Gonna Catcha 1.1.0 is out now! Short version, here are the changes since v.1.0.0-B:
- Added life-borrowing in co-op mode. If one player has lost all their lives but the other has some in reserve, then the first player can borrow one and resume playing the current round.
- Added “Online Help” in Service Mode. Opens an online copy of the documentation in a web browser.
- When player(s) die due to the timer expiring, their spirits-in-hand are released one at a time instead of all at once. This makes it consistent with the game’s other death scenarios.
- Background music in tutorials now loop.
- Reduced startup time for Preta tutorials.
Looooooooong version…
- Added life-borrowing in co-op mode. If one player has lost all their lives but the other has some in reserve, then the first player can borrow one and resume playing the current round.
In many of my co-op mode playtests, I would often see the following scenario: one player would lose all their lives quickly due to inexperience while the other managed to keep on trucking and finish a round by themselves, allowing the other player to come back. However, the first player would lose their “continue life” very quickly and would have to again wait for the other player to beat the round by themselves before they could come back. And the cycle repeated. This seemed like a very boring and passive experience for the inexperienced player, but at the time I couldn’t think of a way to alleviate it.
It wasn’t until it happened again a few days after v.1.0.0-B was released, during a playthrough with me playing with someone new to the game, that the solution came to me: allow life-borrowing between players. It was so simple and done many times before in other games; I was surprised that I didn’t think of it sooner. Now if one player loses all their lives, they can borrow (read: take) a life from the other, provided that they have extra lives in stock, and continue to play the current round.
But take note, just because you have the opportunity to borrow lives doesn’t mean it’s always tactful to do so. If one player borrows a life and then both players finish the current round alive, the player that borrowed a life won’t get a “continue life” in the next round (or the “single point of shame”), because they are only granted to players in a “game over” state, i.e. is dead and have no lives remaining. So think carefully about the pros and cons before you borrow one of your partner’s lives. Or not.
- Added “Online Help” in Service Mode. Opens an online copy of the documentation in a web browser.
I added this to future-proof the game, if I decide to bring the game to platforms that don’t allow or don’t have easy access to an external manual file on a local drive, e.g. HTML5, Steam Workshop. It also adds redundancy for the platforms that have local help files, which is… good…. in this particular case? I think.
- When player(s) die due to the timer expiring, their spirits-in-hand are released one at a time instead of all at once. This makes it consistent with the game’s other death scenarios.
This was an oversight of a rare occurrence; the timer rarely went down to zero in all my playtests, so I didn’t notice that a death in that case resulted in the (really) old spirit-releasing behaviour.
- Background music in tutorials now loop.
Small bug fix.
- Reduced startup time for Preta tutorials.
I noticed that nearly all first-time players skipped the first preta tutorial (the one after the first bonus round) by mistake. My best guess as to why this was happening is: there were several seconds of inactivity at the beginning of the tutorial, which made it look like the game was frozen or required some kind of player input to start. This lead to players pressing random buttons to try to “fix” the problem but it only lead to them skipping the tutorial completely and have no idea how to deal with the pretas. Hopefully by speeding up the start of the tutorial, I can prevent people from accidentally skipping it.
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