Wow! That was so funny at the end - you found an exit to the track! :) Thank you for playing!
andyman404
Creator of
Recent community posts
Thank you! For that flat cartoony style, here how I like to do it:
Gentler lighting/shadows: For lights, reduce the shadow opacity or remove the shadows entirely. Increase the ambient/background lighting so that you don't have dark areas. Too much contrast/shadow creates a harsh look. You can even remove lights entirely and use ambient/background lighting if you can get away with it.
Unlit/Unshaded stuff: Wherever you can get away with it, use an unshaded shader. This helps make things simpler and quicker to create when 3D modeling so you don't have to worry about topology and how it interacts with lighting, and can just focus on the silhouettes and shapes instead. Use vertex colors, or smart UV mapping onto a color palette texture for coloring rather than drawing colors onto a texture map, to have crisp sharp color regions even up close. Use shader parameters to apply a tint to the overall mesh if needed.
Draw/model by hand: Use OpenBrush in VR and draw stuff rather than model it in a 3D modeler to get more of a cartoony/drawn feel where everything isn't perfect. Then export it and clean it up in your 3D modeler tool. The sheep were drawn in OpenBrush and then cleaned up / revamped in Blender and broken up into their parts (head, body, separate legs), and then animated through code in Godot for random procedural animations that look ok and never repeat - which is important when you are looking at dozens of the character at the same time.
Thanks! Yeah I realized after the jam that I forgot to add it, and forgot to make the music looping either. It was on my list for so long and would have been such a quick thing to add. I uploaded with only like 2 minutes to spare - ah the fun of game jams! If I make a post-jam version, I'll be sure to add this.
Good idea on using the fan to carry the sheep. I had something like that in the beginning but took it out so I wouldn't be tempted to smack the sheep with the fan. But it is a relaxation game, so if it helps one to relax, then I'd better add that back in.
I drew the sheep in VR using OpenBrush and then edited them in Blender. The OpenBrush concepting helps to give things a quirky organic feel.
Fearing performance issues from having too many sheep, rather than using skeletal/skinned animation, I just separated them into their separate parts (head, legs, body) as plain old meshes and then just coded the walking and idle animations.
Only had 2 hours of sleep last night, but I uploaded something playable in the final 3 minutes! Still could have used another hour of polish, but oh well.
Some new things I learned in Godot:
- MultiMeshInstance3D - used these to make the clouds and the cloud grass. Without it, there is a big framerate hit to the Quest 2.
- How to write Godot shaders (the code version, not the visual graph)
- Trail particles (for the wind streaks). They don't work well on the Quest since they don't bend, but are nice on the desktop version.
- Fog particle system
- There is a big difference in the lighting between the Quest and desktop OpenXR for some reason. I don't know why. But I figured out how to check which operating system (OS.get_name()) it is using at runtime to pick which lighting environment/light to use.
- AnimatableBody3D doesn't work when its parent node moves. I had to add a script that copies the transform.
Here's how it turned out:
https://andyman404.itch.io/cloud-shepherd
So far, I've made some proc-gen dream clouds after finally learning MultiMeshInstance3D. And then some fluffy dream cloud sheep, which you'll herd to their food source (dreams glitter flakes?). As they eat, they'll grow puffy cloud wool, which you'll harvest, to make more clouds to reach more food, or to make more fences to keep them from falling.
The main herding mechanic (not implemented yet) will be to wave around a hand fan to blow the sheep around.
Sorry, no. I don't have a Pico 4, they don't sell the Pico 4 here in the USA, and I don't have the budget for a Pico 4. I'm going to get a Quest 3 instead - better return on investment for a starving indie dev. But if someone has an extra Pico 4 they could donate/lend me, then I could look into releasing it on Pico 4.