Cooper Rabbit update post! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Tib here!As some of you might know, I’ve been asked to help with Cooper a little bit, since both me and Sephra feel super confident in this game, and it’s also a really nice way for us to avoid creative burnout!After a small break last month as I had some personal stuff to take care of, I’m not only back working on Cooper with full force, but I genuinely LOVE what I made so far!A little background first, a loooong long time ago, I first got interested in game development because of this little game called Crysis. It had a cool map editor that was so simple, even super young me could get into it and make something silly. But what stood out the most, was this little tool it had called the “FlowGraph”. It was essentially a way to script behaviour in the game, make things happen, by creating a flow chart with “building blocks” and logic gates. That’s where I first started to learn about programming logic, what an “if” statement is and all that good stuff! And ever many, many years later, I still remember some of the old tricks I learned in that system.And recently, as I was making it easier for Sephra to create logic without having to write any code, I remembered how easy it was for young me to create FlowGraph in the editor for Crysis… sooo I decided to <try> and create something similar! We come full circle, I present to you… a very early and still super fragile flow graph inspired system I made in Godot!

I’m able to create some basic building blocks with this system, such as “zoom the camera in” or “Display this dialogue and wait until it’s finished”, “toggle these lights on or off” and more! It’s based on an implementation of the Command Pattern system I’ve been perfecting, and I felt like putting an entire graph system on top of that would work well, and luckily, it goes!Here’s a small example I made:

https://youtu.be/TKA-OH_pueQ

Each graph can start at different events. The events available will depend on the type of node we attach the graph to. In this case, it was a base switch that I created previously that has the following 3 events: ToggledOn, ToggledOff and Interact. Since the switch will always make a sound when it’s used, I can simply hook up a PlaySFX event to the Interact event, that way, every time we interact with the switch, it’ll play a sound! But with this switch, I also wanted to toggle some lights around the place, and just to show off the system, make a small dialogue appear when it’s turned on, and then also when it’s turned off!I’m excited to put this system into action soon and see how much it knows.BUT

I also have something else to show off!We’ve been also hard at work making sure the NPCs and enemies in this game feel much better to play against. So, I spent a good while making sure they are more reactive, and here’s a small video showing that off:

https://youtu.be/c0-lM3ZzFF8

As you can see, NPCs will patrol or just guard an area. As soon as they see the player, they will do their best to make their way to where they are. If they last saw a player run into a room, even if the player is no longer visible, they will try to turn the lights on and look around said room, trying to find the player. If they can’t, they will return to their original position. NPCs can also HEAR things, if a loud switch is flipped, they will hear it if they are close enough and will attempt to investigate.I’m hoping to give the early demo over to you all very soon, as I’m genuinely proud with what we made here so far! And I’m very optimistic about the future of it all!With love,Tib <3