Game Jam Day 1 - Themes, Ideas, and Basic Work

I was on the road yesterday coming home from a family vacation when the theme was announced for the July 2024 Godot XR Game Jam. I had just had a weekend full of activities - swimming, boating, entertaining the kids, and translating for some relatives in town - so it was only fitting that the theme for the game jam turned out to be RELAXATION, a perfect chance to wind down after being so busy. I used the drive home to brainstorm while the rest of the family slept in the car.

Before getting into the working idea, I want to go over some goals that I will be using for this game jam

My Goals:

1. Finish a game
2. Finally learn to use Blender instead of relying on CAD imports and re-coloring
3. Have fun

I want to be able to finish the game that I start. That means, thinking small. We have a week to complete the game for submission, so I think sticking to simple movement and controls, little to no story, and short levels (if there are any at all) are all going to be important. I have a feeling most of my time for this game jam is going to be spent in Blender. In the past, I have created 3D assets in CAD software like SolidWorks and then imported them into Blender to color and size appropriately, before importing that Blender file into the game engine. I did this because I'm very comfortable with SolidWorks having worked with the software for 15 years now. Now is a great time to force myself to learn Blender modeling. As long as I'm learning, I'm going to be having fun.

The Idea:

What if your hands were paws and your only job was to knock things off surfaces before your human came home from work? How nice it would be to escape into a reality where your responsibilities are not to care for the house, but instead to be a menace and cause mischief? This is the basis of the idea I'm running with. Catzpah (from the yiddish "chutzpah" meaning supreme self confidence / audacity / nerve) will be a game of mischief, where you will score points by knocking knick-knacks off various surfaces of the house. Each surface could be a level; a coffee table, a kitchen counter, a desk, etc. Maybe the player will score points in a combo style like Tony Hawk Pro Skater or PAIN. I'm not sure how scoring will work yet, but that can come later. 

Basic Work:

I began working last night to set up my environment in Godot. The XR library is very simple to start, so this was no problem! I set up the environment to have a basic starting menu that can be interacted with by paws that replace hands in the VR environment. Look how cute the little paws are!

And look at them as hands!

I re-colored the paws a bit to match an image I found and purchased made by Eriek Bagus (https://www.vecteezy.com/members/eriek?uploads_term=cat&sort_by=popular&uploads_...). It gives me a main menu that looks like this:

What's Next:

Next up on my list is to make the first level and get physics going right. In an ongoing project of mine, I have been using the Jolt Physics engine, and it works wonders. I plan to do the same here. The first level will likely be the living room. Once I get the level and physics going, I may start on a simple scoring process. 

Links:

You can find my source code here: https://github.com/coreyabrown/Catzpah

The 2024 July Game Jam information can be found here: https://itch.io/jam/godot-xr-game-jam-july-2024