Going Gold [Updated 3/14/14]

WARNING!!
A HUGE 80S-STYLE ARCADE GAME
GONNA CATCHA
IS APPROACHING FAST

That’s right, Gonna Catcha is being officially released at the end of this week! Available now!
Woot!
Woot!
Woot!

It will be available on itch.io starting tomorrow (March 14, 2014).

Even though I did get the game working on an Ubuntu virtual machine (Linux Mint) a while back:

Meanwhile, on #Linux. #gamemakerstudio #ubuntu pic.twitter.com/zNyA5IlKCn
— Quadolor Games (@QuadolorGames) February 15, 2014

I still need to do some more work to prepare the game for distribution on that platform, so the game will be Windows-only for the time being.

Boo

What else…? Oh right, the issue of payment. The exchange of money for goods and services. Gonna Catcha will be available as a pay-what-you-want title with no minimum.

Yay!
Yay!
Yay!

Whoa, it’s being a while since I posted here. I’ve been so busy getting Gonna Catcha ready for release that I haven’t had the time to make posts. Well, I tried but the post got so long that I got bored of writing it.

There was a video I wanted to accompany another post I wanted to write, but I think I’ll just show it here. During the development of the game, I noticed that the attract mode demo would end in one of two outcomes seemingly at random, despite there being only one set of input files and a fixed seed for the random number generator. Eventually, I discovered what determined which outcome would occur, whether controller input was enabled or not.

WAT

WUT
HI

LOL
LOL
That was okay.
I did fix a bug that allowed a player to control/interfere with the attract mode demo using a controller, but this glitch didn’t go away. Here’s the kicker: even non-deterministic elements of the game, the ones influenced by the RNG, i.e. the paths the Wandering and Straying spirits take and the random item that appears near the bottom of the maze are also different between the two outcomes, even though the RNG seed was fixed. Oh well, I think I’ll leave it in; it gives the game character.

Can we go now?
No
Nope

Aww
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Excellent, it’s all falling into place.

Gonna Catcha 0.9.2rc is available for download. The “rc” is for “really cool!”. Actually, no, it stands for “release candidate”, meaning it’s ready to go, barring it destroying the world in the next few days somehow. You can find the download link on the game page.

For now, the download is only available on IndieDB because I got tired of Comodo Dragon (Chromium-based) and Internet Explorer (lol) telling me the downloads from my domain (quadolorgames.com) and Dropbox are “dangerous” because they’re new kids on the internet block. Firefox doesn’t seem to care though.

I haven’t had time to prepare a proper blog post to describe the release of v0.9.2rc in detail; I had been going out and getting people to playtest the game. And no, I don’t feel like getting in a debate about whether this post is technically “proper” or not. In any case, I’ll be making another soon, which will include something peculiar I’ve noticed about one part of Gonna Catcha.

While I wait to see if Gonna Catcha will trigger the apocalypse, I’ll be focusing on trying to increase the marketability of the game. In other words, the description pages of this game on this blog and IndieDB are a mess and really need to be updated and cleaned up. That should be fun.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Spit shinin’ the ol’ game, make ‘er all nice and pretty.

