Hi there! How are you doing? I hope you’re having a lovely day <3

Well, here we are, in the first monthly devlog of the I, Penguin remake!

There are so many things to talk about: the new model, the scenery, the storyline… But I don’t want to make this too long so I want to focus on gameplay and show you what we have, its evolution and what’s left to come!

Before I start, I want to clarify why I’ll not rescue any bit of code of the jam version: I wrote it four years ago in JavaScript. It’s dirty, very poorly optimized and in JavaScript. I have more programming knowledge than when I started this project, so it’ll be easier to just make it from scratch.

Did I mention the original code is written in JavaScript?

Also, my Patreon is running now! If you like what I do, please consider support me there. I’d really appreciate it. And you’ll get cool stuff from it too!

The Movement System

Let’s start with the basics. You’re playing as a penguin, so the movement controls have to look a bit clumsy and funny but, in reality, must feel as good as possible.

First, we started with some basic code to get the penguin moving around, with no animations, just a simple model orientation to where its supposed to look.

(You can see a glimpse of what will be the auto-targeted attack system. I’ll discuss it further in time.)

The camera system is based on the Cinemachine plugin. With little to no tweaking this thing can do wonders, and saves me time that I can spend on prototyping other mechanics.

The next thing was to create and implement a simple walking animation test. It’s important to make the penguin look as funny and soft as possible, and so far Rha is doing a wonderful job!

(If you’re not following Rha yet, you’re disappointing me.)

This first animation test felt alright, but it could be improved. While Rha started working on a full animation set, I implemented a basic head orientation script using Inverse Kinematics, We had to readjust the rig bone structure but it works quite well now.

Once the new animations were done, we made a simple Animator Controller to set it up and test the overall feeling. We’re actually very proud of how this is looking at its current state!

(Here you can see the IK head look in action, as well as the new animation set.)

Then we faced a little problem: the eyes weren’t properly rigged and couldn’t be animated nor oriented with the IK system. Rha had to re-rig the model, and took the opportunity to remake the UVs and create a new base texture for the penguin, to add more variety in the future.

(This boy knows how to dance.!)

After the new optional reskin, I made a rescale test: I wanted to push the model to its limit, to see how much could I scale it to have new penguin shapes without it looking, well, rescaled.

This, in addition to an “eye-blink” system that replaces the eyes’ texture once or twice in a while, and a randomized idle animation start/speed, gave a large group of penguins enough variety to give a natural feeling to it.

(Just me and my gang, looking at each other.)

After this, I only had to make a few adjustments to the ground detection system and then I added a “normal adjustment”: the penguin would adjust better to the slope of the terrain, to feel a bit more in-ground without affecting the movement feel.

(Look how cute this little fella is <3)

And there we have a fully functioning movement system, working quite nice at the moment!

A movement test build will be uploaded on December 4th for Patrons only, so you can have a better feel and understanding on what I’ve been doing and you can give me your opinions about it!

The next devlog will be out on December 15th, where I’ll talk about the basic dialogue system, and from then on I’ll post them every month here, with an extra devlog at the end of the month for Patrons only!

Have a nice day, I hope I’ll see you again soon!