next »

[M.S.T.O.P.]

I don't have a name for this game yet, so I'm just calling it "Cat Project" for now.

The game is about, you guessed it, cats: their behaviours and quirks (both from my experience with cats in real life and spending too much time on the internet) and their folklore.

You, as a kitty, must rescue kittens from the tops of towers and swat away annoying human technology along the way: noisy smartphones, hostile spray bottles, the unobtainable bright red dot, etc. There will be multiple cats for you to choose from, each with their own special supernatural powers. One such cat is the "Maneki Neko", who can beckon items to come to him.

Video of latest build







Screen Caps

[M.S.T.O.P.]

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 now 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!

[M.S.T.O.P.]

Meow!

M.S.T.O.P. here with some new updates on the "Cat Project". I'm going to try to make my updates weekly at least, syncing them with Screenshot Saturday. Here are this week's updates:


New combat mechanics

Last week, I demonstrated some changes to the combat mechanics: faster swats, tougher enemies and hitstun.

*smack* *smack* *smack*

This week, I made some more additions to make "Cat Project" even more action-oriented: knockback and attack-cancelling.

Kitty is not amused by practical joke. Also, an innocent laser pointer
gets caught in the crossfire and the toothbrush begins its new career as
part of a  juggling act.

Weak swats now push enemies back slightly; they can also be cancelled into another weak swat if it connects with an enemy, like in many beat 'em up and fighting games. Strong swats push enemies back further (though the hitstun the same, at least for now), but cannot be cancelled.

ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA

Increased kitty health

Begone, evil spirit of good dental health!

Don't get too attached to it, the GUI will definitely change in the future. Health meters now show that both kitty and his enemies are no longer one-hit wonders. I haven't worked out how kitty's increased stamina will interact with the powerup system. (Previously, the powerup doubled as an additional hit point that was lost when kitty took damage, like in Mario games.)

[Adam_]

I really like the way your project comes along. You're not trying to tell the most epic story ever, create a vast and deep world or the ultimate multiplayer experience, no - it's just a little platformer game you're doing, it has cats in it and maybe it will be fun in the end. A lot of projects could really use more of this attitude It's humble and that's nice and kind of rare.

Other than this, it looks nice and plushy. The cat looks lively with those tail animations, and swatting annoying human stuff as enemies is a nice touch. Is there any sound yet? I bet that'll make a huge difference.

[M.S.T.O.P.]

I really like the way your project comes along. You're not trying to tell the most epic story ever, create a vast and deep world or the ultimate multiplayer experience, no - it's just a little platformer game you're doing, it has cats in it and maybe it will be fun in the end. A lot of projects could really use more of this attitude It's humble and that's nice and kind of rare.

After working on several prototypes and not not being totally satisfied with them, I just decided to do something I liked. I like cats, so I decided to make a game about them and how they probably perceive our human world. Watching too many cat video might have also been a factor.

Other than this, it looks nice and plushy. The cat looks lively with those tail animations, and swatting annoying human stuff as enemies is a nice touch.

I'm in the process of improving my pixel art skills. I'm mainly a coder and also do some music composition. I've only done very simple low-res animations before, so those cat animations took me quite some time to get right (though I think they still need to be touched up).

Is there any sound yet? I bet that'll make a huge difference.

I have a gameplay video that contains sound effects (some are placeholders) and also gives a bigger picture on how the game plays:


I also have some background music, but it was turned off when I recorded that video.

[Zorg]

I'd like to see a "HISSSSSS" animation and sound when being hit. Also, wool and robot vacuum cleaner (moving platform but dangerous when hit from the side). 

And a black cat, of course.

[M.S.T.O.P.]

I haven't had much time to work on "Cat Project" this week; I had to take care of a friend's dog and bird (no cats though, except for a surprise visitor in the backyard). So the game is pretty much the same as it was last week. However, I did get a chance to work on some of the background music for the game, which I've neglected to talk about since I started this project.

Currently, I have two tracks to show. To give a bit of background, both of them are "hand-me-down" tracks; music that was composed for other projects that got cancelled that I fixed up and remixed for this one. No point in letting them go to waste. The first one is the title theme:

https://soundcloud.com/m-s-t-o-p/title-waltz

I don't know if it is technically a waltz (maybe it's a minuet, or some perverted fusion of the two, who knows?), but I just call it that out of habit. In any case, it's a fuzzy, lighthearted track that sets the mood for the game.

Next up is a level theme track thing; it's a work-in-progress:

https://soundcloud.com/m-s-t-o-p/level-theme

The vaguely "meow"-sounding lead synth in the second half of the track is a patch I accidentally made with fiddling and twiddling around with the knobs on the Dreamstation DXi2. It seems appropriate for the subject matter at hand and I kinda like it. I just hope the novelty doesn't wear off to quickly.