Gonna Catcha v.0.9.1 is now available for download from the game’s info page. It is largely a “polish” update; I’m tweaking things here and there to start finalizing the game. Here is a summary of what was updated:
Improved movement around corners, as discussed in my previous post.
Bumped up the score requirements for getting extra lives, from 20k/40k/60k… to 20k/50k/80k… I felt that getting extra lives was a bit too easy in previous versions, especially in the later levels where points are more abundant. Players are reminded of the requirements on the title screen.
Updated the user interface. If either player gets more than 5 lives, the lives counter just draws one icon and then the number of lives. (Shown in above screenshot, sort of. Just imagine a number beside Donum’s icon on the lower-left.) Before it would keep drawing icons the more lives a player has, eventually intruding on the space of the round counter and the other player’s life icons. I was surprised it took me this long to realize this problem. In addition to that, I’ve added small indications that appear when a player picks up a power-up item (P): “LOnG” for the first pickup that extends shot range, and “DBL” for the second that gives the player a double shot. Before this friendly reminder, the power-up item was the only item that did not obviously indicate what it does.
Rewrote the help manual and changelog as a Compiled HTML Help file (CHM). Now in colour! Images, links, and an index! Multimedia for the win! But seriously, the manual looks much better and easier to use now.
Lastly, I updated the “Starring” screen to include the new, and possibly finalized, Chinese names for the characters. This time I opted for a transliteration than is biased towards the pronunciation of each Hanzi rather than the meaning,, using this chart as a basis. 
Pohena Das: 波伊娜 ・ 達絲 (Trad.) / 波伊娜 ・ 达丝 (Simp.)
Mandarin (Pinyin): bo1 yi1 na4   da2 si1
Cantonese (Yale): bo1 yi1 naa4   daat6 si1
Donum Dono: 多南姆 ・ 多儺 (Trad.) / 多南姆 ・ 多傩 (Simp.)
Mandarin (Pinyin): duo1 nan2 mu3   duo1 nuo2
Cantonese (Yale): do1 naam4 mou5   do1 no4
The problem I had with Pohena’s old name (魄伊娜) was that the Cantonese pronunciation for it didn’t sound very nice (paak3 yi1 naa4), and being the Chinese dialect I grew up with, it was gnawing at the back of my head. It does work very well in Mandarin (po4) though and its meaning is relevant (魄 = “soul, spirit”), but still. As a compromise, her name is now 波伊娜. I had a similar problem with Donum old name; actually, it was much worse: 當納睦 ・ 當儺, dong1 naap6 muk6   dong1 no4. I also decided to simplify his name and came up with 多南姆 ・ 多儺. Fun fact: his last name, 多儺, can be interpreted as “many exorcisms of evil spirits”. It would fit Pohena better, but meh.
I plan on rewriting the bio pages on this website, not just to update the names, but because the info on there is out-of-date. The lore of the Gonna Catcha universe has changed since I put that page up. I’ve also considered incorporating it and the other extended descriptions of the game linked on the game’s info page to the manual. That will be part of my next update.

P.S. The Japanese transcriptions for their names are unchanged for now: ポイナ・ダス (Poina Dasu) and ドナム・ドノー (Donamu Donō). I don’t know why I decided to put that out there.

P.P.S. Wish I knew something about transcribing to Korean Hangul… and Vietnamese.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Today: Improving movement around corners in Gonna Catcha. Tomorrow: Humour check-up

In my various playtests of Gonna Catcha, I have noticed that many players were having difficulty trying to turn at intersections, going from one corridor to another perpendicular corridor. The solution I came up with was simple, yet I still managed to write this whole blog entry about it, so here goes.

Gonna Catcha uses a smooth, grid-based movement system, as in, even though the players move smoothly, they will always be aligned with the grid that divides the play area when stopped. This is to facilitate players in lining up properly intersections and going around wall corners, instead of having the player painstakingly line themselves up with pixel-perfect precision. Even with this alignment aid, I’ve noticed in my playtests that players were still having problems negotiating those corners.
To explain this better, below is a figure showing five different cases where a player is approaching an intersection (click on it and any other figure to expand):

Figure 1. Five cases of a player approaching an intersection

The figure shows two horizontal corridors linked by an opening between them. In cases 1 and 5, the player is not aligned with the opening; in cases 2 and 4, the player is partially-aligned, and in case 3 the player is fully-aligned.

The next figure shows what happens when the player holds [Up] to try to move upwards in each case:

Figure 2. Results of holding [Up]
As expected, in cases 1 and 5 the player cannot move upwards since they are completely blocked by the wall; and in case 3, the player is free to move upwards since there are no obstructions in the way. The problematic cases are 2 and 4; where the player is partially obstructed by a wall, which for all intents and purposes counts as being fully-obstructed by the game. In most of my playtests, players end up in cases 2 or 4 when they try to turn too early, and they end up getting snagged in corners, which was a bit frustrating to them.
For a long time, I’ve thought about whether to fix this problem, or just leave it in as a “quirk” of the game’s movement system that players need to get used to in order to get good at the game. Many games in the 1980s did have control schemes that had quirks or little annoyances that players needed to learn to in order to master them (I’m looking at you, Bubble Bobble, Ice Climber and Super Mario Bros.).


