I’m developing this game in my free time, as a hobby. I hope I will finish it eventually. For now I’m having some fun making it. Here’s a video with some of the features already in the game.
It’s a 3D platformer / collectathon. The main objective is to find homeless animals and bring them to a shelter. There will also be NPCs that lost their pets and you can also rescue them and bring them to their owners.
Using Godot Engine, of course. I’m also making all the art for it using Blender. But for now only a few art assets are final, everything else is just placeholder art / greyboxing.
You can download a demo of the current state of the game on itch io, here:
This is really good. I like how you have already stayed minimal with blocking everything out -
Great design workflow
Keep going and I like the concept of rescuing animals and very child friendly game.
Thank you very much!
Yes, I modeled and animated everything in Blender. There is some deformation from the squash and stretch style of the animation, perhaps I should tone the stretching down a bit.
Work on Lost & Found: Animal Rescue continues. While development time has been limited lately because of work and, well, life, I’ve implemented some new features and refined others.
I’ve added a Compass HUD at the top of the screen to assist with navigation. It displays the cardinal directions and the relative directions of nearby NPCs (Marked with a placeholder Godot icon), animals (marked with a paw icon) and key locations, like the animal shelter (not being displayed on the compass yet).
Initially, the compass will only show NPCs and key locations. Tracking lost animals and special collectables will be unlockable upgrades obtained later in the game. And further upgrades to increase the range at which the object is displayed on the compass (the icon fades away the further the tracked node is from the player).
Other than that I tweaked a lot of little things in the player movement physics, but they’re hard to notice on video.
I also added a new hazard: the manhole covers that slam and create a shockwave that can hurt the player and animals. The art is placeholder, the final model of the manhole cover will be stylized with cartoony eyes, like the traffic cone enemy.
All enemies will be inanimate objects with cartoony eyes, as I didn’t want to make enemies be either animals (would feel weird to be rescuing animals and stomping other animals) or humans (why would you be fighting people in the streets while trying to rescue animals?).
The current city layout is largely a placeholder too. I intend to move away from “realistic” street grids/city layout in favor of “abstract” Level Design (like Mario or Crash Bandicoot games - the level might have a city theme, but the layout doesn’t have to follow realistic city logic). The idea is to replace flat, walkable city blocks with a more fun type of layout that favors actual platforming. So things like floating platforms, bottomless pits, non-linear pathing and more verticality… it doesn’t have to make sense, it only needs to be fun.
The game looks really cute already, and the world is barely even textured! The control/movement looks very smooth too. Very good vibes, makes me want to climb to rooftops and rescue animals. One can dream
I published the game in its current state on itch.io, here:
It’s only one level and there’s not a ton to do in it, but it’s something.
It’s still in graybox with only a few things with real art: the player character, two enemies, the crates and the “coins” (they’re actually pet snacks), and I think that’s it. I’m making everything from scratch so it takes a while.
But there was a lot of progress in development, specially in level design, since last time I posted here.
I plan on adding at least one more enemy in the first level (flying delivery drones that drop boxes on your head), and add some more sub-areas. I’ll also add some more things to do to populate a little more the existing areas.
There’s a Windows and a Linux build. I haven’t tested the Linux build because I don’t have a Linux machine, so I don’t know it it’s actually working.
I highly recommend playing with a controller, but there’s support for keyboard/mouse too.
I would love if some people would be willing to test it and give some feedback. Don’t be afraid of being honest, I can take it (I think).
If you play it and you can use a screen capture app like OBS to record your play session, that would be really awesome. If you can also record your own voice commenting in real-time while playing, that would be even better. Would be great to get a feel of how people react to it on the first play.
Of course, if you’re not willing to go through all that trouble, a simple written comment feedback is very appreciated too!