I'd like to see a "HISSSSSS" animation and sound when being hit. Also, wool and robot vacuum cleaner (moving platform but dangerous when hit from the side). 

And a black cat, of course.

All good ideas, I'll keep those in mind. As for the black cat, I'm still deciding on whether to have just a generic black cat or a specific black cat from folklore, e.g. the Cat Sith and the Ovinnik are said to be black cats. One steals your soul and lives in your barn and barks like a dog.

Hmm... I wonder...

[M.S.T.O.P.]

I took a break from posting updates last week because 1) it was very late and 2) there wasn't much to post about. Oh well, that just means more updates to show this week! Here's what I've been working on the last two weeks.


New Health UI

I have replaced the old rectangular health meters with rows of health icons:

Close-up of health icons

The player's health is represented by cat heads while the enemies' are represented by gears. The smallest unit of health (1 HP) is represented by half an icon. And on a related note, I've also added healing hearts to make your sad, monochrome cat heads happy again.

Doors

Cat goes in and reemerges somewhere else:

I like how the door-swinging animation turned out. The power of trigonometry! The doors not only allow you to move quickly between two points in the same room, but they will also connect different rooms together in certain multi-room levels, as demonstrated in this video:



The game is getting closer and closer to becoming a stand-alone playable demo, but it still has some ways before getting there. Needs a lot more polish. I also think that this thread is long enough that I need to update my first post to display the more recent screenshots and whatnot.


And now that I'm finished, just for fun, here are some outtakes:


Kitty and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Doors

A Glitch in the Matrix Pause Function

Aww, kitty thinks he's The One.

[M.S.T.O.P.]

These last two weeks have been a bit weird. Maybe it's because I've been focusing on working in game mechanics into "Cat Project" and I was getting a bit tired of it, but I've been adding in sillier things into the game recently.

Last week I added a crouch action to the game, mostly as an excuse to turn Kitty into a catloaf:

Loafing around.

The "loaf position" with serve other purposes in the future, other than being cute.

This week I added two things. First is a, uh, cat paw to the (interim) main menu:

This is silly.

The above GIF is just me testing the cat paw being drawn at different angles and lengths. It will be part of the finalized main menu.

The second things I added this week is a new passive enemy type: the balloon:

Balloons! Kitty is pleased. *smack* *smack* *pop*

Like the laser pointer, balloons do not harm Kitty, but he can smack them around using uncharged swats. Charged swats will destroy them. They'll probably serve as bouncy item containers in the final game.

[Jondog]

Looks pretty cool.

At some point you may want to clean up those rotated sprites.
They don't need 360 frames of rotation but some sprites for certain angles along with the free rotations would make it look a bit nicer.

RotSprite is pretty good for making nicer looking rotated sprites.
http://info.sonicretro.org/RotSprite

[michaelgabrielr]

That's one of the cutest game I've seen here.
Keep up the good work!

[M.S.T.O.P.]

It's been two months since my last update. Time freally flies.

I am still working on "Cat Project" and made several additions and changes. Here is a list of those things:

• New title menu featuring a kitty swatting the menu options to select them:
  
  
     
  • The same interface is also being used for a laser-swatting minigame I was playing around with:
  
  
  

• Removed the more powerful charged swats, replaced them with a special attack that is charged/executed by a separate key/button. While they will all share the ability to use the regular swat attack, each kitty will have their own unique special attack. For example, the gray kitty can gather static electricity and shoot chain lightning at enemies.
  
  

• Made the collisions between kitty and the environment more precise.
  
  • However, as a result of this, kitty can no longer change direction in midair.
  • And as a result of that, kitty can now jump backwards.

• Experimenting with more complex backgrounds.
  

• New death pose.
  
  
  

• Removed universal horizontally wrapround. It was limiting my level design choices. I might bring it back for a few levels though.

• Added horizontal scrolling. In addition to allowing horizontally-oriented and wide-open levels, it made even the vertically-oriented levels feel less cramped.

• Smoother camera scrolling.

• Other miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes done to the platforming mechanics to make it more slick.
  
  
  

Last but not least, here's a video showing how everything fits together:





I got some feedback suggesting I should call the game <em>Kitty Quest</em>. That might be a good starting point for coming up with names.

[M.S.T.O.P.]

Two weeks ago, I had a bug-free, perfectly-good platforming engine. But then out of a whim, I decided to mess around with it and added support for sloped platforms.



Aside from a few bugs with the player or enemies occassionally getting caught in the slopes, it seems to be working just fine. Here's a video of it in action:



I've learned that implementing the code to make objects moving up slopes was the easy part. Making it look nice was the hard part.

[M.S.T.O.P.]

Implementing moving platforms was much easier than adding in slopes. Kitty is pleased.