graphics – Page 2 – Quadolor Games

He jests at time that never felt good use. But, software! What game doth yonder team projects?

mstop_4 Gonna Catcha, graphics, That Which Binds Us, TOJam May 9, 2013 0 Comment

It’s been another slow week or so.

Yes, I know things are moving a bit slow for Gonna Catcha, but fret not as I did make some improvements to the spirit sprites. (Hmm, I’m getting déjà vu here.) I added some animation to them to make them more lively. *BA-DUM TSSH*

(hold for groans and boos)

No one suspects the spirits with the shifty eyes!

If I get the scoring system done and add a a title screen, I can release a demo version of the game. And that would be just super. 🙂

In other news, it turned out I did make it into the Toronto Game Jam 2013, about 15 hours before the event started. Some people had cancelled their confirmations, so there were spots open for my team. Unfortunately, my team members had already made other plans for the weekend since when the initial rejection email was sent out, so we had to decline as well. Hopefully things will turn out better next year.

Despite all that, we’re still have our game idea; might as well not let it go to waste. We decided to go ahead and make the game anyway in the near future. I’ll write about our experiences here. Also, it shouldn’t take too much time away from Gonna Catcha, so I’ll still be working on that concurrently.

We have some Items on the agenda that we must discuss. [Updated: 9/3/2013]

mstop_4 gameplay, Gonna Catcha, graphics April 21, 2013 0 Comment

UPDATE 9/3/2013 – The content of this post has been promoted to a full-fledged page here.

As promised in the previous post, I will be talking about the items and power-ups that will be in Gonna Catcha.

Double Shot

Allows the player to have two shots on-screen at a time.

Long Shot

Extends the range of the player’s shots.

Shield

Gives the player an additional hit point.

Ruckus

Causes all spirits and ghosts to stop temporarily.

Bonus Items

Grants the player extra points.

That’s it, you’re going on my Enemies List! [Updated 7/13/2013]

mstop_4 gameplay, Gonna Catcha, graphics April 14, 2013 0 Comment

UPDATE 7/13/2013 – The content of this post has been promoted to a full-fledged page here.

Original post:

It’s Pohena’s birthday today! To celebrate, I’ve made a list of the enemies and whatnot that will be in Gonna Catcha along with some descriptions.

I have settled on six different NPC types for the game, which I decided to sketch up in GraphicsGale (vectors coming soon). There is a small chance that I will add a few more in the future, but for now, six spirits seems sufficient.

Six spirits seems sufficient.

Six spirits seems sufficient.
Six spirits seems sufficient.

That’s makes a good tongue twister.

Left: Spirit. Right: Sprite.

Know the difference. It could save your life.

List of NPCs

Good Spirits

Wandering Spirit

Your standard happy-go-lucky spirit. They’re so content that they seem to forget that they need to be somewhere. They move around the level aimlessly; Donum should have little trouble collecting them. They do no harm to Pohena, but she must take care to not accidentally shoot them.

Bashful Spirit

These spirits are still a little shaken at the news of their deaths and actively try to avoid the player. As such, these spirits pose little annoyance to Pohena, but Donum needs chase them down in order to catch them.

Evil Spirits

Straying Spirit

Your standard troublemaking spirit. Like their good counterparts, they move around aimlessly. However, they are harmful to touch. They’re spirits Donum won’t want to bump into in a dark alley. Pohena must shoot them first before collecting them.

Vengeful Spirit

These angry spirits will do anything to avoid capture, even if it means chasing down and attacking the player. Made up of a significant amount of fighting spirit, they take multiple shots to stun or subdue. These spirits will keep Donum constantly on his toes and Pohena must remain vigilant so she doesn’t get overwhelmed.

Preta

(a.k.a. “hungry ghosts“)

This is a new enemy class. They are harmful to touch and take multiple shots to stun, but they do not need to and cannot be captured as they are beings and not spirits. They mainly serve as a nuisance to the player.

Hungry Ghost

In a futile battle against hunger and thirst, these ghosts will eat anything they find, whether it be food or items. Donum and Pohena need to be quick on their feet if they want those items.

(Note: I’ll be describing the items in a future post.)

Vagrant Ghost

These ghosts hate the outdoors. Everywhere seems to be either too hot or too cold, never just right. Hence, they try to seek shelter anywhere they can, even if it’s already occupied. Good spirits don’t like sharing space with these guys, so they’ll flee if one of them makes it into the shelter. Similarly, if one of them opens the door to the jail, the evil spirits inside will be more than happy to escape. Donum and Pohena must boot the Vagrant Ghost out the shelter or jail before they can put the spirits back in.

I’ve been trying to work for the past week and all I got was this lousy post title.

mstop_4 Gonna Catcha, graphics March 11, 2013 0 Comment

It’s been a slow week.

I’ve been doing other things in the scary, mystical world known as “outside” that has left me feeling a bit exhausted. In addition, coding on the Gonna Catcha has temporarily been halted due to the reports I’ve read on Game Maker: Studio-related forums. The latest update broke a lot of people’s projects, namely their games have stopped running after being compiled, similar to the symptoms my projects had last week. My project only broke once for a different reason, but it was fixed easily. YoYoGames has suggested rolling back on the software to the previous version for now until they roll out another update. Since I don’t want my project to break again like last time, I’m still on the fence regarding whether to try the rollback solution or just wait until this whole thing blows over.

