October 2013 – Quadolor Games

Gonna Catcha Beta Demo Released!

mstop_4 administration, demo, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam October 23, 2013 0 Comment

The wait is over. I’ve released the Gonna Catcha Beta demo. Download it from here.

In other news, I’ll have the write-up for my experiences with Rise & Fall at the Ancient Arcade up soon.

You’re going to make a public spectacle of yourself.

mstop_4 demo, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam October 16, 2013 0 Comment

After some thought and playtesting of the co-op mode, I decided to move the beta release of Gonna Catcha ahead of schedule. I feel the game is stable and complete enough to be playtested by a wider audience. The things I planned to do before I wanted to release the beta has now been moved to the “Beta → Release Candidate” list. What does that mean? Nothing really. Development will continue as it was before, it’s just that there won’t be a high score table or attract mode in the beta right away. Technicalities, blah blah blah. However, before I do release the beta, I do need to do a little bit of tidying and housekeeping to get the game ready (i.e. write documentation and make the interface a bit more user-friendly). Stay tuned to this blog for more information and a special TV offer! (Wait, no.)

Not to leave you empty-handed, here’s a screenshot of the title screen:

Wait, do you even know how to write that on paper?

Gasp! It has a proper title in it now! After many changes and revisions, I’ve settled on “導魂使隊” as the Chinese-character title for Gonna Catcha. “導魂使隊” translates to, or at least what I want it to translate to, “team of spirit-guiding emissaries” or “team of psychopomp emissaries”.

In related and coincidental news, Rise & Fall will also be making its public debut at the “ROM Game Jam: Ancient Arcade” event at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on October 19, as part of International Archaeology Day. My team and I will be there from 1PM-3PM. So if you happen to be going to the ROM that day, feel free to drop by. This will be the first of a handful of planned appearances by Rise & Fall at a public event. Stay tuned to the blog for more information and we’ll double your order absolutely free! Just pay shipping and handling. (Nah.)

Two-player action!

mstop_4 gameplay, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam, testing, whoopsie doodles October 6, 2013 0 Comment

This week, I switched gears and went back to mainly working on Gonna Catcha, in particular the co-op mode. Things have been more difficult than I imagined. You’d think that with a game that screams “CO-OP GAMEPLAY!!! (Oh, and you can play solo too.)” I would have designed and coded the co-op part first or at least made the single-player mode in a way that would be easily expanded to co-op gameplay.
Well apparently I didn’t.
For the sake of simplicity, I designed and coded many of the features in the game around the single-player mode. It turned out that the code was so intimate with the single-player mode that it made coding the co-op mode difficult. To give you an idea of what I had to do, I pretty much had to tear out the code for various features from the game, smack the co-op version of that code onto them, then shove them back into the game. The results seem to be working so far, aside from a few hiccups:

But now the code design isn’t as pretty. Oh well, so much for my idealism. It probably won’t matter in the end; I don’t think Gonna Catcha is resource-intensive enough for a few pieces of unoptimized code to have any impact on the performance of the game. When the co-op mode is working properly (for the most part), I’ll upload a video it, but for now, I give you the above.
In other news, there was some footage of a “whoopsie doodles” in the development of Rise & Fall that I forgot to upload last week. I think this is a rather common graphical glitch, but I find it amusing nonetheless: