undershot

For the past year or so I’ve been working on making a video game. Actually that’s a lie: I made the first prototype for this game seven years ago. Back then I got the basic mechanics working for the player character, but I had no story to go along with it, and therefore no game.

This time I made exactly the same mistake, spending a few months getting the character’s motion working well before I had any idea where the game would go. But it has worked out well: the game play was interesting enough to inspire a friend to help with the script (hi Lara :) and now it’s well on the way. It’s being created in Blender.

In-game screenshot of Cargo

Cargo is a 3D adventure game. You play a snail who is on a mission to whoa! No spoilers just yet. But you can get an idea of the basic game play from the screenshot above: Cargo (the snail) can crawl on almost any surface and wraps around objects. The motion is fluid and quite engaging. A little too engaging: development is slow because I spend half of my time just playing the game. In fact, I think I might have a go now.

I was just trawling through my old posts, and noticed that it is almost exactly one year since we adopted out cat. Back then we thought Kuro was a boy, but the vet soon set us straight.

We got a bit of a fright at the vet because she had a microchip: we thought her old owners would want her back. But it turns out they moved interstate several years ago. From the way she behaved when we met her we think she was dumped. I’ll never understand why someone would do that. She’s such a lovely cat.

I mean, she’s usually nice and likes pats a lot. Sometimes she thinks that being lovely involves biting, and then it’s under the tap with her. We have developed a kind of affectionate fear of each other that I think works pretty well.

Happy birthday, Kuro.