasn't as complicated as I originally thought, I got to work on it. I made a very, very ugly and incomplete HUD to have the visuals of the magic levels and health. Whenever you get little pieces of light, your light magic level increases. You can attack only if you have magic, and if you hit an enemy with it... It dies... I broke and fixed the magic system multiple times before I got it working correctly, but I am happy that it now works well!

This is the most recent screenshot of the game that I have. I made some really quick trees to get a better idea of how the forest would look like, and now that I look at it while writing, I believe I will have to make them even taller. Either way, I am almost done with the game loop. I need to finish doing interactions and make the enemies attack Dulce back, but I have made good progress!

My next plans are to work on the real Dulce model, and to start listing the assets I will need so I can then build my three levels. Although sometimes it feels like I'm going too slow, I feel optimistic about the game.