More public spectacles

mstop_4 administration, Bento Miso, Bit Bazaar, Gonna Catcha 0 Comment

Gonna Catcha has been updated to v.0.7.3. This update added a new maze to the game, allowing me to bump up the round cap to 12. This also had the side effect of unlocking an enemy type that wasn’t in the previous versions (because it didn’t appear until Round 9). NPCs now also gradually speed up after each bonus round after you’ve played through each maze once. Oh, and there are some miscellaneous tweaks and fixed here and there, yadda yadda yadda.

I will be showing off Gonna Catcha in meatspace at Bento Miso on two occasions:

Since I enjoyed looking at and playing all the games that were showcased at the last Bit Bazaar in May, I thought why not participate this time? The Bit Bazaar offered two options: submitting a game as part of the Arcade or getting a table, which requires you to sell something physical as well (e.g., merchandise, Steam keys or preorders printed on something). Since this is my first time showcasing at the Bit Bazaar and I have no ideas for what to sell, I decided to play it safe and go for the Arcade submission. Perhaps I’ll get a table next time. I’ll get you next time , Gadget… next time.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

My time at the ROM and Gamercamp 2013 – Part 1

mstop_4 Gamercamp, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam 0 Comment

In these past few weeks my team and I have been showing off our ROM Game Jam game, Rise & Fall, to public audiences at the Royal Ontario Museum and Gamercamp 2013. I wanted to write about my full experience at both of these sessions in this post, but it got really long. Therefore, I decided to break it up into multiple parts to be posted over the next week or so. In this first part, I’ll talk about my experiences with the playtesting of Rise & Fall. 

If you been to this blog before, then you know the deal with Rise & Fall. If not, click here and read. I’ll wait for you to finish.

Done? OK. The game was first playtested as part of the Ancient Arcade at the ROM for International Archaeology Day (October 19). Our game was displayed on a large monitor and played with two controllers.



As you can see from the picture directly above, I only had one Xbox 360 controller, so I had to use an old Logitech controller as the second one. Unfortunately, it was so old that the game didn’t detect it automatically; I had to use Joy2Key to make it work. Another unfortunate thing was I didn’t bring my male-to-male 3.5mm audio cable to connect my laptop’s headphone jack to the display’s PC Audio In jack (to be fair, I didn’t even know the display had one of those), so I had to turn my laptop towards the players (from behind the display) and crank up the volume to maximum. Even then, the tiny speakers on the laptop couldn’t overpower the ambient noise of the crowds at the museum. The only fortunate thing that happened that day was the discovery of a VGA input port on the display. My laptop, being 5 years old, doesn’t have HDMI output (which would have also fixed the audio problem), only VGA.

The game generally received positive feedback from those who played it (especially from the kids) and some even suggested improvements that could be made. There was one kid in his group of friends that managed to quickly figure out the optimal strategy (read: exploit) of the game and remained undefeated. Later during the day, another gentleman found the same strategy exploit and won a lot of games. One player noted that the game favoured the player who was further ahead, since that player’s artifacts would provide ample cover and making it very difficult for the other player to hit them.


Taking those into consideration, we moved and changed the properties of some of the artifacts to balance the game before we showed the game at Gamercamp. We also added a fifth artifact on each side that don’t serve as platforms or cover, but as an indicator that one side has won. This changed the objective from:

“Defeat your opponent to restore all your artifacts then defeat your opponent once more.”

To:

“Defeat your opponent to restore all your artifacts.”

which to me is much less confusing (and less explaining on my part).



The setup for “debut” of Rise & Fall at the Gamercamp Ancient Arcade (November 2-3) was largely the same as the setup at the ROM, except I bought and brought an additional Xbox 360 controller so both players had the same controller to play with and I brought my audio cable, hoping that they would be using the same type of displays as last time, which they did. Even with the audio coming from the display this time, it was still hard to hear the audio amidst the crowd and other games’ audio. Oh well, at least I tried.


Not everyone who played the game gave feedback, but those who did gave positive feedback. Kids seemed to be the most excited of all the playtesters (that’s not to say they weren’t any adult that weren’t excited). We had to compete for attention with the games that were part of the Gamercamp Official Selections, which were being showcased in the same space opposite of the Ancient Arcade games. They had way more time to be polished, so it was a bit intimidating, but overall I think we did pretty well out there.

I would like to thank my team members Shmuggly and Goombaguy for helping me helping people learn to play our game at both the ROM and Gamercamp. The next public showing of Rise & Fall is tentatively scheduled for December 6th at the ROM again. We hope to be there again to show off our game some more.

