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[raventhe]

Hey there!

Apathy Goat is a dark comedy type-'em-up game co-starring a goat with an emotional disorder. But it's far too hot to be a functioning psychopath in the Australian outback!

Oh, and it's made in Unity.

Global Wording has become a real problem wherein all the educated people have had their vocabularies stolen by aliens, rendering them brain-eating zombies. Of course. Only people living in isolated communities with weird dialects full of colloquialisms are safe from the aliens, who have no idea how to process words like g'day and trackie-daks.

You play as one such bloke in the Australian desert (and his pet goat), armed with a USB 10.0 Wireless Keyboard which is the secret to defeating the aliens and zombies.

(Sidescrolling level prototype. Motivate Goat to continue walking while also avoiding & blowing up obstacles. Need to finish the level before he finishes his cigarette.)

Different styles of levels will include sidescrolling, arcade, top-down (driving, flying, space), and a shmup on rails tribute to Typing of the Dead.

(Driving level prototype. Navigate slippery, bumpy dirt road, dodge potholes & termite mounds, beep at kangaroos, run over or type enemies like zombies & roadkill)

Project Status:
This is a project reboot from a Facebook casual game I was originally working on. I've got a great deal still to do. The two samples above were made in one week each. I'll be spending a bit of free time trying to get my head around a plan for PR before fleshing out the full details for the game, but I have enough ideas floating around in my head!

Typing games are kind of... I don't know, weird. I have no idea if anyone will like this kind of game. So feel free to chime in with thoughts, suggestions, encouragement. Oh god, I'm so lonely *sobs*

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[raventhe]

Okay, time for an update! I've gotten myself well and truly engrossed in social media shit (now I get caught checking my Twitter on my phone and my friends groan and ask what's wrong with me), and I've had some thoughts about exposure/marketing campaign stuff for later in dev, which are just way too secret to tell you. I know you're all just waiting silently to steal my ideas.

More importantly, I've been working very solidly on the first level of the game, pumping out new assets and mechanics. My pixel art skills are improving already, and considering I only started with proper pixel art 6 weeks ago, I think I might actually get good at this and be able to reliably create my own art for once.

I've also written up a story & level outline with several boss plans.

Umm, you don't care about this, right? You want pretty pictures. Here. Have some pretty pictures.



New Effect: Apathy Goat smokes while idle & walking
Apathy Goat never got the memo about lung cancer. Like all goats he can't read anyway.  Reading is tied too closely with ambition, and ambition is dangerous territory when you live day to day.

New Enemy: Eastern brown snake
No-brainer. Comes at you. Type it before it gets to you. I also think I'll open the level with a sequence a bit like this, camera tracking a snake.

   

New Enemy: Dropbear!
Oh, it looks like I broke the dropbear's falling code when I implemented a new pathing system. And he's in the wrong layer. Hmm.

Seriously, drop bear. You had one job. You can't even drop properly? What even...

New Enemy: Flaming sheep + New Mechanic: TNT
When aliens invade, the sheep are always the first to go. This particular guy isn't typable and he runs just slightly faster than Apathy Goat, so the player will need to work out that they have to go back past the TNT barrel and use it to blow him up. >=) Not that the sheep is evil or anything, he's just panicking and likely to start some serious bush fires.

New Obstacle: Molly, the Formerly Living Cow!
Molly. Even in death, she was still in the fucking way. What is it about cows and roads? As he stepped daintily through her remains, Apathy Goat wondered what had killed her...

 

New Mechanics: Wireless Signal Detector & Pizza Rod
Still working on it, but the idea is that the mouse cursor controls  your keyboard's wireless signal receiver, and you can use it to detect typable objects in the level (in this case a very obvious barrel).

Here the barrel contains pizza, which Apathy Goat's owner dangles  from a fishing rod on the far side of the screen, motivating the goat to  run faster!

New Mechanic: Edible Stuff
Some obstacles such as beer, ashtrays and school children will cause  Apathy Goat to stop and eat them rather than just being bumped. You'll  have to stop and watch him eat and chew while you wait (and as a  time-based game, this sucks for you). So, ideally, you'll get rid of 'em  before he gets to them.

Other new stuff:

• Destructible rocks, logs, barrels,
• Added rippling lakes & trees to the background
• Added hay bales, pitch forks & truck tyres to the foreground
• Added rocky hills to the level (previously it was entirely flat, which is actually realistic for the desert, but uninteresting for a game)
• Improved visual separation of foreground & background layers by adding a rough lip to the top of the foreground
• Improved the quality of the dirt textures (both foreground & background)
• Improved the bases of the termite mounds
• Revisited the graphics of the background windmill & watertank
• Adjusted the tree colour palette, but still not totally happy; think I need to improve the shading on it. But I don't know if I will because I am exceptionally lazy. >=)

Thus concludes my epic update. I'll try to be a little more frequent and a little less huge in future... But you know how it is.

[BanzaiBrigade]

Looks like alot of fun. The pixel art/animations look great, and it's nice to see you're already varying things up with the top down thing.