Overall I think it’s already very cute and playable, even with placeholder textures and such. The move set feels really good, although a lot of it doesn’t have a use yet, and camera control works well too
The difficulty ramps extremely, especially if this is intended to be an area at the start of the game. With so few checkpoints, the gameplay can be very tense and unforgiving, which seems at odds with the cute and carefree style. Compare it to something like Mario 64, and how far you have to get before making 10-20 instant death jumps in a row… it’s not the first level
I think I’d prefer a more forgiving Sonic-like system where ‘dying’ resets you to the same place immediately, and losing all your ‘rings’ (biscuits) leads to a checkpoint reset… or something. It would certainly mean less frustration, encourage more risk-taking, and less standing around preparing for the next life-or-death hop.
My notes:
Wall jump is cool, but it feels overly limiting that you can’t climb on top of a building, presumably because of the small lip around the roof. If that’s because roof tops need to be inaccessible to make harder-to-find paths, wall jump should have some other use.
Both for presentation and testing purposes, I think it would be good to start implementing sound.
Rescuing a second animal (the rooftop dog) didn’t seem to do anything, and the text still shows 1/4.
After tabbing out of the game, I couldn’t get the window to display again. This only happened once.
The white text on light gray dialog box is kind of hard to read.
Would be good to detect controller type and show correct controller buttons (A/X etc). Buttons like X are on both XBox and PS controllers, which is confusing.
You might consider having interact and forward jump on different buttons, so one doesn’t accidentally trigger with the other (ie jumping next to an interactive item).
Slopes (like the road out of town and house roofs) seem a little too slidey. I’d intuitively expect the character to be able to walk on a ~30 degree slope, and maybe up to 40-ish or more. Another typical way around this is to have a texture indicating whether a surface is slippery or walkable - in any case, it should be clear to the player before they try to walk on it.
I found the path to the construction site (?) pretty challenging, but not frustrating. It obviously helps with the checkpoint right before it. The other path back, carrying a dog, felt much harder, and I lost the will to live when I reset for the Nth time, jumped down with the dog, and the dog poofed out of existence - meaning I’d have to traverse the entire area again, just to get back to the checkpoint, where a new dog would presumably be waiting. No player wants to be forced to repeat what they’ve already completed.
Loading a game respawns all pickups (ie dog biscuits). That may be by design, but it is exploitable.
Just a note on that - do consider that if you receive 60 minutes of video, you’ll have to watch 60 minutes of video to discern what a person is communicating. You’ll probably also want to turn their stream of words into compact writing, in a nice list of items, so you remember them. What they’re saying will not be a careful deliberation, but rather spur-of-the-moment comments that may change as the run goes on.
I’m not saying it’s a bad approach, but it is time-consuming (for you and testers alike) and leaves a lot up to your subjective interpretation.
Hi @phoenixdk
First of all: thank you very much, I really appreciate the detailed feedback!
It’s really good to hear that you like the character movement. The movement is the thing I’ve spent most time working on because I wanted to get it right, so it’s great to hear that you liked it.
I agree with all your notes, and I already have some plans on how to fix or improve a lot of the things you’ve mentioned.
I’ll try to get a new update out soon with most (or at least some) of these issues addressed.
About the difficulty, I believe I fell victim to the classic mistake of underestimating how good a dev will get at their own game after testing it constantly for months. I definitely don’t want the game to be frustratingly difficult. I already have a few ideas on how to mitigate the bottomless pit deaths being too unforgiving and also for the issue of players having to traverse again areas they’ve already completed.
Some follow-up questions:
Do you remember which areas you felt were the most frustratingly difficult?
Did you play it with a controller or with keyboard/mouse?
How long did you play for (approximately)?
How many pets did you save (including the one that didn’t trigger when you brought it to the shelter)?
You mean the one on top of the tall building (not the one on the roof of a simple house), right?
That’s something I will have to find some way of conveying to the player: some of the animals in the game will not be stray. They’re lost but they have owners, and you have to bring them to the owner, not to the shelter. The way it is now it’s pretty much impossible to know that, but I have some ideas on how to convey that to the player.
