Gonna Catcha - Gameplay Test & Explanation

OK, class.  We have a special treat today.  I won't be standing up here lecturing you for 6 minutes about the basic game rules of Gonna Catcha.  Instead, we'll be watching a video. Can someone get the lights?

*goes to sit at desk, opens a magazine*

Remember, there will be a quiz on the video next Wednesday!

A Race to Bottom... of Sound Chip Specs [Updated]

Update 3/18/2013 (6:21 PM):

EVERYTHING IS SUPER

HAVE A NICE DAY!

Well, it didn't take long for things to go back to normal.  Maybe I should've held off posting this just for a little while longer.  Oh well.

As a bonus, here's the coloured image of Pohena I meant to show earlier:

"I'm not a prize, you idiot."

W-well, I didn't mean it like that.   Uh... awk-ward.

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TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

PLEASE STAND BY

Well, it seems that in my attempt to reorganize the files on my "website", I did something that caused all the images on this blog to break (Dammit, I'm a computer scientist, not a web administrator!).  I'm in the process of getting that fixed.

In the meantime, let talk about something that doesn't involve anything hosted on my site.

In my introductory post of Gonna Catcha, I posted this music sample from the project:

It was my attempt at emulating the style of music from 80s arcade games, without actually knowing how it was actually done.  Being someone who spent 3 years working on a master's thesis on computer-generated sound,  this just simply wouldn't do.  Nope, nope, nope.avi.

As with the graphics, I turned to Pac-Man  for inspiration:

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

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...

New address for blog

Using powerful internet magic, I have created an new address for this blog:

blog.quadolorgames.com

The old one (quadolordevblog.blogspot.ca) still works, but doesn't the new one look a lot nicer?

Fighting file corruption and tightening up graphics

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.

Gonna Catcha: In-Game Testing

Status report:

Here's some in-game test footage of Gonna Catcha, featuring Donum Dono as the test subject: