Bubble Ranch, for Global Game Jam 2025!

gertkeno · January 28, 2025, 1:36am

Check it out!

We made Bubble Ranch: A Cozy Hunt for Global Game Jam 2025.

It’s a casual collect-a-thon where you catch bubble creatures on cactus-filled planet. Each creature has a little personality and there are 3 distinct AI types.

Catch as many as you can and post your high score! At the jam site the highest score we saw was 104,000!

Play here!

— GGJ Entry Page

Animations

We were able to get a ton of animations in for our player character and Godot’s AnimationTree was up to the task! I made use of blendspaces within each animation state to cross between crouching and even an anticipatory raising the net.

With 4.3’s skeleton deformation system we used the wiggle bones addon to slosh the player’s bubble-helmet around.

Creature AI

Our creatures follow a Path3D, but use the navigation to get to those points. This is so they can run from the player and find their way back on track. Initially we also used move_and_slide so they would obey physics, but with lots of creatures and complex tri-mesh collision shapes this proved highly taxing; though the Navigation Agents surprised me, they are very performant.

GGJ Team Page

Our artists did an amazing job, I love how the world looks and all of the creatures, our player is cute and eager to catch them all!

My fellow programmers were fantastic, I could spend time in my own little scene and the pieces would magically coalesce. A smooth operation, we took our time and all agree legible code is the best code!

Having a producer on your game jam team is a boon; getting the right thing done right on time stress free is great in and out of the jam setting. Mega bonus points for also designing and implementing the level!

Join game jams! Make friends! Wooo!

gertkeno · February 1, 2025, 8:26pm

Bonus Screenshot Saturday post

Here’s how our artist set up the face textures with 4 states! Using a sprite-sheet style we can offset the UV map, also saving extra space by mirroring the eyes and mouth.

In the script we can apply these textures by an index, or preferably an enumerated type, with a little bit of math.

enum Face {
	NEUTRAL,
	SAD,
	SURPRISED,
	OUCH
}

func set_face_idx(idx: Face) -> void:
	eye_material.uv1_offset = Vector3(idx * 0.25, 0, 0)

rado_wil · February 5, 2025, 10:18pm

Hi,
I am grateful for your explanations how and what you do inside your game. It is very inspiring and may help solving some problems for others when they create their games. Thank you

KingGD · April 9, 2025, 5:17am

Hey, it looks so great! Mainly the models and animations. Also, the juicy impacts and other things related to coding. Glad to see you made it

But I have a question, would you like to share how you made the models. If it’s by any other team member, then from where you get them?

Just read, you were working with a team. Then, did you find it in itch.io?

KingGD · April 9, 2025, 6:33am

Well, so I played the game right now, everything feels okay to me (mainly the art and animations), expect one thing, you could add smooth rotation change based on direction… It just changed directly which feels odd to me. Otherwise everything is perfect.

gertkeno · April 9, 2025, 2:28pm

We met locally at the jam site, though I have worked with our character artist before, small world (or town)! After meeting on the first day most of our artists opted to work remotely so they could use big rigs and continue working on other paid work, I did not see their workflow personally. We did make use of temporary models efficiently for the first day or two.

Thank you! We mostly tested on controllers so the snap-turning on keyboard is jarring, if we had more time for turning animations that would be the best, or as you describe applying the rotation.y toward the last direction over a short time.

WorldyBear · April 9, 2025, 8:41pm

This game looks absolutely insane ! I love everything about it! The modeling, the animation, all of it! Amazing job, and I strongly encourage you to continue creating your game !

Tzaot · July 9, 2025, 6:40pm

What type of object is the player face, so that you can easily edit it’s uv in real time?

gertkeno · July 9, 2025, 9:19pm

It is a StandardMaterial3D applied to one of the MeshInstance3D’s surface material overrides.

Similarly you can edit shader parameters in real time, and a similar shader would use uniform vec2 uv_offset to add to the model’s UVs. It doesn’t edit the model’s UVs directly.

uniform sampler2D albedo_texture: source_color;
uniform vec2 uv_offset = vec2(0.0f, 0.0f);

void fragment() {
    vec4 albedo_sample = texture(albedo_texture, UV + uv_offset);
    ALBEDO = albedo_sample.rgb;
}

iOSxcOder · March 8, 2026, 8:48pm

@gertkeno

look a great graphics, enviroment, fun enviroment, - just out of curiosity i enabled log .

Referrer Policy: Ignoring the less restricted referrer policy “no-referrer-when-downgrade” for the cross-site request: https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-JNRNM31J09 js

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