i finished psychonauts 2 about a week ago and it left me suddenly, unusually fired up about the idea of making games. i think the sheer beauty of that game made something click that had never clicked for me before about what makes games fun for me. i lose interest really fast when i think about "pure gameplay mechanics" in a vacuum, or even using games to tell stories, but when i think about using games as a vehicle for channeling aesthetics and just the vibe of being a thing in a place... 😌
anyway, at this point i'm already brainstorming this platformer where you play as this OC of mine and all that stuff but i'm also thinking about another idea, something with a definite end goal: i have yet to make any kind of coquette dragoon fanart. i have a burning and completely unironic need to see bell falling victim to her own favorite TF scenario. i thought the best way to convey this would be an interactive toy in the style of that one from warioware: touched... (if you know you know 🍮)
the first thing i did was hop into blender and model probably the simplest "character rig" i've ever made. take a cylinder and use edge loop select and scale to add a very careful curve of plumpness. good good good good good. the texture was equally simple, although of course the final model will not be a simple generic pudding. we're still in the resident evil 2 tofu stage.
(also, my pudding has bones in it. it's normal. i'm kind of amazed at myself for remembering how to do weight painting in blender without a guide.)
no pudding is really a pudding without the jiggle, so i look up tutorials for jiggle physics in godot. the 3D capabilities of godot haven't been good for very long, so the results are distressingly few and far between. the first result i find feels like it's taunting me specifically.
look at this. i'm so mad. there's no code on screen, no download in the description. they're just waving around a jiggly pudding distressingly similar to the one in my test scene, going "heheheh, look, i made jiggle physics! ok bye" and leaving me to grab and shake my monitor with both hands like i'm looking at an abandoned arch linux troubleshooting post from 2008.
i did find one usable implementation of jiggle physics, a script someone wrote four years ago that someone else found and updated more recently. this one is funny because it seems to exist independently of godot's physics, but i was able to get it to attach to a grab point that i could drag around (after figuring out how to cast a ray from the camera and translate mouse movement to 3D space)
(gotta find a better recipe.)
unfortunately there was one funny hiccup with this script. and i wanted to fix it but after spending an entire day learning about new things to do to a vector3, i still had no luck. the problem was... the pudding kept twisting!!
in the end the twisting bothered me so much that i threw out the jigglebone plugin and rolled my own.
my jigglebone solution consists of an IK node on the uppermost bone of the pudding which targets my grab point, which is in turn attached to a 6DOF joint configured as a 6-way spring constraint acted on by godot's built in physics engine. (this solution has a very "gmod contraption" type feel to me.)
this is pretty neat at this point, but i don't know of any way to get a pudding's bones to stretch or change size, so i added some extra code to add some true "squash and stretch" when the grab point is moved vertically. (all with functions that tie the x/y/z scales of the pudding object to the y coordinate of the grab point in various ways. valerie pointed me to easings.net which was really useful for making this stuff look smooth!) i'm making little tweaks to the pudding bones and the IK behavior all the while to keep things looking as natural as i can make 'em.
now that i have a mathematically ideal pudding, it's time to put the puppy ears on it, so that's how i spent the entire final day of the project.
i drew a lot of cute expressions over this super simple texture and made some code to change them around when you interact with her.
add some great big ears, and... presto, it's bell!
i'm pretty happy that i chose something like this for my first project... if i can look at tutorials and docs and throw together something slightly unconventional like this with no previous frame of reference it makes me a lot less intimidated to get my feet wet making something that resembles an actual video game. 🐀
also i set the program to start automatically and live on my desktop and there's something really therapeutic about having it around to just play with occasionally. my computer comes with a fidget bell now