One day, out of boredom, I found my copy of Midway Arcade Treasures 2, an emulated collection of old Midway arcade games. I only played it a few times on my Gamecube a long time ago, so I decided to give it another chance and popped it in my Wii. After chopping down trees in Timber and crashing cars in Hard Drivin’, I played a game that caught my attention: Wizard of Wor, an action maze game from the magical year of 1981:
The basic premise of of the game is you and a partner must shoot and kill all the monsters in a maze-like dungeon to move on to the next one. The partner can be another human player or, if you’re playing alone, a computer player with limited intelligence. From what I’ve seen, the players’ movements aren’t confined to a grid like in Gonna Catcha. However (and this is the whole point of me mentioning this game in this post), the game had no problems with players getting caught in corners, as the player characters would “hug” the corners if they were close enough to one. In technical terms, the player would move in the direction perpendicular to the direction the joystick is being held, towards the nearest intersection if one was close enough. Confused? Don’t worry, there will be figures soon.
This got me thinking, if an actual early-1980s arcade maze game could handle intersections like this, then Gonna Catcha should be able to too. So I modified the movement code (something I haven’t touched in a long time) to make it handle corners and intersections like Wizard of Wor (and likely the multitude of maze games that came after it). The figure below shows the results of holding [Up] in each case with the new movement system:
Figure 3. Results of holding “Up” in the new movement system
Cases 1and 5 remain the same, however in cases 2 and 4, the player will now scoot around the corner of the nearest intersection if they are partially-aligned with it. Playtesting the game with the new movement system, I can say for certain that turning around corners is now much easier and smoother. One other thing I noticed when I was playtesting was that I had coded the movement direction and the way the sprite faces independent of each other. Before this change, the player’s movement and facing were always in sync, so I never noticed it, but now that there are cases where they’re not in sync, and in those cases it looks like the player is sidestepping or strafing around a corner. Technically, this is a graphical glitch, but I think I will allow it, because it looks cool.

The v.0.9.1 update will be coming soon. It’s not the finalized version of the game, the later levels are still unbalanced and possibly impossible to beat, but I am one step closer to it.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

The end is nigh. Muwahahahahaha!

It is a joyous occasion; Gonna Catcha is now feature-complete. Everything I set out to do with the game is done aside from a few tweaks here and there. In v.0.9.0, I made two major sets of additions, along with some minor improvements.
The first set of additions are two additional screens in the attract mode. The first one is a brief introduction to all the characters in the game, and idea I borrowed from Mappy:
Meet the folks.
The game itself did not have any detailed depictions of the two main characters Pohena and Donum, so I put (relatively) large portraits of the two on this screen. Both still adhere to the 4-colour palette limitations of all sprites in the game, if you break them down into individual 8×8 tiles. (It was actually much easier to do than I imagined.)
After the introductions, the attract mode switches to a gameplay demo. This where the game’s autoplay system plays back one of my attempts at beating the first round with both characters. As was the style at the time, the attempt was poor.
You suck at this game!
I’ll buy YOU for a dollar!
The second set of additions are the tutorial sequences that teach players how to play the game, replacing the instructions screen in the previous version.
… …
Yeah, I got nothing.
The tutorials demonstrate, by example, the basic rules of the game: what each player character’s job is and what they can or cannot shoot. There are four in all; they are shown before Rounds 1, 2, 3 and 8.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

This game plays so good, it plays itself.

Welcome to the first post of 2014! I’ll been working on the autoplay system (for the “How To Play” segments and the attract mode) for Gonna Catcha since the last time I posted. And since it’s also been a while since I uploaded something on my Youtube channel, let’s make it a twofer; here’s a short video of it being tested:


As I was coding this, I realized that creating the autoplay system would have been a lot easier if I was using Game Maker 8.1 instead of GameMaker:Studio to make this game. That’s because games made with Game Maker 8.1 could be coded to be dynamic at runtime. That is, you could add, remove or change graphics, sounds, rooms and even code while the game is running.

