ROM Game Jam

Congratulations! Your game has evolved into Alpha!

mstop_4 GameMaker: Studio, gameplay, Ghost Month, Gonna Catcha, ROM Game Jam 0 Comment
Up until today, Gonna Catcha was nothing more than a collection of protoypes, loosely connected together and couldn’t work together as a whole game without changes to the hard code. 
Well that ends today. 
I’ve taken care of all the little things and filled up the holes to make Gonna Catcha a playable alpha (yes, I know I’ve called the previous versions of the game “alpha builds”; in hindsight I think that was jumping the gun a bit). It still has some game-breaking bugs, but at least the game progression is there now:

And just in time for Ghost Month, the 7th month of the lunar calendar, which starts tomorrow I believe. According to the various superstitions surrounding Ghost Month, I shouldn’t be working on Gonna Catcha at all for the next 30 or so days, unless I want to be pestered by evil spirits.  Well, if anything goes wrong in the coming month, such as me losing all my work or my computer catching on fire, then I’ll have a convenient scapegoat:

lolololol
On the 15th day of Ghost Month is the Ghost Festival. During the festival, the Heibai Wuchang 黑白無常, the Black and White Guards of Impermanance, supposedly appear and give people free money.  Depending on your cultural background, you may know them by different names:

  • Fan Wujiu and Xie Bi’an, 范無救  謝必安
  • Qiye and Baye, 七爺 八爺
  • Da Boye and Er Boye, 大伯爺  二伯爺
  • Pohena Das and Donum Dono 魄伊娜・達斯  當納睦・當儺
OK, I made that last one up. 😛
There’s more to Ghost Month and the Ghost Festival than that, but I’ll save it for another day. Also, the ROM Game Jam is next weekend; I need to brush up on my HTML5 GameMaker skills.

P.S.  I updated Gonna Catcha’s info page with a new screenshot and the video above.

Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.

You have encountered Abstract Art.

mstop_4 administration, GameMaker: Studio, gameplay, graphics, ROM Game Jam, shaders, That Which Binds Us, whoopsie doodles 0 Comment
Has it been two weeks already?  Tracking the Steam Summer Sale and playing around with shaders in GameMaker: Studio can really make you lose track of time.
Sometimes I tweet stuff on Twitter if the aforementioned stuff isn’t substantial enough to be turned in a full blog post.  If you haven’t done so already, you can keep track of those tweets on the sidebar on the right side of this blog or follow me on Twitter.
If you have been following on Twitter, then you’ll probably already know that I signed-up for and got into the ROM Game Jam, the first ever game jam to be hosted by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto on August 9-11.  I am part of the same team that was making That Which Binds Us.  I say “was” because we’re focusing our efforts on the ROM Game Jam now, so That Which Binds Us has been put on hiatus for now.
Another tweet I made was about shaders.  Wait, I already mentioned that above. Anyway, I downloaded some shader scripts from this forum post on the Game Maker Community forums and, just for fun and curiosity, applied them to Gonna Catcha‘s drawing code. Although it wasn’t its main purpose, but the graphics code modifications I had previously done also allows me to apply a shader to the entire screen, but I wanted to do that anyway.  Two birds with one stone I guess.  

Here are the results of my shader experiment:

Once you’ve regained your composure from watching the trippy and completely unnecessary graphical effects, you may notice something new in the video.  The game randomly places rocks in the maze that act as destructible walls. (Rocks?! I thought they were just blobs!) This is to slow the player down and allow the spirits to better disperse throughout the maze.  However, the rock impede the spirits as well, making the whole thing kind of pointless.  Of course, they’re spirits; so my plan B would just have them, you know, pass through the rocks unimpeded. Preta can stay impeded by rocks, being corporal beings like the players.

One other big change I made to the game that might not be obvious in the video is the player movement code/rules.  Previously, the players had free movement; now their movement is restricted to the grid much like the spirits and preta are.  I did this to make turning around corners easier for the players. My previous solution had the players snap to a corridor if they were “close enough” to turn into one; it looked a bit weird and was a bit finicky.

Re-writing and messing around with the movement code did produce some amusing bugs in the process, something that hasn’t happened in a while.

(Wow, this post was longer than I thought. And I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to write about! Harumph!)
Copyright © Quadolor Games. All rights reserved.