What's this?
The Cubs is a top-down food hunting / care-giving game set in a wet landscape. You are some type of animal with a nest of cubs and you must learn to balance the art of taking and giving in order to provide optimal conditions for your young ones' survival.
How does it work?
• Controls are mostly explained in-game.
• Interact with [x] and [z]
• You can move around with the [arrow keys]
• left and right steers your character, forward pushes you in the direction you're in
Your cubs need food, warmth, and rest. You can feed them by hunting for food, but be careful as they will become restless and cool down and require more food. Your ability to manage this determines the game's difficulty.
Why is this here?
This game is a spin-off from Gorpslosh from my before-Pico-8-times. Water and wetness is a great tool to tell a story through the behavior of stuff.
Features
Development
The vector field's fluidity had me convinced it would be straightforward to render it watery without using refraction.
I was wrong. I have documented some of it.
I was hoping a few patterns would be watery enough for the game I wanted.
Tried a few spritemaps and configurations and these got whacky. (I came back to another version of this after trying a few)
Too solid
Has something but no
Too blocky.
Might look like reflection with varying width maybe but it's supposed to be top down
Seemed like it had underwater potential.
Mirroring and turning looked much better onpaper.
I continued with small environment maps but they looked less appealing the more I tried.
This was not straightforward at all!
Finally settled for a mapping of sprites, separating lows mediums and highs into dark, none, and light. Without the need for refraction, and nothing to refract..
Lesson: I didn't need the x y values, but just the depth for rendering above. Underwater, the x y values do the work.
Lesson: Sinking the critters' tummy should have been step 1!
Credits
This game was made by me, skipperd
Tips:
Thanks! They started out as a collision test, here's them before they were trees:
They no longer intercollide to save cpu and prevent grid-edge glitches which makes the effect more subtle as well.
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