So what does dynamically-generated game assets have to do with the game playing itself? Well, the assets of interest in all of this are timelines, a series of code snippets that are run at assigned steps in time. Once a timeline is assigned to an instance and is set to run, it will automatically fire off the code snippets at their predetermined times. If I was using Game Maker 8.1, I could record player input to a file and then save it to the disk. Later, when I want to play the input back for demo purposes, I could read the data from the file, translate it into a dynamically-generated timeline and let Game Maker (and my player input code) handle the rest.

Unfortunately, due to cross-platform incompatibilities, the ability to dynamically add and change game assets at runtime had been restricted in GameMaker:Studio. In particular, most of the dynamic coding functions are gone. Fortunately, the all of the dynamic timeline functions survived the cut; well, all of them EXCEPT the function that allows you to ADD new code to a timeline. Without this function, this function, it is impossible to created new timelines with new code from scratch on-the-fly, pretty much destroying the above method of creating an autoplay system with a surgical strike.

In light of that, I tried to think of other ways to do this. First, I tried to record the player input into a human-readable format then manually translate and hardcode it into a timeline. However, this method was too tedious and took way too long to do, and if I wanted to re-record a play session, I would have to retranslate everything from scratch. Next I tried to build the timeline from scratch, but it was also too tedious since it was too hard to predict NPC movements, even though the random seed was fixed.

In the end, I decided to create my own timeline system. It’s not as through or functional as GameMaker:Studio‘s native timeline system, as it can only take control of the player characters, but it’ll do.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Holiday Post thing

Whoa, it seems like forever since my last post. Since the Bit Bazaar ended, I’ve been focusing my attention on many things, some regarding Gonna Catcha and some not. But there’s no time to explain them all here, so I’ll pick the most important one.

As I mentioned in my last post, Gonna Catcha was played in an arcade-style environment at the Bit Bazaar on December 7. Players weren’t be able to read the manual to figure out how to play the game, as it wasn’t available to them. So in an attempt to minimize confusion, I added the instructions screen below, which was shown just before the first round started.

Crash course in spirit catching.


It explained the basic rules and goal of the game, i.e. what you can and can’t touch, what you should and shouldn’t shoot and how to progress.

I didn’t arrive at the Bit Bazaar when it started, so I might have missed some of the early birds playtesting the game. The first people I saw playing didn’t seem to have too much trouble figuring out what to do, but as the day went by and more people played, it became apparent that the instruction screen wasn’t doing its job very well. My guess that it was too brief and too detailed at the same time, and that confused people about the rules of the game. It presented all of the shooting and touching rules for each NPC type all at once, but due to the lack of space, the descriptions of each rules were too laconic. By the end of the day, I was back to my old ways, explaining the game myself and skipping the instructions screen, and things went by a lot smoother.

In retrospect, the instructions screen was more of a band-aid solution than a real fix to the problem. Since it was a bust, I figured that I need to go to Plan B, which is to use demonstration cutscenes to explicitly show how the game is played. As such, on my to-do-list I’ve promoted “Demonstration cutscenes” from “Optional” to “Necessary”. I also grouped it together with “Attract mode” because the two have one thing in common: the ability for the game to play itself. But before I get into that,


INSTRUCTIONS SCREEN, YOOOOOUUUUU’RE FIRED!!
Or kicked upstairs, whatever.

Ahem. So anyway, I’ve started working on the new instructions delivery method: new tutorial cutscenes that will replace the old instructions screen. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like so far:

Don’t fear him.
Essentially, it’s just a half-size level that plays itself to teach new players how to play the game. And speaking of playing itself, I’ve also started on making the autoplay system too. I think I’ve got the playback system working pretty well, the recording system on the other hand, which is only here to help me record gameplay to be played back by the autoplay system and may not be part of the final product, has a few bugs to work out. For starters, it generated a 500+ MB output file when it was only supposed to be a few kilobytes in size.

I feel bloated… ugh.

The recording code is working much better now. I’ll go into more detail about in a later post, because this one really needs to get out there. I don’t know when, because it’s the holiday season, with the whoop-de-do and hickory-dock. And don’t forget to hang up your sock, ’cause just exactly at 12 o’clock, he’ll be coming down the chimney, down.

P.S. Now that I think about it, Donum and Pohena bears some similarities to Sinterklaas and Krampus of Alpine folklore.  Krampus punishes naughty children while Sinterklaas rewards good children. Pohena and Donum does the same with spirits, according to the supplementary material.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Gonna Catcha v.0.8 Post-Mortem (Oh no, somebody catch its spirit!)

