Super Mega Best Cat Adventures

This is a passion project and I work on it in my free time. I intend to run a small Kickstarter campaign this year to help spread the word, build a small community around the game and raise funds for a limited edition production run.

I've started this devlog to share what I'm up to and document progress. I really enjoy reading other people's development stories on the Clickteam forums and I'm hoping everyone will enjoy mine too! Any feedback that I can get from fellow clickers will be appreciated!

Thanks for the positive replies! And that is a great offer starvingindie, I'll let you know when I get something worth playtesting!

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Update 001:

It's taken about a year to get where I am, a few redesigns of how I wanted the core of the game to work (enemy generation and level style) meant I completely changed the process of generating both. I've now settled on something that allows me to make the game I wanted to all along, whereas my first iterations were compromises.

Whilst being a traditional wave-based twin stick shooter at heart, from the start I wanted to give the player some freedom to explore and feel like they were not just defeating screen after screen of enemies.

The game is structured into map 'layers', which each comprise of a grid of rooms. A room takes up the whole screen and contains one wave of enemies. There is a wall around the room, and on clearing the wave of enemies a selection of routes forward open, allowing the player to move through a randomly generated maze.

To create a richer environment, each room of the maze will have a few defining features, and will have an environmental 'zone' which determines the choice of scenery props and backgrounds.

I've had a small break from making games whilst I worked on other things, and I have decided that to get myself back into it I would take a smaller project from genesis to completion, including exploring a couple of avenues of distribution. I feel it will be a really useful learning experience as I have not done this before.

Given that I want to make an abundance of tiled backgrounds for each of my rooms, I thought I would start by making a small utility to help myself do this, and perhaps other people would find it useful too.

The program has one main function, and that is to assist tiled image creation by looping brushmarks from edge to edge, and showing a live preview of how the tile would repeat. I've mocked up a basic interface, and implemented a basic 1 pixel pen, bucket fill, dropper tool and export to PNG.

I'm considering rolling tools like this into the game to allow for user generated content, so this is pretty exciting. There's lots of fun facets to this mini-project so I'm looking forward getting stuck in and adding a decent amount of features, such as other simple tools, and animations.

Up next:
- Making a modular interface

Hi again Starvingindie! To make the rainbow menus, each colour is an active object. Every frame, I move that Active one pixel to the right, one pixel down, and reduce the transparency of it. That image above has about 30 actives, each sliding down and to the right, until eventually they have faded out and are destroyed. (It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist)

All of the text in the game is also hand-drawn in Active Objects, that way I can animate each letter independently and move and scale them. There is a great tutorial about text blitting here: Please login to see this link.

I haven't pinned down all of the Kickstarter details yet, but I'm planning to run it later this year, in perhaps around 3-6 months time.

I'll post a big new update later this week, but I thought I'd just share a screenshot of a couple of scenery assets I drew (fairly) recently.

These lollies are planned to be some of the scenery on the desert stages.

I found an Android app called Dotpict which is a great little tool for drawing pixel art on the go. The main reason I love it is that it is so much easier to control than other apps, as the pen is not where your finger is it allows you to see what you are doing. I'd recommend giving it a go.

Please login to see this picture.

Update 002:

I'm really pleased with the progress made so far with the tile maker tool, now that I've got some foundations for my interface down I can soon focus on the functionality.
I've made modular tool panels which you can drag around to wherever you want them, and close them if you don't want them.

I also had a bit of fun drawing my own tool icons, which was definitely a great use of my time!

Up next:
- Zooming in and out
- Custom tile sizes

Thanks guys!

I've started talking to the artist who made the music for my youtube video, his music is really upbeat, fun and retro and fits my game really well. I'm hoping to get the tricky things (finance agreements) sorted out before we start working together to make sure we both consider things fair and can work together positively - having the same expectations. I've not done this before so it's an interesting challenge, I'd be interested if anyone has any experience with this.

To expand further on how the rainbow actives work in the maze menu, they are actually all clones of the same active, and are 1 pixel in size. The active has 1 animation, which is stopped and does not play automatically, and has 1 frame per colour (24 frames). I have a counter which ticks up at the rate of 0.5 per frame, and resets to 0 when it hits 24. None of the actives exist at the start of frame, and when the player holds the button to show the map, they get created at a rate of 1 per frame. When the active is created, I make sure it's animation is stopped, and set it to display the same frame as the current number of the counter. The active is also scaled to be whatever size I want the menu to be when it is created. Finally, I also subtract 2 from the semi-transparency of any rainbow actives every frame, and when the active is fully invisible I destroy it. I find it easy to keep track of all of the actives - because they are all the same object it is only three lines in the event editor!

