Wednesday, July 31, 2013

140 character limit exceeded

This post was too big for Twitter, so I'm posting it here.

The first step towards creating a CRT display shader is complete.  Gonna Catcha can (optionally) draw the game window with barrel distortion:

Babby's first shader

I know there are already CRT display shaders out there on the internet, but I do want to learn how to do it myself.

In other news, it hasn't been a week yet and already amusing bugs have been making a comeback.


The video also revealed the new time bonus tally at the end of each round.

Monday, July 29, 2013

You have encountered Abstract Art.

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!)

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Well isn't this a motley crew of small updates.

In the past two weeks I've been mainly doing a little work here, some more over there and a tiny bit all the way over there.  The updates are a bit difficult to stitch together into a coherent theme for a post, so I'm just going to list and itemize everything.

Item #1

Implemented the Hungry Ghost enemy into Gonna Catcha:




It's current behaviour has it wander aimlessly in the maze like the Wandering and Straying Spirits.  However, if there is an item in the maze, it will move towards, consume it and then resume wandering and feeling remorse.  Also, you might kick yourself for not grabbing the item first. The Hungry Ghosts are harmful to touch at all times; they can be stunned or knocked out for a short period of time, but they cannot be captured, so they remain a permanent fixture in some rounds.

Item #2

Modified some of the rules for Pohena rounds:  if Pohena comes into contact with a good spirit, her movement speed will be reduced until she is no longer touching one.  They will slow her down enough for evil spirits or preta to catch up with and kill her.  Hopefully (or disappointingly for Pohena) this will make good spirits more of an obstacle as evil spirits are for Donum.

Item #3

New music for Gonna Catcha: Bonus Round!


Item #4

Rewrote some of the graphical and garbage-collecting backend code. The new graphics code fixes some minor graphical glitches that occur when upscaling the game window.

Item #5

Updated various parts of the blog:
  • The rules section on the Gonna Catcha info page has been updated with the info in Item #2.
  • The descriptions of the non-player characters from this post are now on their own page, with the addition of the two new spirit types and slightly updated artwork for the spirits.
  • Rearranged some stuff on the sidebar on the right.


THE END