Gonna Catcha is gonna be shown in the Arcade at the Bit Bazaar Winter Market on December 7 (the day after this post was originally published). Being an arcade-style game played in an arcade-style environment; Gonna Catcha will be put to the ultimate test in its own element. I’ve been working hard to get it polished up for public playing. Here’s a list of changes and improvements I made between v.0.7.4 and v.0.8.2:

High Score Tables and Name Entry

Your name registrated

This is no doubt the biggest change to the game since the latest update.  Instead of only keep track of one high score value, Gonna Catcha now keeps track of twenty high score values: the top ten for single-player and the top ten for co-op.  Not only that, it also keeps track of the highest round reached for that playthrough and, of course, the player’s initials, so that your valiant efforts will be remembered forever for future generations to admire, until someone bumps you off the list. Hmm, better stock up on quarters and snacks.

AAA – the undisputed champion

Instructions Screen

Crash course in spirit catching

As I mentioned earlier, Gonna Catcha will played in an arcade-style environment at the Bit Bazaar. As such, players won’t be able to read the manual to figure out how to play the game. Heck, they won’t even get the luxury of instructions printed on a cabinet. Sure, I’ll be there to help people out if needed, but frankly, after explaining the rules to the many new players to the game in previous playtesting sessions, I’m getting tired of it.
To minimize confusion and delay, I added the above instructions screen, which is shown just before the first round starts. This explains the basic rules and goal of the game: what you can touch, what you can shoot and what the heck is going on. The game’s “hidden” rules can be learned through experience. Hey, at least I’m not charging anyone multiple payments of 25¢ to learn the game by trial-and-error.

The Fourth Maze and Endless Play

How high far can you get?
After much procrastinating, I finally added a fourth and final maze to Gonna Catcha. This also means the game can finally be played endlessly, as it was intended to. Rounds 1 to 16 have a fixed distribution of spirits and pretas. Beyond Round 17, however, the distribution of spirits is randomized for each round, likewise with which pretas decided to show up in a round. In addition to that, spirit and preta movement gradually speeds up each time the maze changes after Round 17. Speaking of rounds, next we have…

Rearranged Rounds

I’ve probably played Gonna Catcha more than anyone else in the world, and because of that, I’m probably the most likely person to get bored of it. One problem I’ve noticed in my playtests is the round progression. Originally, you needed to play four straight “regular” rounds of spirit catching before you hit the bonus round, and then afterwards the maze changes and the cycle repeats. In all my playtest sessions, I was playing co-op with another player, and I felt fatigued at the fact that I had to endure four rounds of pretty much the same gameplay before two major gameplay changes happen one after the other. It’s not as bad in single-player because the character you control, and therefore the gameplay, alternates between rounds. Still, I knew something had to be changed for the sake of co-op mode.

The solution was simple: in each existing set of five rounds:

4 regular rounds → bonus round → (maze change) → rinse and repeat

I just moved the bonus round into the middle, i.e.

2 regular rounds → bonus round → 2 more regular rounds → (maze change) → rinse and repeat

This way, instead of having two major changes to gameplay every four regular rounds, now there is one major change for every two regular rounds. Hopefully by spreading out the changes, it will make the game more interesting to play for longer.

Pause Function

ザ・ワールド!時よ止まれ!*
One minor annoyance I had with Gonna Catcha while playtesting it was that I couldn’t pause the game when the other player had to attend to something else for a moment. After all, why would I need to put a pause function in an arcade game? There’s no time for pausing in the arcade business, time is money. However, since I’m not really interested in extorting quarters and attention from people in exchange for making it on the high score list, and the fact that I’ve already violated a few limitations and conventions of early-1980s arcade games, I decided to put a pause function in the game for the sake of convenience. Actually it was more like taking he pause code from Rise & Fall (shader and all) and plopping it into Gonna Catcha, hence the black-and-white blurry effect.

*ZA WARUDO! Toki yo tomare!

(Yes, it’s actually “Toki yo…” not “Toki wo…”.)
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

High five! I mean, ten!