In my next post, I will be writing about the other games at Gamercamp in the following days. Stay tuned to this blog.

(Terrible photography provided by Quadolor Games. With over 2 weeks of experience, DON’T rely on Quadolor Games for your photographic needs.)

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Greetings from Gamercamp!

mstop_4 GameMaker: Studio, Gonna Catcha, interface, Rise & Fall 0 Comment

It seems like a long time since I last wrote a post. Since I’ve released the beta demo of Gonna Catcha, I have been less compelled to write about it since it’s much easier to learn about the game by playing it than sitting here reading about it. Also, I was going to post about the International Archaeology Day playtest session with Rise & Fall, but the post ended up being not very interesting on it own, so I’m going to combine it with the Gamercamp playtest session post I’ll write about after Gamercamp, which is happening right now. Yay.

In the meantime, I suppose I can talk a bit about what was added to Gonna Catcha since it’s release. Aside from several major bug fixes that somehow slipped through my keen eye, the biggest update to the game is the inclusion of several new options in the game’s Service Mode (fancy arcade talk for “Options Menu”).

Well, there’s your problem.

I feel like I’m being very thorough with the amount of customization you can do with the game, and I haven’t even put in the sound test or let the player customize gameplay settings yet.

During the development of the co-op mode, I had difficulty deciding how to bind the controls to what keys on the keyboard without the two player bumping their hands into each other. Also, what might be the ideal key bindings for co-op might not be for single-player mode and everyone has their own preferences on what the best key bindings are. In the end, I decided to let the player(s) figure out what controls work best for them and put in a key configuration menu.

UNLIMITED POWER!

This is the first time I’ve made a key binding system for a game and it turned out to be less trouble and error-prone than I imagined. GameMaker: Studio has built-in functions for rebinding keys, but I ended up creating my own solution.

With great power comes great responsibility.

I have received some feedback from people who played the demo. Aside from pointing out the bugs, most have praised the retro arcade art style and audio of the game, saying that it’s quite accurate and devoted. One thing that came up was some people had trouble getting the game started because they couldn’t find the “Insert Coin” key. So to help new players, I added “key reminders” on the title screen to help them get started.

I don’t understand your crazy
moon controls!
I also made the list of default key bindings clearer in the manual (if people actually read that thing). for those acquainted with the controls, there is an option in Service Mode that allows you to turn the reminders off for a more authentic arcade experience.

Oh man. *tap* *tap* Which button is it?
*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
What would make it even more authentic is an entire arcade cabinet, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

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

mstop_4 demo, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam 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.)

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Two-player action!

mstop_4 gameplay, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam, testing, whoopsie doodles 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:

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Where Is That Thing You Were Working On Several Weeks Ago Now?

mstop_4 GameMaker: Studio, gameplay, Gonna Catcha, Rise & Fall, ROM Game Jam, testing, whoopsie doodles 0 Comment

Okay, I’ve held off publishing this post for two days now, time to stop writing and actually do it.

(But there just this tiny little thing I want to ad-)

Nope. We’ve live. Wait, who are “we”? I’m talking to myself again. Anyway…

On this episode of Where Is That Thing You Were Working On Several Weeks Ago Now?, or W.I.T.T.Y.W.W.O.S.W.A.N.? (“Witty Woss Wan”?), we have a gander at Rise & Fall. You know, the thing I worked on as part of the team Robots Mashing Keyboards for the ROM Game Jam. (Oooh, that thing.)


Quite a few things have been added or changed since the ROM Game Jam prototype. The biggest change is the inclusion of jump-through platforms (i.e. platforms that can be passed from below but not above). The original prototype only had completely solid platforms, but to have a greater number and density of platforms in the level, my team decided that we need to have jump-through platforms as well. Seeing how something like this should be Game Programming 101, I should have learned how to do a long time ago, but never did until now. Still, I had to learn it from the source code of this demo by Bill23. Even then, it took me two attempts to get it working right. Other changes are relatively minor, such as adding mercy invincibility, or bug fixes. We will also be changing up some the graphics and adding more levels before the playtest session at the ROM on October 19.

During the development of Rise & Fall, I had encountered the weirdest glitch I’ve ever seen in all my time using GameMaker, even weirder than the ones I’ve seen while working on Gonna Catcha. Furthermore, I don’t think it was (entirely) my fault:


It looked as though GameMaker didn’t rebuild the asset cache after I deleted some objects from the project, so the game ended up drawing the wrong sprites and even creating the wrong objects (i.e. the projectiles seemed to have been replaced with experimental wall section object I had been working on). Clearing the asset cache and rebuilding the game once more fixed everything.

