Travel Cat

Welcome to Travel Cat - an exciting adventure where you control a globetrotting feline to explore the wonders of the world! With access to a plane, car, and boat, the whole planet is your playground.

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Inspiration

The project is inspired by open world games with exploration elements

What it does

It lets the player fly a plane, drive a car or drive a boat to explore anywhere in the world using a combination of Google 3D Photorealistic Maps and Google Street View. Track your journey as you travel which you can export as a KML.

How we built it

Using Visual Studio, using my tripgeo.com website to test and host. Some code was adapted from earlier projects I have created. Used Claude to assist with some of the coding such as the 3D animation. Used Flux to create images. Used Tripo3D.AI to create the 3D models. Used RunwayML for portions of the intro video. The game can be played at either https://tripgeo.com/travelcat or https://tripgeo.com/fly/main.html (same maps code at both locations).

Challenges we ran into

The 3D models were tricky to display initially - more for the axes of rotation, Blender helped to fix that. Not being able to get ground elevation of map points was a problem. I resolved that by requiring the player to click on the map in order to enter drive mode - this returned the elevation. The street view in the drive mode is not perfect so that will be improved in future versions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the 3D physics and visualization of the plane to work was a good achievement. I played around with 3D models earlier in the year and ran into problems then. This time I think the UI and the 3D maths work well together to provide a fun user experience. The game was made more fun by adding the cat character with the 3D model and images for the help dialog.

What we learned

More about 3D maths, animation and physics. Using Blender and AI tools to create the models. Designing a concise UI and help system.

What's next for Travel Cat

I definitely want to develop the code some more and add more depth to the game. Letting players discover places and share them with other places would be nice to do. Also creating mini-games to play at one map location. I'm also looking for other people to collaborate with and to develop more advanced games based on this project.

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