Kilkenny Kitty - "Cat Project" Update

I haven't had much of a chance to work on "Cat Project" this week due a multitude of events and factors in real life that took up my time. Nonetheless, I still have a few updates to share. I was experimenting with speeding up the pace of the game; besides increasing kitty's walking speed, I also changed the kitty's swats so that they come out faster, but each individual one is weaker. This means (at normal strength) kitty will now have to combo enemies into oblivion.

Eww. Dirty toothbrush! *smack* *smack* *smack*

The old, slower and stronger swat is now an ambush/charged attack. Holding down the attack key/button will make kitty raise his paw in waiting, ready to to deliver a strike more powerful than a regular swat at a moment's notice.

Kitty sneak attack

With this change, the Maneki Neko power's beckoning ability is now exclusively performed by the charged swat.

Come to me! ... I said, come to me!

An update on the "Cat Project"

I am participating in the ROM Game Jam this weekend, but before I go and start talking about that all weekend, I just want to update you on the status of the "Cat Project". I'm in a bit of a hurry, so I'll try to make it short.

To recap, I started this project two weeks ago. I don't have a name for it yet, so I'm just going to call it "Cat Project" for now. The game is about, you guess it, cats: their behaviours and quirks (both from my experience with cats in real life and what YouTube has "taught" me), their folklore, and some human misconceptions about them.

The basic premise of the game is you, as a kitty, have to rescue kittens from the tops of towers and swat away amnoying human technology along the way: noisy smartphones, hostile spray bottles, the unobtainable bright red dot, etc. Kitty will also collect "mouseys", the currency of this game, that will be used to "buy" things. There will be various power-ups that transforms his appearance and gives him special kitty powers, such as "Maneki Neko", which allows kitty to beckon mouseys to come to him.

Some changes since last time:

• Redid the foreground and background tiles (they're still in an experimental phase). I also changed up my tiling system so that characters and objects no longer look like they're floating above the ground.

Out with the old...

...and in with the new.

• Added graphics for "Maneki Neko". In Japanese folklore, statues and figures this calico Japanese bobtail in known for beckoning ("maneki") good fortune to their owners. In "Cat Project", every time Maneki Neko kitty makes a swipe with his paw, nearby mouseys will be pulled towards to him.

Feline Pied Piper

• Added a new enemy, the Spray Bottle (shown in the bottom-right corner of the picture above). This object seems harmless, but it can attack kitty by spraying him with water without warning.

And here's a video showing the current build in action:

KITTY! First look at my upcoming game project: "Cat Project".

Meow.

It's been a while since I posted here, but now I'm here to show you an early peek at my upcoming game project. I don't have a name for it yet, so I'm just calling it "Cat Project".

The game is based on, you guess it, cats: their behaviours and quirks (both from my experience with cats in real life and on YouTube), their folklore, and some human misconceptions about them.

The idea I have so far is you, as a kitty, will have to rescue kittens from the tops of towers (and other lofty sturctures) and fight through annoying human technology (e.g. noisy smartphones, mysterious humming toothbrushes, an unobtainable bright red dot, etc.). Kitty will also collect "mouseys", the currency of this game, that will be used to "buy" things and various power-ups that transforms his appearance and gives him special kitty powers.

A picture maybe worth a thousand words, but they don't do as much justice as a video would. So here's a video showing the core idea of the game (and some other little details):

So what does the feline community think of all this? Let's do a quick interview.

Hmm, I wonder if that cat's jaw was ever fixed.

Meow.

Gonna Catcha: Steam Greenlight and future plans

I'm pleased to announce that Gonna Catcha is now on Steam Greenlight! If you would like to see the game on Steam, be sure to vote "Yes" on the Greenlight page.

In light of this occasion, I've fixed up the trailer for the game:

Regardless of the status of the game's Greenlight process, I plan on restarting development on Gonna Catcha some time in the future, adding new features and game modes. Here's a summary of what I plan to do:

Score Attack mode

Gonna Catcha's current gameplay has you play through a series of increasingly difficult rounds to see how far you can get and what is the highest score you can reach. In the planned Score Attack mode, you'll play only one time-limited round to try to get the highest score possible. My plan is to make it come in three flavours:

• Single-player: one person plays, self-explanatory.
• Co-op: two people play as Pohena and Donum, working together.
• Versus: two people play as the same character (two Pohenas or Donums), working against each other.

Change in Graphic and Audio styles

Currently Gonna Catcha sports an art and audio style defined by limitations inspired by the Namco Pac-Man hardware. While it has it's own charm, I am prepared to push these limitations higher, perhaps forward half a decade to turn it into something from the latter half of the 1980s. (My baseline is a style like Bubble Bobble.)


Additional Mazes

The game in its current state has four mazes spread across 16 rounds, which cycle endlessly. I plan on adding new mazes to the game, though I still have to figure out how these new mazes will fit in with the current game progression.

Welcome to Cloud Saving! (dot.Market 1.2 Update)

M E M O R A N D U M

To: You, the Owner of this dot store

From: Dorothy A. Ellipsis, Dot Retail Strategist

Date: June 21, 2014

Subject: Welcome to Cloud Saving!

---

Hello You,

Our agreement to save our money and backup our business records in the Game Jolt cloud has begun!

Now if your dog ever eats our local records or you accidentally used them on your most recent papier-mâché project, you can just put in a request to download another copy from the cloud seamlessly and continue to run our business as if nothing had happened! Being stored in an abstract form, our puncta* are also much safer than hiding them away in the back of the fridge. The Tech Guy set it up so that your credentials are entered automatically when you come in for work, unless goes wrong then you need to enter your username and token manually. There were some other miscellaneous things that were also taken care of, you can read it here.

As an aside, I would also like to note that the big "Erase Data" you have set up in the Options room now will automatically destroy the records on the cloud in addition to the local ones.

It's convenient should there, I don't know, ever come a time when our business experiences complete failure and you want to, you know, torch the place for the insurance money. ...Not that I endorse such extreme measures...

Actually, I did the calculations, out of pure curiosity and totally not because I think you should do this, and did you know that if you did burn the place down for the insurance, after the costs of registering a new business, buying a new location and bribing everyone, you would be left with 3000 puncta to buy new dots with. I find that quite peculiar, wasn't that the amount you started with? Not that I'm implying anything...

OK... I think I should stop writing now.

Best Regards,

Dorothy A. Ellipsis, Dot Retail Strategist (And Totally Not Crazy)

* FYI: "Puncta" is the local currency. Just in case you forgot.