Well in the meantime, maybe I can dredge up something to show.

Hmm…

Well, here are some concept sprites for the spirits:

Good

🙁 : ) -_- 😀 😮 x_x >_<

Evil (a.k.a., troublesome, vengeful, misunderstood)

>:( :O D:< %P J:| x_x >_<

And here’s a screenshot of the last build of the game:

“A strange cloud is coming from the North. I’m scared!”
(* A cookie for who knows where that’s from)

It might be hard to see from a still image, but the latest build allows the player characters to shoot evil spirits, with different outcomes. I’ll make a proper video in the future.

Fighting file corruption and tightening up graphics

mstop_4 GameMaker: Studio, Gonna Catcha, graphics, helpful resources, Windows March 5, 2013 0 Comment

One of the biggest annoyances I face when coding something is when your program suddenly stops working for no apparent reason. It happened this weekend when I was working on Gonna Catcha.

I was just going abut my usual business when all of a sudden the game would no longer run after compiling. My guess was that the project got corrupted somehow, so I decided to make it anew. GameMaker: Studio‘s ability to easily transfer resources between projects and the fact that the projects themselves are just large collections of image, audio and XML files made this relatively painless.

In the graphical department, I made some major changes. Not being much of an animator, I had a lot of trouble doing the side walk cycles for each character. As of my last post, I had something that looked like walking, but it still looked awkward. After reading this tutorial (which I had previously encountered during my undergraduate studies in game development in the days of yore), I realized that I was missing a “Passing” frame in the walk cycle, and that I made it overly complicated. So after much tweak, this is the end result:

I haven’t even finished Level 3 and I’ve already tightened up those graphics a little bit.

You may also notice two other changes in the above image: 1) I reduced the amount of arm swinging in the gun-away walk cycle. I think I’ll reserve that amount of swag for a special occasion :), and 2) After doing a bit of research on the video capabilities of old arcade games (read: Pac-Man, mainly here and here), I’ve modified all the sprite palettes so that instead of each having 4 colours from a 16-colour palette, i.e, this:

I think I need to fix my graphics drivers.
(Source: Wikipedia)

They each have 4 colours from a 256-colour palette, i.e. this:

Ah, 256-colour. My arch-nemesis in Microsoft Paint back in the 90s. Still dithering?
(Source: Wikipedia)

That should make things a little more, uh, colourful. Yeah…

Before I finish this, I want to share a few interesting articles and whatnot I came across as I was doing research on ancient video game graphics. I’ve already introduced three of them above: a tutorial in animating a walk cycle: idleworm: animation tutorial – walk cycle part 1; and the two articles about the hardware used in Pac-Man machines: Pacman hardware and Aaron’s MAME Memories Part 3.

Some other things I’ve encountered are this handy Color Bit Depth Reducer, which converts 24-bit TrueColor RGB or web hex values into the nearest values in other bit-depths and back again, and this old but free e-book about game graphics: Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics.

Hey, I can’t believe we got jobs doing this.
(Not intended for residents of anywhere. Offer void in Nebraska.)

Gonna Catcha – An arcade-style maze game [Updated 4/3/2013]

mstop_4 Android, GameMaker: Studio, Gonna Catcha, graphics, HTML5, Windows February 25, 2013 0 Comment

UPDATE 4/3/2013: This page is deprecated. Here’s the more up-to-date page:

Project Gonna Catcha

UPDATE 3/17/2013: Woo! Coloured portraits!

The time has finally come; allow me to introduce my new game project.

Game Info

The game is called Gonna Catcha, an arcade-style maze game where the player(s) assume the role of one of two psychopomps in their duty to get spirits to where they belong. What’s a psychopomp? You know, those guys that guide spirits of the dead into the afterlife. You know, these guys.

The names of the two player characters are Pohenas Das (left) and Donum Dono (right). Pohena is in charge of collecting evil spirits while Donum is in charge of collecting the good ones. Each psychopomp will have different game mechanics reflecting their different jobs:

Pohena must subdue evil spirits before collecting them and take care to not get defeated by them or accidentally attack good spirits (who serve as obstacles).
Donum must attract good spirits to come to him and take care not to accidentally attract or get defeated by evil spirits (who serve as hazards).

In 1-player mode, the player will alternate playing as Pohena and Donum between stages (or sets of stages). 2-player alternating will essentially be the same thing, except with two game sessions intertwined. Finally, 2-player co-op will have each player taking the role of one psychopomp and may involve a different set of stages.

Platforms

Right now, I have the following options: Windows, HTML5 and Android. Windows is the easiest, so I’ll target that first. With a few tweaks, I can get it running on my website as an HTML5 game; Android might take a while longer.

Characters

I’ve introduced the main characters briefly above, but I’ve written some more detailed character bios on a page linked below. It will be updated as time goes now and I flesh them out some more.

Gonna Catcha: Character Bios

Sprites

Below are some concept sprite art. I chose to use a 4-colour palette for each character to emulate the look of old arcade games. I also included a 16-colour sprite for each character to demonstrate their actual colour palettes.

Audio

And last, but definitely not least, the theme music. Since I have an arcade-style game with arcade-style sprites. why not go the whole nine yards?

Release Date

TBD.

That’s all I have to say for now. Stay tuned for updates!

ZOMG!