Last week, I updated Gonna Catcha to v.0.7.4. It was pretty much a knee-jerk response to some issues I encountered when playtesting it last night at Bento Miso. It added an option to toggle a fullscreen mode, to hide your desktop and other windows behind black while you’re playing, and a few bugs fixes. Unfortunately, being a knee-jerk response, I didn’t test it properly and there are a couple of bugs with the fullscreen mode, though the bugs don’t interfere with normal game operation.

In addition to fixing these bugs, the next version, v.0.8.0, will replace the single high score of the current version with a high score table (or two). Here is a screenshot of what it looks like so far:

In addition to keeping track of the top ten scores, it will keep track of the other standard high score information: player initials and the highest round reached. I am considering a second, separate high score table for co-op mode, which will also keep track of which character the player used.

Well, that’s all I can do to make this sound bigger and more important than it really is. I’ll be doing another meatspace test this Friday. I should really try to finish this before then.

In other news, when I woke up today, I was greeted by this on /r/gamemaker:

As someone work mainly works with vectors for higher-resolution artwork (i.e. not low-res retro sprites), I am pleased by this turn of events.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

My time at the ROM and Gamercamp 2013 – Part 2 [Updated 11/19/2013]

UPDATE 11/19/2013 – For some bizarre reason, I linked “Samegame” in the description of Pyramid Party to the Wikipedia article “Banshee” instead of “Samegame”. That has been fixed. Also, I totally left out one Gamercamp Official selection: A Fishing Game with Actual Water. You can now read about it at the bottom of this post.

Last time, I talked about my experiences playtesting Rise & Fall at both the Royal Ontario Museum and Gamercamp. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the other games that were featured at the two events. Sorry for the lack of pictures; all the ones I took didn’t do these games justice.

First off, I’ll describe some of the other ROM Game Jam games. Unfortunately, I forgot to make note of the teams’ names that made the following games.

Pyramid Party

Sort of like a cross between Wario’s Woods and Samegame. (Note: you’ll be seeing me use these fusion-of-two-games comparisons a lot in this post.) One or two players each take control of a pharaoh who run and jump around a SameGame-like playfield to give commands to their workers to run, jump and move blocks around. When four or more blocks of the same color are joined together in any way, they become fixed brown blocks that fall and acculmulate at the bottom of the playfield, while the blocks below them bubble their way to the top of the stack(s). The goal of the game is for the player(s) must build as much of a specific structure (shown before the start of each level) on the playfield out of brown blocks before time runs out. Each level has it’s own specific structure and quota that must be met.

This game is quite addicting and also difficult if you don’t have some sort of strategy planned out.

Relic Ravage

A multiplayer competitive platformer for up to four players that’s divided into two stages. In the first stage, players play as warriors who must fight and defeat each other to score points. When a player is killed, they drop an artifact where they died. After a time limit, the first stage ends and the game builds a pyramid on top of all the dropped artifacts. In the second round, the players play as archaeologists/treasure hunters who must dig into the pyramid to collect artifacts and other treasures and bring them back to a pack mule for points, the artifacts dropped in the first round being worth the most. After a second time limit, whoever has the most points is the winner.

What really made this game special is the enthusiasm of the dev team behind this game when there were playing it with the patrons of Gamercamp.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Afterlife

A trivia game that’s pretty much exactly what it say on the tin. You play a recently-deceased character who has to navigate the underworld while answering trivia questions from Anubis and Set, the latter being fond of trick questions. When you answer a question correctly, the weight of your character’s heart decreases, and conversely, an incorrect answer make your heart heavier. At the end of the game, you meet Osiris and he weighs your heart against a feather (as per the myth). You win the game if your heart is lighter than the feather, otherwise, you get a bad ending.

Next up, here are some of the games from the Gamercamp official selection that really caught my attention. I have also provided links to the games’ and developers’ websites.

Toto Temple – Juicy Beast


A multiplayer competitive platformer (these seem very popular) made during TOJam 8. Players scramble to grab and hold on to a goat. The player with the goat continuously accumulates points for possessing it. The longer the player holds on to the goat, the more points it generates. The other players can (and should) use a dash attack to steal the goat. When the goat is stolen from one player to another, it lays a bunch of eggs that hatch into coins which provide a secondary source of points. The game ends when one player reaches 3000 points.

