April 2014 – Quadolor Games

My GM48 10 submission: Fodder Cannon

mstop_4 Fodder Cannon, game jam, GameMaker: Studio, GM48 10 April 22, 2014 0 Comment

Out of the blue, I decided to participate in the GM48 10 game jam held on r/gamemaker on Reddit. The theme was “Guns that don’t shoot bullets”. So I decided to make a game with guns that shoot minions at your opponent, and kick them into submission. Here is the result: Fodder Cannon.

You can download the game from itch.io.

Kick, punch. It’s all in the mind.

I regret nothing!

It’s been a long day.

Sometimes you just can’t win. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

And here’s a time-lapse video of the process:

And here is the brief post-mortem I posted on r/gamemaker:

Did you succeed with your plans?

Finishing a full-playable game? Yes. Finishing absolutely everything I wanted to do? No. I wanted to implement a single-player option in my game but didn’t have the time.

Did you come up against any obstacles?

The only obstacle I came across was a technical one. I had been testing my game on both the Windows and HTML5 platforms during the jam so that I could release a standalone and a web version of it afterwards. During the last hour of the jam, the health and ammo meters stopped working in HTML5 for some unknown reason, so I decided to drop it for the jam since I figured my time was better spent on polishing the Windows version.

What did you think of the theme?

This was the theme I wanted to do most. I was pleasantly surprised when it was actually chosen.

Did you learn anything new?

When I don’t filter character and graphical designs in my mind and just draw whatever I feel like, things get a little bizarre.
I can compose something resembling background music in as little as two hours. I think it still needs a lot of work, but it turned out better than I expected.

Eaten… by some… Linux, or something.

mstop_4 Gonna Catcha, Linux, Ubuntu April 4, 2014 0 Comment

Gonna Catcha v.1.1.1 has been released! And much sooner than I expected. This version also marks the first release of Gonna Catcha on Linux (so far only tested it on Ubuntu-based Linux Mint).

Minty fresh.

On the technical side of things, I overhauled the graphics code to make the game’s codebase compatible with GameMaker: Studio 1.3. Up until release, Gonna Catcha was written with GM:S 1.2. When I tried to run the game in 1.3 (which was released as a beta) for the first time, I was greeted with this:

Gonna Catcha is now F2P.
You get the other 8/9 of the screen as paid DLC.
$10 for each ninth.

One of the big changes in 1.3 was the major changes to how it drew stuff on screen. I naturally assumed that the update broke my graphics upscaling kludge code.

#GameMakerStudio 1.3 changed up the 2D graphics engine, breaking my game slightly. Good thing I didn’t delay the release any further.

— Quadolor Games (@QuadolorGames) March 15, 2014

Since I had read that the changes to the drawing engine in 1.3 made it much easier to upscale graphics pixel-perfectly and therefore made my workaround obsolete, I decided to rewrite Gonna Catcha‘s graphics code in accordance to the new method of upscaling.

About an hour later, I had finished the rewrite. I tried running the game again, hopeful that the problem was solved:

*cue losing horns*

Thank you internet!

Well, that was a bust. The 1.3 update didn’t break my old graphics code after all. After another hour of probing my code, I finally found what was causing the problem. It seems that the function that toggles between windowed and fullscreen modes was preventing the window size from being changed. Not knowing if this was a bug or feature at the time, I just implemented workaround to get around it. Yes, I wrote out a workaround from my game just to write in another workaround. Based on other people’s reports on the problem, now I’m beginning to think that it’s a bug.

The rest of the updates are just bug fixes and interface improvements:

Fixed a bug where movement keys would get “stuck” if they were pressed or released while the game was paused.
Fixed a bug where lives were not being counted correctly after one player borrows a life.
Factory Reset now properly resets [Borrow Life] for both players.
Default key for [Borrow Life] (Player 2) moved from the 2 key to the 9 key (only takes into effect if you install a fresh copy of the game or do a Factory Reset).
Credits screen can now be exited by pressing any key or Start, Back or A on a controller (formerly just Esc).

It seems that by solving one big problem, the life-borrowing mechanic create a few small ones. Also, I moved the default key that allows Player 2 to borrow a life from 2 to 9 because it didn’t make much sense for it to be on Player 1’s side of the keyboard.