Speaking of Gonna Catcha, nothing visually interesting has happened with it since the last update, so no video or screenshots for you. However, I did completely overhaul how the game handles round progression, now incorporating the NPC speed multiplier I talked about last time. Alright, that another task down for Gonna Catcha, what left? I really should make a list of these things.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

They’ve gone to plaid!

mstop_4 GameMaker: Studio, gameplay, testing 0 Comment

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival and also various other full moon-related holidays in other parts of the world.  I thought it would be appropriate to post something about Gonna Catcha today because:

Mid-Autumn Festival –> harvest festival –> harvesting of souls –> psychopomps –> Pohena and Donum
Full moon –> werewolves –> wolves –> Pohena and Donum
Q.E.D.

Actually, I lied; this has nothing to do with any holiday, it’s just a coincidence. Anyways…

A week ago I posted a video of gameplay from the playable alpha of Gonna Catcha, and since then I’ve gotten some useful feedback and suggestions. One of them was the to increase the speed of the spirits and pretas as the game progresses. I thought this was a good idea, so I did just that: put in some code that allows the game to scale the enemy movement speeds:


16x speed is the maximum the game can handle; any higher will cause the spirits and pretas to break free from their imprisonment of the maze and shoot off into oblivion. However, anything higher than 2x just becomes too difficult and frustrating to play (even 2x was pushing it for me).
With this, I now have two ways of increasing the difficulty of the game:

  1. Increasing the speed of NPCs, and 
  2. Increasing the number of NPCs required to be captured and avoided in a round.

With the former, I think I won’t have to rely on the latter as much to scale the difficulty as the game progresses, I can ramp up the latter much quicker and make the early rounds less boring.


P.S.  On a serious note, today is also a sad day with the passing away of former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24160150
As someone who started gaming on the Famicom and Game Boy and now the owner of a Wii U and 3DS, this news hit me hard. May he rest in peace.

Great, now I feel awkward for publishing this post today.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

Alpha demo gameplay video thingy

mstop_4 demo, gameplay, Gonna Catcha, whoopsie doodles 0 Comment

The part of my brain that comes up with clever titles is out of office today.

After some thought, I’ve decided to make the Gonna Catcha playable demo a closed alpha for testing purposes, as I think it’s still too early for me to throw the game up on the internet for open testing.  As a consolation prize, here is a video of the playable demo in action:

So what else do I need to do to move this game from alpha to beta?  Well let’s see…

  • More rounds. Which maze the round takes place in and the number of spirits, rocks, preta and bonus items (in bonus rounds only) in it are manual determined by me for each round, rather than determined by some algorithm. Even though the game will have 256 rounds, I’m only going to create round data up until a certain point, then either start repeating the last few rounds or randomly generate round data to fill in the rest.
  • Co-op mode.  It might have modified round data compared to single-player mode to balance the game.
  • Attract mode. How else will you know how to play the game?
  • High score table
  • Controller support
  • Bug fixes and code optimization.  Even when I thought I’ve squashed most of the major bugs in the game, a new challenger appears:

And here are the features that would be nice to have, but not entirely necessary:
  • CRT shader. The game is setup up to use it, but it’s no longer a required feature to me anymore.
  • Demonstration cutscenes. Whether or not I need these will depend on how much info I can cram into the attract mode.
  • Bezel art. Artwork to put on my virtual arcade cabinet.
Well, looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me. …Wait, haven’t I already said that before?
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

New and improved blog design!*

mstop_4 administration 0 Comment

I took a small break from game development to redesign this blog. It might not win any awards, but at least it’s better than the largely default theme I was using for this blog until now.

Also, I have a new mascot/logo for Quadolor Games. If you haven’t noticed it, it’s the rabbit thing in the top left. I’ve nicknamed it “Quadbunny”. I actually like how it turned out, as graphic design isn’t one of my strong points; I just know enough Adobe Illustrator to get by. I’m also surprised that I didn’t just stick with the very first design that came to mind like I usually fear I would do (Quadbunny went through at least eight revisions before reaching this final design).

Quadbunny’s red-yellow-green-blue colour scheme is a throwback to an older unused logo when Quadolor Games was still Quadricolour Games. And the reason Quadbunny is a bunny is because, well, I like bunnies, especially ones with Dutch markings:

My second choice would have been a Hotot rabbit, a.k.a. eyeliner bunny:

* Actual impressions may vary. See newspaper for details. Limit one per customer. No refunds.
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.