The game got pretty frantic when I played it with three other people, with the goat exchanging hands very frequently. I also learned quickly that grabbing as many coins as possible helps with maintaining your current rank even if you can’t hold on to the goat for very long. The game also has a very polished look and a colourful cartoony art style.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had played another game, Knightmare Tower, by the same developers before. Small world.

STARWHAL: Just the Tip – Breakfall


A very neon and somewhat surreal multiplayer game where players take control of technicoloured narwhals and must stab the other players’ hearts with the tips of their tusks to defeat them. The last narwhal standing wins. When a narwhal’s tusk tip gets close to an opponent’s heart, the game goes into slow-motion, allowing the players to fine-tune their strikes/dodges, and allows both players and the audience to clearly see what lead to the successful strike or dodge.

The narwhals seem to be programmed to be difficult to control. Even though I had played this game before online and knew the controls, more often than not, my narwhal ungracefully flopped and flailed around the low-gravity arena as I tried to skewer my opponents. However, this is what makes the game interesting; it adds unpredictability, excitement and silliness to the gameplay, which led me to play it over and over again.

I’ve played this game before at the Bit Bazaar at Bento Miso back in May. I’ve even posted about itLovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a two-player co-op game were both players operate a Death Star-esque spaceship to defeat enemies and rescue planets from invasions. The catch is the two players don’t control the ship directly, rather they control the two-member crew inside the ship. The control consoles for each of the ship’s systems (turrets, shield, thruster and laser) are spread throughout the ship, so the players must navigate through the ship’s corridors and ladders to switch between them. Some new things I experienced are powerups that boost the abilities of the ship’s systems and a boss battle. One last thing I want to mention is that this game has infected me with the “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” earworm.


Crypt of the Necrodancer Brace Yourself Games


A fusion of the music and the roguelike genres, Crypt of the Necrodancer is, well, a roguelike that is controlled by a dance pad and has the timing of its turns synced to the beat of the background music. I didn’t play it myself, as my experience with dance pads and roguelikes are rather limited; I only saw oither people play it. In any case, the game has a very polished pixelated art style and detailed animations. One of my team members kept commenting on how the enemies all danced as they moved around the dungeon. The music sounded pretty good, even though it was a bit hard to listen to carefully as a spectator.


Huskerball KPD Games


I would describe Huskerball as a cross between soccer and Mighty Milky Way. Up to four players each control a spaceship in a large arena. The spaceships adhere to and move along the curved walls and obstacles in the arena. The ships are also launch themselves away perpendicular from the surfaces of these objects. Each player also has a goal area, and in the middle of the arena there is a ball. Using Newton’s Third Law of Motion, players must push the ball into their own goals to score points. First to five points wins. Maybe it’s because I’ve played Mighty Milky Way, but I got used to the controls very quickly, though the four-player match I played and won was mostly due to dumb luck. 😛 

A parody of Cold War-era spy movies and old comedy movies, Jazzpunk is an open-world adventure game set in an alternate, postmodern, tongue-in-cheek Cold War world. I didn’t play the game for long, but from what I gathered I was send on a mission to infiltrate some building. However, I spent most of my time interacting with the environment and NPCs, reading the game’s humourous script. It seems that there are puzzles you need to solve to progress through the mission (I only solved one) and a few sidequests you can do as well. I would definitely want to continue playing the game once it comes out. Shut up and take my money!

A Fishing Game with Actual WaterFrancis “narF” Sheridan Paré

Another self-descriptive game for one or two players. At the bottom of the screen, each player will see three bowls in their colour; from the top of the screen, various fish fall downwards towards the bowls. The players must “activate” a bowl when a fish is on top of it in order to catch it and score points. Seems like a simple game, so what’s the catch? The answer: controllers that are made up of of three physical bowls of water. To activate a bowl, you must physical put your hand into the water, as if you were trying to catch the fish while it was inside of it. The goal of the game is to get as many points as you can.

The pace of the game is slow at first, but get much faster near the end, to the point where water get splashed everywhere. That’s probably why the developer covered the monitor with clear plastic and the developer himself wore a raincoat.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.