Update on TOJam

Well, looks like I didn't get into TOJam this year due to a lack of space and resources.  Maybe next year will be better.

Even though, my team may still go ahead with the project we already planned out.

Time really flies you're eagerly awaiting something.

I haven't been working on Gonna Catcha as much this past week, mostly because I was distracted by the Toronto Game Jam that is happening next weekend: coming up with ideas and eagerly awaiting the confirmation email.  Today, I received note that my team was still on the waiting list of participants (they received ~100 more registrations than spots available).  Here's hoping that additional spots will become available in the coming week.

I've been working on some ideas for the theme music for the TOJam project, this is what I have so far:

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

The last thing I was working on for Gonna Catcha was the pathfinding for the Vengeful (left) and Bashful (right) spirits.

As described in this post, Vengeful spirits move toward the position of the player while Bashful spirits move away from the player.  For the former, GameMaker has built-in functions for grid-based pathfinding.  "This will make my job a whole lot easier", or so I thought. *DUN DUN DUUUUN*

It turned out that the grid-based pathfinding system makes some assumptions on how you've setup you sprites, objects and levels (the wording in the documentation does hint to this).  To get the best results, you'll need to design your game to accommodate the pathfinding system.  Unfortunately, Gonna Catcha is not one of those games.  It bows down to no one.

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

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.

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

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.

Is Gonna Catcha the reincarnation of an actual arcade game? More news at 11.

I was just googling for some images of tranquilizer guns, so that I can design Pohena's more fantastic version of the same arm, when I came across footage of an arcade game called Tranquilizer Gun, made by Sega in 1980.  I don't know about you, but I the gameplay looked a bit familiar:

New Gonna Catcha info page

I created a a new and improved game description page here, to replace the old, outdated blog post describing the game.  You can also reach it by clicking on "Project Gonna Catcha" on the bar above this post.

This way, it's easier for me to keep it up to date and for readers to find it.  :)

Let's look at level design (sorta) and the 鬼. Er, I mean GUI.

This post will be a bit brief, as the things I've done with Gonna Catcha are rather simple and better expressed in a series of images.

The first thing was to the grid resolution for the game's levels.  The old 16 x 16 cell size made the test levels feel small and their designs limiting:

Not that I actually tried designing them.  I mean, putting
Internet speak into a level's design is SOOOOO gauche.

So I reduced the cell size to 8 x 8, allowing me to cram more details, hallways, twists and turns into a single level: