A bow on top + context

This devlog is the final bow on top, a trivia dump and an attempt to historicize this project in my life.

Track ID & name

The track this game is set to is DJ Technorch - I WANNA BE A HAPPY. I heard it at a birthday freeparty shortly before starting the project and was awestruck. The combination of energy, lyrics i couldnt make sense of and it being based on a gabba classic did me in.

At the time I couldnt find the lyrics to I WANNA BE A HAPPY. Thanks to the tracks lyrical structure and composition lining up so neatly with the original - the lyrics that appear in a circle around the kitty are based off the "hippy" version.  All painstakingly keyed word by word and arranged to match the music :)

(displayed in the Gumi Symbols font)

where are they now? the hippy from i wanna be a hippy went on to start a game studio!

Techniques to steal for yourself

Main Overlay Shader

The game is represented mostly by objects with bright thin outlines on a black background for the shader to work. Past shader pastebin mostly for reference.

Every frame it:

1. Takes the result of the shader from last frame (screen texture inside of a viewport that doesnt clear itself between frames)
   1. Offsets it by a smooth 3d simplex noise moving through the third dimension in time (to evolve the pattern without shifting it)
   2. Blurs it via mipmaps using textureLod
   3. Hueshifts everything
   4. Multiplies value by a number less than 1 to decay  past results over time
2. Applies an outline effect to each rgb channel of the input texture (gameplay render)
3. Adds outlined texture to modified past results

The results are later additively combined with a render of the gameplay to display to the screen.

!!Of note!!

The shader receives the worldspace coordinates of the camera as well as where it was last frame and then shifts past results and noise accordingly. This allows objects to have a "glow" that is seemingly in worldspace rather than screenspace. Otherwise the effect would emphasize camera motion over object motion relative to the world.

This shader does not take zoom into account, pay attention to camera zooming in and out sharply when landing / jumping the kitty. 

The edges of the screen have a very subtle vignete applied to them to prevent the edge pixels from bleeding into the image too much. When objects enter the frame they have no "glow" yet and gain it as they stay on screen!

Animated Tiles

I wanted tiles that were animated to the beat and had multiple overlapping animation, at the same time, achieving the effect with regular godot tiles seems to be complicated, and generating the animation frames myself seemed unappealing. As all tiles need to animate at the same time with no overlapping offset motion - this is done with a shader! Tile shader pastebin.

Most animations in the scene are done with shaders who have a period that is synced to the bpm in fact.

Fonts for fast and easy assets / symbols

The hello kittys are all from this font, i also considered adding a kuromi mode. Not all symbols looked how i wanted so the game picks randomly from a hand-pruned list of only the ones i liked (DgkjiXaAbBcdEefGhHIJKlLMopPqQrRsStUvVwWxyYzZ1247). In traincyberdeliahaxx2025 the obstacles flying at you are done the exact same way except they are using NineMatScript by YutaOne as well a few of their other fonts for UI. They were giving away their big font pack for free at some point and i formated my computer since downloading it 😭.

Timeline

I initially made a procedurally animated scene for my moms birthday (Dec 2023). 

Then kept rotating it in my head where it rubbed along lantern mice from Rain World and rlnbrls request for a grapling hook game for Paradise Secret Santa (Jan 2024). 

The prototype was a barren playground and was eventually polished into the game you see now culminating on Valentines (and a showcase at a Toronto dev meetup)(Feb 2024). Shortly after my very soon to be husband <3 messaged me again and a week later i got hired by Kitten Cup so i had many bigger fish in the fire and kitty got put on indefinite "i can make her better i know it for sure" hiatus. 

Only to be pulled out of the drawer, shown to friends about a year ago(Sept 2024), and lost in the sauce again.

And later again, now! (Sept 2025) Except I'm not swamped with everything right now!

Where'd it come from where'd she go

I feel this game stands at a breaking point between my past experimentation with trippy vfx and a full on dive into intersection of music and cyberdelia. After this game I started occasionally producing, and got a lot more involved with the local rave scene! VJ'd a few parties with a screensaver and a self-assembled touch designer setup. I feel traincyberdeliahaxx2025 is a direct descendant of this vibe, ramping up the intensity of visual overstimulation, use of UI and text as textures, font abuse, etc.  I hope snoik 2 in at least some of its manifestations will be a worthy followup to this direction!

Success?

Gameplaywise - eh..

Recording your positions and replaying them as collectables that move across the playspace with a period of one phrase was done with the intention of creating an elaborate dance with yourself starring in every role. The reality of it ended up being a lot less elegant and they re just kinda there. I will be experimenting with this mechanic in the future for sure! Perhaps snoik2?

The score is a multiplication of the bubbles you collected times the amount of past selves you crossed by the end of the phrase (represented by the grid of hello kittys on screen that shrinks toward every corner at the end of the phrase, one axis for bubbles, other axis for past selves, i feel this is a great way to show multiplicative scoring actually :]. Once again i think this is a good piece of design to reuse later but the in this case it fell flat for the reason of the past positions not quite working out as expected. 

Movement could be improved too, i feel it lacks the flow i intended for it to have and some friends pointed out that is likely due to the camera being jolted back when you hit a wall and lose momentum. For a game where smooth turns and momentum feel best - the movement system and the camera didnt help with that. 

Aesthetically - YES!!

Most of my applied takeaways from this have been aesthetic :b