Super Mega Best Cat Adventures

[PBarwick]

SUPER MEGA BEST CAT ADVENTURES is a colourful, retro twin-stick shooter.
Battle unusual enemies ranging from washing machines to feline ice lollies, exploring a randomly generated maze to hunt for powerups and save your kittens!

The deeper you go, the harder it gets - building to frantic, psychadelic action inspired by the best shooters of the early nineties!

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!

[starvingindie]

This game looks like it's right up my alley! Looks like a lot of fun to play. Let me know if you need a play tester during development if you're ever looking for feedback or tuning suggestions.

[nim]

Good luck with it! Looks very original and fun.

[PBarwick]

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.

In-game map showing an example empty 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.

Current progress on tiled image editor, for a 32px tile

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

[starvingindie]

Awesome info PBarwik! I'd love to know how you did the rainbow and flashing effects. They. Are. SWEET Also, when were you planning on running a Kickstarter?

[PBarwick]

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: http://www.diybandits.com.au/MMF/tut...textblit1.html

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.

[PBarwick]

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.

Draggable, closable tool panels

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

[nim]

I'm really enjoying keeping up with this! The game looks great and I love your visual style. I've been working with colours in Fusion a lot recently so I'm sure I could help you with those rainbow effects if you have trouble.

What are you doing for music? It might be worth reaching out to some chiptune artists if you don't have a musician already.

[starvingindie]

Keep the updates coming! Thanks for dropping knowledge on how you did the colors. Do you find it hard keeping track of all those actives or have you set it up to be able to easily make changes across actives that are supposed to have the same functionality?

Count me in for whenever you start a Kickstarter. I'm excited to see how this game develops.

[PBarwick]

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!