CowHammer, September 2025

We've officially reached the end of the second year of development! Video preview below.

Aug 31

The sinkhole enemies patrol around their waypoint path, turning around whenever they walk into each other. Godot wouldn't let me scale them as CharacterBody3D objects, so I instead scaled their skeletons.

Sinkhole enemy

Sep 1

The sinkhole puzzle is complete and functional. It took quite some trial and error, but now the enemies detect Ternera if she approaches them from behind too quickly or if she tries to attack their weak spot and misses.

The result is quite scary, as the player has to reach them and hit them without getting noticed and before they turn around and see them. I also added two of the same type of enemy guarding the end of the slide hill puzzle, which are knocked out by the rolling sheerk smashing into them.

Sep 4

I found and fixed a bug in the maze area that made the sheerk teleport to ground level and get stuck in mid-air. I tweaked the code so the default height is only applied downwards in underground puzzles and upwards in elevated puzzles.

The last puzzle, a group mini-boss battle, is complete and works beautifully. If the player gets too close to them, they all attack at once and chase them away. Otherwise, they attack using different strategies, always trying to confuse the player. Once an enemy is defeated, the others rearrange to protect their prey. I added a little random delay so it looks organic, rather than choreographed.

Sep 6

Some puzzles become extremely hard depending on whether a keyboard or a gamepad are used, because the camera doesn't quite cooperate. I'm afraid I will have to keep it on rails at least for the slide puzzle, otherwise it becomes impossible. But that's fine. I realized there's a very simple way to change the camera's behavior between managed and manual.

I finished the last scheduled part of the level by making the sheerks enter their pen when their herd is complete. I found a really simple way to do it: if the center of the herd is at point A and they must gather around the center of the level O, which is at (0, 0, 0), how to make sure they all fit through the pen gate that is right between A and O. Very easy: the sheerk in position A + B must go to position O - B. The path between those two points is guaranteed to pass through the gate at (A + B) / 2.

2025 video preview

And here is the result! Earlier than planned, even. There are a lot of bugs to fix now, but we're making very good progress. Here's to hopefully not many more years of development! Thank you all for your kind support!