Thief Catcher

Created in Godot utilizing gdscript. Goal of the game is too navigate through levels as a police officer catching thieves and pushing them into the police vehicle. With the interactive UI once all thieves in a level are captured, the player is moved onto the next level. As of right now there are two levels.

Skills/Tools used

  • Godot 4: Game engine used.
  • GDScript: Scripting language used.
  • JetBrains Rider: IDE used for scripting.

Thief Catcher

Role: Solo Developer

Description

Created in Godot utilizing gdscript. The goal of the game is to navigate through levels as a police officer catching thieves and pushing them into the police vehicle. With the interactive UI once all thieves in a level are captured, the player is moved onto the next level. As of right now there are two levels. Controls found below.

Features/mechanics

  • Visual Production Pipeline: Assets generated using a generative tools. These included a mixture of cursor generative agents, and ChatGPT generative chats. Plan on replacing these with assets I’ve created out of Krita eventually.

  • UI Features: Interactive UI that dynamically responds to the number of gameobjects tagged with the tag “Enemy” within a level. Updates text when all remaining thieves are captured. After a short delay progressing the player character to the next level.

  • Level Design / Thought Process: As the current state of the game has two levels, the first level serves as an introduction to the core concepts of the game with a simple and easily navigable design. While the second plays on concepts established in the first level while introducing a more complex and larger map to navigate with more police trucks and thieves for the player to engage with.

  • Sound Effects: Grunting sound effects for when enemies are pushed into the police patrol vehicle.

  • Capture Mechanic: The police car serves as the destination to capture the thieves. Emphasized to the player by the text and particle effects around it.

  • Chase Logic: Enemies have a layered movement logic when at the start of the round they will travel in a random direction with a weak force. As the player approaches them the game will check if they are in a certain distance before having the thieves run in the opposite direction with a weak force. This was a pretty iterative feature as making the force too strong creates obstacles in getting the enemies out of corners or making them too hard to push into the truck. Refer to the below GDScript:

func _physics_process(delta: float) -> void:
	if player == null:
		return

	var distance_to_player = global_position.distance_to(player.global_position)

	if distance_to_player < flee_distance:
		var flee_direction = global_position - player.global_position
		flee_direction = flee_direction.normalized()

		apply_central_force(flee_direction * flee_force)

	if linear_velocity.length() > max_speed:
		linear_velocity = linear_velocity.normalized() * max_speed

Controls

Use W,A,S,D keys for movement

W Move Up A Move Left S Move Down D Move Right