About the wall-jump: there is one area in the level that you need the wall jump to reach: it’s the roof of the factory. I’ll probably add more things like that. I didn’t want the player to be able to easily reach the roof of any house, so if they have to get on top of a house they’d have to find some other way. I think I’ll make the areas between the houses somehow inaccessible, so that the player doesn’t expect to be able get on the roof by wall jumping between them.
You’re right. I think seeing the gameplay video might be valuable in different ways then thought-out written feedback. Both are valuable in different ways, of course. But yeah, I do have to keep in mind that watching videos would be more time-consuming. I don’t expect that many people (if any) would record videos, though, so I don’t think I have to worry too much about that.
Thanks again for taking the time to playtest and write the feedback!
No, I don’t think so. I got up there jumping on a fire hydrant, then a long extended jump straight ahead… as I recall.
As for showing which are strays, color and shape are the obvious ones. The player has to be able to tell them apart from a distance, before they decide to head that (potentially difficult) way.
I really like the alleys though.. and restrictions on freedom can tend to feel heavy-handed. As long as the wall jump has uses elsewhere, I don’t think it’s a problem… it’s just right now, between the houses was the only spot I found where I could do it
I’ve been there myself, and I fint it kind of miserable. Gathering data is easy, turning it into information is much harder - there’s much more ambiguity, and much more “fuzzy” information to deal with (ie you watch someone having trouble with a section, but they’re actually just distracted, tired, disinterested, and so on).
Personally, I think the way to do it is to start broad with player comments like here, and don’t start playtesting with people (ie video recording and such) until the game is close to finished. Otherwise you may get testers reacting to all little issues you already know about.
Just the one I mentioned.
I tried both, preferred controller.
30 minutes? A little of that time was spent taking notes.
1 right one, 1 wrong one, and I was on my way back with an unknown third one.
Oh I thought you meant a different one. The one you had is supposed to be delivered at the shelter as you did. So it’s a different issue then, but I know what’s going on: the first dog you rescue actually doesn’t get counted in the counter. That’s something I already knew but completely forgot, I’ll fix it.
Another problem is that there is no fanfare or reward when you rescue an animal, except for the first one that triggers a dialogue. I have to add some type of reward there. At the very least they all should trigger a message from the shelter guy.
I believe I’ve addressed most of the things @phoenixdk mentioned in his feedback, except the for the sound - the game still has no sound at this point. That will be my next task, I think.
For now, here’s a list of updates in this latest version (0.0.6):
Improved dialog boxes so they’re easier to read. Also did some rich text styling.
Input device is now detected and input prompts and tutorial messages automatically show the correct device button icon. This includes Keyboard, and controllers (generic, x-input/xbox, sony and nintendo). I created the icons myself.
Falling in a bottomless pit no longer insta-kills you - it resets you to your last safe position (meaning, your last position on solid, non-moving ground) and you only lose one heart.
Interact and Dive are now mapped to separate buttons.
Every time you deliver an animal to the shelter it triggers a dialogue thanking you. I will at some point add some kind of reward (coins/biscuits? some special collectible? I don’t know yet) for each delivered animal.
Made some level design updates so player can easily get to places they’ve already reached before (like elevators that can be activated when you reach the top of a high building, so if you fall it’s easier to get back up again without having to get through a platforming section that you’ve already concluded).
If you tested the previous version and is willing to test this new version, don’t load your saved game from the previous version. Because of some changes, errors might occur. Clear the save slot and start a new game instead.
I was going to take a screenshot with the keyboard icon for the jump input and another with the controller icon, but when I press the keys to take a screenshot it automatically updates the icon to the keyboard input
But here’s a screenshot of my Illustrator file with all the button icons I made. I might release this as a free asset pack at some point, I just need to add some more buttons to the pack, like the analog sticks, and I guess I would need to make every single keyboard key for it to be an actual complete pack, right?
