High five! I mean, ten!

Last week, I updated Gonna Catcha to v.0.7.4. It was pretty much a knee-jerk response to some issues I encountered when playtesting it last night at Bento Miso. It added an option to toggle a fullscreen mode, to hide your desktop and other windows behind black while you're playing, and a few bugs fixes. Unfortunately, being a knee-jerk response, I didn't test it properly and there are a couple of bugs with the fullscreen mode, though the bugs don't interfere with normal game operation.

In addition to fixing these bugs, the next version, v.0.8.0, will replace the single high score of the current version with a high score table (or two). Here is a screenshot of what it looks like so far:

In addition to keeping track of the top ten scores, it will keep track of the other standard high score information: player initials and the highest round reached. I am considering a second, separate high score table for co-op mode, which will also keep track of which character the player used.

Well, that's all I can do to make this sound bigger and more important than it really is. I'll be doing another meatspace test this Friday. I should really try to finish this before then.


In other news, when I woke up today, I was greeted by this on /r/gamemaker:

As someone work mainly works with vectors for higher-resolution artwork (i.e. not low-res retro sprites), I am pleased by this turn of events.

My time at the ROM and Gamercamp 2013 - Part 2 [Updated 11/19/2013]

UPDATE 11/19/2013 - For some bizarre reason, I linked "Samegame" in the description of Pyramid Party to the Wikipedia article "Banshee" instead of "Samegame". That has been fixed. Also, I totally left out one Gamercamp Official selection: A Fishing Game with Actual Water. You can now read about it at the bottom of this post.

---

Last time, I talked about my experiences playtesting Rise & Fall at both the Royal Ontario Museum and Gamercamp. In this post, I'll talk about some of the other games that were featured at the two events. Sorry for the lack of pictures; all the ones I took didn't do these games justice.

First off, I'll describe some of the other ROM Game Jam games. Unfortunately, I forgot to make note of the teams' names that made the following games.

Pyramid Party

Sort of like a cross between Wario's Woods and Samegame. (Note: you'll be seeing me use these fusion-of-two-games comparisons a lot in this post.) One or two players each take control of a pharaoh who run and jump around a SameGame-like playfield to give commands to their workers to run, jump and move blocks around. When four or more blocks of the same color are joined together in any way, they become fixed brown blocks that fall and acculmulate at the bottom of the playfield, while the blocks below them bubble their way to the top of the stack(s). The goal of the game is for the player(s) must build as much of a specific structure (shown before the start of each level) on the playfield out of brown blocks before time runs out. Each level has it's own specific structure and quota that must be met.

This game is quite addicting and also difficult if you don't have some sort of strategy planned out.

Relic Ravage

A multiplayer competitive platformer for up to four players that's divided into two stages. In the first stage, players play as warriors who must fight and defeat each other to score points. When a player is killed, they drop an artifact where they died. After a time limit, the first stage ends and the game builds a pyramid on top of all the dropped artifacts. In the second round, the players play as archaeologists/treasure hunters who must dig into the pyramid to collect artifacts and other treasures and bring them back to a pack mule for points, the artifacts dropped in the first round being worth the most. After a second time limit, whoever has the most points is the winner.

What really made this game special is the enthusiasm of the dev team behind this game when there were playing it with the patrons of Gamercamp.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Afterlife

A trivia game that's pretty much exactly what it say on the tin. You play a recently-deceased character who has to navigate the underworld while answering trivia questions from Anubis and Set, the latter being fond of trick questions. When you answer a question correctly, the weight of your character's heart decreases, and conversely, an incorrect answer make your heart heavier. At the end of the game, you meet Osiris and he weighs your heart against a feather (as per the myth). You win the game if your heart is lighter than the feather, otherwise, you get a bad ending.



Next up, here are some of the games from the Gamercamp official selection that really caught my attention. I have also provided links to the games' and developers' websites.

More public spectacles

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:

• At Games with Friends #45 on November 18.
• At the Bit Bazaar Winter Market Arcade on December 6.

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.

My time at the ROM and Gamercamp 2013 - Part 1

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).

Greetings from Gamercamp!

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.