• Provide a toggle for the music. It sounds like it was procedurally generated by Claude Code. I understand CC was trying to give it a "Damacy vibe", but it just doesn't have any of the charm. I can still sing the very memorable original's theme despite not having played it in over two decades.
• The camera has a bit too much elasticity when you haven't accreted much on the ball. For whatever reason, good camera controls give even SOTA LLMs a surprising amount of grief. Might be worth a bit of manual tuning.
- The down key should move backwards
- I found the left / right keys don't just spin left / right, they move forward a bit, which I found quite frustrating at points.
I hope you'll forgive an unrelated tangent: what culture does your ~~ tag come from?
The loading is extremely slow - I'm not sure I need all the objects loaded before selecting the first level.
Also I'm not sure if some textures didn't load, but the first level is just... almost empty with random things on the floor? It doesn't have any interesting surroundings. https://photos.app.goo.gl/cEnu76hb5JeJ3DhP7 If it's not an artefact of my phone, a Katari clone needs way more polish/scenery.
Later, I bought Katamari Damacy, and it doesn't have that aspect. You can't suck up everything on the planet. You can get moderately bigger and pick up objects the size of a car instead of objects the size of a paper clip.
What you're describing just isn't a strength of the original game; it was a strength of the sequels.
Also, the items in the game are very artfully arranged.
This version (the part I played) just dumps everything on the floor and the music is lifeless.
You start off small picking up crumbs and trinkets.
You get larger and pick up sports equipment.
Then you start picking up people and they run away from you.
Then cars. Then buildings. Then cargo ships.
Then mountains. Weather systems.
Planets.
And the level designs are fun and intricate. The levels you're inside eventually become the objects you roll up.
You start inside a house at the size of a mouse. Then later you come and roll up that house and its whole neighborhood.
It feels like the horror movie "The Blob", except it's quirky and adorable when you start devouring the whole town.
All of these clones are flat and miss the incredibly good level design.
The other two are:
1. The whimsically melancholic music 2. King of All Cosmos' majestic facial hair and crotch bulge
It's the chaos, the music, the growth over a level, the characters, the visual design, the sound effects.
The sequels showed that when any one of them suffers then it makes for a less endearing game on the whole.
Also hard to reproduce: the selection of objects, the art style (decidedly Japanese) the ambiance (king/prince/planets, the pool table when you lose), music and sounds, and a lot of the little things that make it delightful like things running away, the selection of items - the fact that parts of the world that are not objects become items to pick up at large scales.
Is there some source for that? It sounds unlikely... And you can see the original models exported here https://katamari.andrew-boylan.com/
Basically if you have models that are already low-poly, why would you need multiple versions for zooming rather than just changing the camera?
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/postmortem-the-singular...
I could have sworn I remembered a talk on this but I couldn’t find anything so might be misremembering.
Words every game designer should read, even more true today than back then.
Yup. It does.
It is a cute idea. But the implementation is flawed.
And if the goal is to help people explore cultural artifacts, building a game that actually minimizes the importance of the artifacts, and literally just drives the player to squash them up into a great big ball might not be the best way to help people actually appreciate the items.
Nah.
Nah nah nah, nah nah, nah nah.
Katamari MetArtSee?