BabyKitty Game - Pre-Art
My partner had a memory of a game she used to play where you have to kiss your coworker whenever the boss is turned around without getting caught, it looked something like this:
She'd play it on girlsgogames.com and could picture it perfectly from memory. It was cool to see how many clones exist of it and it seems to be a genre in itself. Here's another example:
With this game in mind, she wanted to make a version based off of her childhood cat Baby Kitty, who loved to drink wine from people's glasses as soon as they looked away. Before embarking we happened upon a cool last bit of research through a youtube essay from Li Speaks that was really fun and worth a watch:
The game itself seems really easy to make. You need a few elements:
- An animation to play when you are breaking the rules
- A mix of animations to play when you are not being watched vs. when you are being watched
- A metric for how much you're getting away with breaking the rules
Taking to my friends about it they pointed out how its just red light green light w/ a theme, but I'd argue the rule breaking is required for this to feel so good.
My partner A and I spent some time on tuesday breaking the game down into pieces and working on our respective tasks. She'd make the art, and I'd do the dev in Godot. After a ~6hrs the dev is in a solid state and just awaiting the art to make it shine.
Here we have the following elements:
- a cat with state for being notdrinking/drinking/paused
- a human with state for being notwatching/watching/paused
- a wine meter that uses a shader to fill (so that we can swap it with a bottle texture later)
- a wine goal that fills over time
- a timer so that we have some meta goal of finishing faster between runs
- three lives so that the game has some challenge and can be lost
- a save system to maintain the fastest time so far
The only remaining work is adding in the art and adding in a "drunk" screen shader after you have a couple glasses of wine
Art takes a while and we want to do justice to baby kitty so we'll be giving it its due labor. I'm excited to see what this looks like, and I'm excited with how easy it was to spin this up so quickly. I can picture the fun of flash game devs back in the day, it must've been such an exciting community to be a part of.
The only thing to credit in the game is the font I got from fontesk.com called Super Warming Font, you can find it here.