Perhaps that is a little confusing, it looks a little like this in Fusion:

= Always:
- Add 1 to X position of rainbow_active
- Add 1 to Y position of rainbow_active
- Add 2 to semi-transparency of rainbow_active
- Add 0.5 to rainbow_counter
- Set rainbow_counter to (Value(rainbow_counter) mod 24)

= Player holds map button
- Create new rainbow_active
- Set X and Y scale of rainbow_active
- Set Animation frame of rainbow_active to Value(rainbow_counter)

= Semi-transparency of rainbow_active > 128
- Destroy rainbow_active

For anyone who has not encountered the 'mod' operator, this returns the value of the remainder when divided by a number, 24 in this case. So if the counter was 15, it would stay at 15 as 15/24 = 0 remainder 15; but if the counter was 24, it would reset to 0, as 24/24 = 1 remainder 0.

Hope this was interesting for everyone - should have a new full update in a couple of days!

Thanks Akiat, I'm thinking about publicly sharing an alpha perhaps within the month - it's already prepared but very rough around the edges

Update 003:

Spent a little time the other day finishing the function that lets you zoom in and out of the drawing for easier editing.
Whilst doing this I also added a nicer grid overlay, this stays at 1 physical pixel at all times, I think that it is much easier to read and use.

I also implemented functionality to work with canvases of any dimension, but I've not yet added an interface for changing it – I intend to just let the user pick this when they start their drawing, and for the time being I've restricted it to sizes between 8x8 pixels and 64x64 pixels.

Now that this is all done I can build the routines that save and load images! This should include the framework for the animation system.

Update 004:

Two updates in one day! I decided to try out a small idea I had to improve something that was in the back of my mind for a while. As shown below, because the simple enemy types always ran straight towards the player, they could easily be shepherded into a very tight group – and eventually all overlap completely.

Implementing path finding or another type of collision/overlap check would too expensive given the number of enemies I want to have on screen, so I tested the simple idea of giving a random amount of variance to the direction that the enemy looked towards. I am pleased with the result – especially as I have decreased the frequency of the direction check so I should have a small performance increase too! Previously every enemy would update to look at the player every single frame, and with this new method I have pushed this to every quarter second. If I stagger the checks then this should be great.

I'm pleased with the look of this as it keeps large groups of enemies looking like an intimidating swarm!

Update 005:

It's been a little while since I posted any updates; life has been fairly busy and I've not given my project as much time as I would have liked. I have made some good progress with my tiled image creator, I've nailed the importing routine, and set up a nice panel which allows you to easily change between frames of the animation. The animation also previews in the same panel, looping continuously, currently at 5FPS.

You can see in the GIF that once the images are loaded, the changes get updated in near-realtime in the animation and preview panel. The images auto-save every second, something I decided to implement after noticing dotpict does a similar thing; it is nice to know that my drawings will be safe.
Now that I've sorted out a lot of the loading/saving issues, and animation preview I can bulk up the functionality of the actual tools and push this mini-project closer to being completed.

Just for fun, here is a screenshot of a barbeque and some sausages that I drew on my commute on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to setting up the barbecue as a sausage spewing mini-boss!

Next up:
- Adding pencil sizes

Update 006:

Quick update today, added variable pen sizes to the tiled image utility program – and an outline that moves to show you where the pixel will be drawn. You can hopefully see in the GIF that the red outline snaps to the pixel grid of the drawn image.

Maybe soon I'll get back to making the actual game! This is a fun diversion, but I can't forget it's not my actual project!

The other tools that I'm considering adding are:
- Selection tool, allowing you to move a portion of the image and copy/paste it
- Undo button (!)
- Straight line tool
- Spray can/dithering tool
- Round pen tool

If anyone has any other ideas that would be really interesting to hear!

In any case, I'd like to keep the scope fairly small, and this is already getting quite feature rich for a side project!

Not sure what's happened to my GIF here, it seems to have grey marks on it now that I've uploaded it to my server. If anyone has any ideas that would be great!

Next up:
- Straight line tool (maybe)

My Wednesday commute is starting to become a little productive! Here are some more pixel-y barbecue foodstuffs that I drew on the way to London:

Thanks nim, and that's cool you find dotpict useful too, it's a great little app!

Yeah, I'm going to keep the scope as limited as possible with this mini project, I think I might not do the spray/dither tool to try and help wrap things up faster and get back to work on the game. It's nice to feel like I can carry this through to completion, as the game itself is a much larger project.

I've been using Fusion 2.5 to make this image editor too- the surface object for all of the drawing actions, and each tool window is a sub application.