Is the typing just random words or does it tell a story?

[James Edward Smith]

This game looks hilarious. I'm curious though, what is the point in typing stuff in the driving mode over just running it over?

[raventhe]

Thanks for your interest guys! I've been developing in the dark so long, it'll be great to actually hear what some people think.

Looks like alot of fun. The pixel art/animations look great, and it's nice to see you're already varying things up with the top down thing.

Is the typing just random words or does it tell a story?

Thanks heaps! I'm new to pixel & animation (I'm a coder, not an artist) so that's good to hear. I've only been doing it a few weeks and feel I'm getting much better already, so really looking forward to seeing what I can do in a year!

To answer your question:
Some words will be randomly selected from a list appropriate to that object. Some will be hardcoded, always the same for that object. There will be little times when I'll have a few together that make sense to add some humour, but mostly it'll be the random selection.

This game looks hilarious. I'm curious though, what is the point in typing stuff in the driving mode over just running it over?

Cheers! :D Focusing mainly on the sidescroller at present, but some mechanics outlined for driving levels already. Some obstacles e.g. dead cows are too heavy to run over & must be typed. Things like the Wordless (zombies) can be run over or typed, but typed=better points & also running them over slows you down a little bit. Running over 1=no big deal. Driving into a group of 5=maybe 3 die, car stops from impact, 2 surviving wordless attack you.

There'll be more typing mechanics worked in. A big thing when driving through Aussie outback at sunrise is a risk of collision with kangaroos. In areas such as where the 1st level is set, it's important to beep your horn every minute or so to make them piss off (in real life). So, for example in the game, roos can't be typed, but you might have to type "BEEP" to honk the horn while driving so they run away.




Also, someone on IndieDB pointed out that I haven't really explained the game at all, so I thought I'd share my response here too, to put some of the above in context. I know, I'm a bit all over the place haha.

Apathy Goat's Sidescrolling Level Mechanics
Firstly, these are of course a W.I.P and will be adjusted based on how I feel playing through the 1st level once it's completed (maybe 1-2 more weeks). Secondly, sidescrolling levels represent just under 30% of the current game plan; I'm aware that they would become quite monotonous, hence mixing up the gameplay every level to keep it fresh, and throwing in splashes of humour. I'm a big fan of not letting games become too formulaic, or setting up what the player would perceive as a formula, then doing something unexpected to stop them being complacent.

So here's the mechanics for sidescrollers:

• Yell (type) at goat to motivate him to move. Each yell=go faster. Slows down again over time. Needs some tuning; won't have to type him as frequently as seen above, as it's kind of annoying me already.
  
• Change goat's direction left/right with arrow keys to help dodge some stuff, but for now no way to actually reduce his speed.
  
• Level of course gets harder if you go faster, so player must balance according to their skill level
  
• Level is timed by goat's cigarette. Too slow=he has to go back to get another one (restart level). Faster finish time=better score. Reach platinum score target = platinum skill point to unlock little game-changing skills like aixelsyD, allowing you to type words backward for big score bonuses. :3
  
• Skill system under revision; more info later
  
• 3 platinum scores achieved necessary to unlock final chapter of game & real story conclusion.
  
• Some obstacles slow you down, some hurt you, some insta-kill you
  
• Speed mechanic does work nicely for chase scenes too of course. Boss of 1st level = mammoth dropbear that you must outrun whilst also "typing" him to slow him down until you get to the car.
  
• "Wireless Signal Detector" controlled by mouse used to find hidden stuff like pizza (speed up) & cigarettes (bonus time). Not vital; just a bonus for the hardcore. Vast majority of obstacles=automatically detected.

[raventhe]

I'm just finishing up the remaining assets for the 1st level now. Toward the end, the first alien attacks--he'll have a shield that can't be penetrated until the keyboard is upgraded (I plan to handle shield strength vs keyboard power by changing the amount of time you have to hold each letter down). So on the first level he'll just attack the goat briefly and if you fend him off, he'll get bored and float away (no shield visual yet).

I was really struggling to come up with a unique concept for the aliens. In my head I kept picturing the "Eater of Souls"/"Corruptor" enemies from Terraria for some reason http://terraria.gamepedia.com/Eater_of_Souls

I do want it to fly and have AI similar to them, but I like to put thought into things like how it flies. The aliens have enough technology to come to earth, so I thought maybe I should give them jetpacks or something--just hovering or looking like a squid didn't make much sense.

I was also thinking about what kind of feeling I'd like it to give off. Since it's a comedy game, I decided to abandon "horror" and settle with "cuteness."

But after a bit of brainstorming, a walk with the dog and a lot of coffee...

The hangolotl alien wields mysterious technology allowing it to "levitate," attacking from above. It may not be quite certain of what is going on or why it is in the sky, but it IS the scourge of the galaxy.

And I'm pretty proud of him. ^_^

Today, I weaponised him!

[ZeroTec]

hehe, the alien salamander is super awesome

[raventhe]

Thanks dude! :D