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.

Gonna Catcha Beta Demo Released!

The wait is over.  I've released the Gonna Catcha Beta demo.  Download it from here.

In other news, I'll have the write-up for my experiences with Rise & Fall at the Ancient Arcade up soon.

You're going to make a public spectacle of yourself.

After some thought and playtesting of the co-op mode, I decided to move the beta release of Gonna Catcha ahead of schedule.  I feel the game is stable and complete enough to be playtested by a wider audience. The things I planned to do before I wanted to release the beta has now been moved to the "Beta → Release Candidate" list. What does that mean? Nothing really. Development will continue as it was before, it's just that there won't be a high score table or attract mode in the beta right away. Technicalities, blah blah blah. However, before I do release the beta, I do need to do a little bit of tidying and housekeeping to get the game ready (i.e. write documentation and make the interface a bit more user-friendly). Stay tuned to this blog for more information and a special TV offer! (Wait, no.)

Not to leave you empty-handed, here's a screenshot of the title screen:

Wait, do you even know how to write that on paper?

Gasp! It has a proper title in it now! After many changes and revisions, I've settled on "導魂使隊" as the Chinese-character title for Gonna Catcha. "導魂使隊" translates to, or at least what I want it to translate to, "team of spirit-guiding emissaries" or "team of psychopomp emissaries".

In related and coincidental news, Rise & Fall will also be making its public debut at the "ROM Game Jam: Ancient Arcade" event at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on October 19, as part of International Archaeology Day. My team and I will be there from 1PM-3PM. So if you happen to be going to the ROM that day, feel free to drop by. This will be the first of a handful of planned appearances by Rise & Fall at a public event. Stay tuned to the blog for more information and we'll double your order absolutely free! Just pay shipping and handling. (Nah.)

Two-player action!

This week, I switched gears and went back to mainly working on Gonna Catcha, in particular the co-op mode. Things have been more difficult than I imagined. You'd think that with a game that screams "CO-OP GAMEPLAY!!! (Oh, and you can play solo too.)" I would have designed and coded the co-op part first or at least made the single-player mode in a way that would be easily expanded to co-op gameplay.
Well apparently I didn't.
For the sake of simplicity, I designed and coded many of the features in the game around the single-player mode. It turned out that the code was so intimate with the single-player mode that it made coding the co-op mode difficult. To give you an idea of what I had to do, I pretty much had to tear out the code for various features from the game, smack the co-op version of that code onto them, then shove them back into the game. The results seem to be working so far, aside from a few hiccups:

But now the code design isn't as pretty. Oh well, so much for my idealism.  It probably won't matter in the end; I don't think Gonna Catcha is resource-intensive enough for a few pieces of unoptimized code to have any impact on the performance of the game. When the co-op mode is working properly (for the most part), I'll upload a video it, but for now, I give you the above. 
In other news, there was some footage of a "whoopsie doodles" in the development of Rise & Fall that I forgot to upload last week. I think this is a rather common graphical glitch, but I find it amusing nonetheless: