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New build up in the same place as the previous one (http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/spacecat.rar).

Tweaks:
- Player jetpack speeds are lower, hopefully controls feel a bit nicer, although a side-effect is that the balance has shifted around a bit. It's both easier and harder ;)
- Enemies stay dead for a while when you revisit a screen after moving between screens
- Removed the gun taking energy from the jetpack, since it was complicating the flying control
- Flying enemy movement improved

Fixes:
- Fixed occasional random crash when entering a new screen
- Fixed dead enemies firing
- Fixed horrible slowdown bug when lots of gravity-affected projectiles were on screen

Remaining known issues:
- Z sorting glitches on some graphics cards - "shadow" enemy body parts drawn in front of foreground parts, etc.
- Still doesn't support old gfx hardware :(
- Occasionally get stuck inside an enemy or nest on screen transition (have to quit)

I approve heartily of all things both cosmic and feline.  Good luck!   :)

Early days...

(http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm90/tigshrimp/Image1.png)

The Random NPC framework is kind of done, as is the random world framework. Neither are *actually* random/procedural yet, mind you.

The player sprite is on temporary loan from another project (and by my artist collaborator). The final cat will be more... Space-ish.

I made the enemies in about 5 minutes. They look approximately 50% funnier than you would expect in motion.

Knytt rip-off! Space Barnacle rip-off! >:(

...nah, just kidding. :P Sounds really great.

Great sprite for space cat!

Hahah rumbled! (thanks)

Graphics were originally going to be very 8-bit style, but it might be about to turn very Amiga-ish. Fortunately I had some fake-Copper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Amiga_chipset#Copper) code lying around! Sprites and other stuff coming soon...

(I need to place Space Barnacle actually - keep seeing it and never getting round to it)

@Paul - That's Mao. He belongs in another game :). Also he can't survive in space due to the lack of a goldfish-bowl hat.

lol.  Give him a fishbowl!  He's awesome!

What game is he from?

Here's the situation on the graphic front, currently just brainstorming out different ideas.

Some very early sketches (I'm not posting the pics themselves in order to avoid filling the page with two Pg Dn of pictures):
http://i29.tinypic.com/2h4m1ci.png (http://i29.tinypic.com/2h4m1ci.png)
http://i28.tinypic.com/2zpjdwn.png (http://i28.tinypic.com/2zpjdwn.png)
http://i30.tinypic.com/vree4l.png (http://i30.tinypic.com/vree4l.png)

Another idea was to have somewhat Amigaish graphics, maybe modular:
(http://i26.tinypic.com/2ntz3h2.jpg)
(http://i29.tinypic.com/1sdpjo.png)

This is the current situation:
(http://i27.tinypic.com/19merc.jpg)
...cleaned up:
(http://i25.tinypic.com/2dshldj.png)

- and hooray, this is my first post on TIGForums!!!

That modular guyman looks super sweet. GO WITH THAT!

This whole project looks super awesome and RayRay's graphic thingies are great so far.
Looking forward to it!

Space-Cat? Random Planets?

NOCTIS RIPOFF

Thanks for the encouraging words.

Noctis: Sounds interesting, I'll try to play it once.

You really should. Noctis is one of the most brilliant games ever made. Indie/freeware or not.


Hopefully this will be too.

I approve of any game that involves furry mamals adventuring in space.

Code for modular guyman complete! We're going for the amiga-ish look. I'll make a demo build when there's something to show on world generation.

Screen shot (http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm90/tigshrimp/RandomIdiots.png) (warning: includes placeholder rubbish art;))

Next on the coding schedule:
- Jetpack and recharging energy bar
- Enemy nests (sketches (http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm90/tigshrimp/scanbiomech.jpg))
- World: different areas, caverns, etc (**porcedural generation magic happening here**)
- Placement of the crashed ship and ship parts, and inventory
- Very simple intro/outro cutscene framework (just static images and text)

@Tantan - I really really love the idea of Noctis, but got as far as wandering around my ship in mid-space and couldn't figure anything else out. If we do a Space Cat 2, I would like to do an (inhabited) universe of planets with an exploration/trading aspect, each planet being a 2d platform world.... maybe the usual ice planets, lava planets, jungles, etc. We'll see :)

@PaulMorel - Mao is from another unfinished project. You may see a thread appear in the "Feedback" forum one day ;)

Here's a sample of what we're currently doing, it's all a bit messy but should give you the idea:

Thinking about the world setting: http://i30.tinypic.com/9h05g0.jpg (http://i30.tinypic.com/9h05g0.jpg)
An idea for not so cute catrobot: http://i32.tinypic.com/1zz27te.png (http://i32.tinypic.com/1zz27te.png)
Some enemies: http://i25.tinypic.com/35mnxpd.png (http://i25.tinypic.com/35mnxpd.png)

I like the Amiga-stlye colour palette.  This could be really cool!

The palette's from Chaos Engine, that's why it's good.

I thought them looked like Bitmap colours!

That cat robot looks intense!
And Awesome! :-*

does the title of the game come from the VGNG?

superflat, xion: Thanks! I cleaned it up a bit.
http://i31.tinypic.com/10de5if.png (http://i31.tinypic.com/10de5if.png)

thief0: Maybe we should ask Shrimp's cat...

World generation is coming along pretty well - there's a wrap-around surface layer with various area types laid out along it (but not displayed as anything more than a debug string yet) and caverns below the surface.

Other stuff that's gone in: the jetpack, crashed spaceship, NPCs shooting (although this is currently far too random for the non-abstract style of the game).

I'm hoping to post a demo later today (i.e. 12 hours or so).

@thief0: Not from the VGNG, but maybe subconsciously inspired by it.  Also not from my cat. His ideas are more along the lines of 00000000000000000222222222211111111 [...etc]

I love the shit out of the style you're going for.

You do realize that you have to put ALL OF THOSE FRIGGEN SKETCHES in your game...

Right?

Oh my god that sprite is beautiful. :o

Here's a demo then. (http://www.mediafire.com/?jcklphyr41n) You can't complete the game as the spaceship parts aren't placed yet. You can just fly/run around shooting things.

z = jetpack
x = fire
left/right cursors to move

(I just thought - people with non-qwerty keyboards might hate z and x... shout if so and I'll do an update with some alternate buttons)

- NPCs are stupid at the moment and all have about the same behaviour. Soon (?) they should have various tendencies to jump/attack/etc.
- There's a bug where sometimes you get stuck in the scenery when flipping screens
- Player has no animations yet
- Lots of placeholder graphics...
- Health is very high
- NPC bullets are a bit nuts. Planning to re-work this system.
- ... oh, and NPC placement is pretty meaningless right now...

Obviously needs a ton of tweaking, but it looks gorgeous. The map looks surprisingly natural.

Also, I found your animation editor :P

Thanks - that's nice to hear about the map!


Oh yeah  :-[
Hehe - and that editor isn't even used on this project. (Not that there's anything procedural going on with the anims, I just wrote something to import from gridded images instead.)

I cannot get it to work! :'( It just stays on the title screen, with Space Cat in big letters and title in tiny letters. I can go to the animation editor, too, but no the actual game.

You have to press Z or X ;)

Doesn't do anything.

I just hit random stuff and eventually it started. I think it might have been enter.

Nice game, by the way - this is really nice base to build your game off :D I look forward to playing it more when the level design shapes up a bit!

Nada. Though I think it just freezes up on the loading, because if I hit z and then change windows back and forth it's got the other window frozen on it.

That was great fun! Even though there's a lot of polish needs to be done, the core gameplay seems to be enjoyable already.

Hi Inane - how old is your graphics card? Unfortunately when fixing some draw-order issues I broke support for cards that don't do OpenGL vertex arrays. I will try to fix this...
Alternatively, it may have crashed on world generation, although I haven't seen this happen. Is there an error message in the window title bar?

Thanks for the encouraging words, those that could run it...!

"Need to use this to use Z level drawing" is in the titlebar after hitting Z.
The laptop I'm on has a pretty crap graphics card (Intel GMA 950, to be precise) so I wouldn't be surprised if that was it :(.

Ah yes. Sorry about that :(
I'll investigate a fix after a bit more gameplay has gone in.

It should at least be clearing the screen, unless your OpenGL support doesn't even extend to glClear. Sounds like something fishy's going on. I'll have a think

I don't think it's anything so mysterious - it just throws an exception in the rendering code when vertex arrays aren't available. Talk to you on MSN...

Help no longer needed... there was some trans-atlantic miscommunication!

Finished! Download link and other info in first post.

Good going guys, this game is great fun. I love the Amiga-style graphics and the level generation works really nicely too :-*

Very nice job! The level generator creates very fun levels. Definitely feels like a good old school game. :)

Game's pretty fun. Nice job.

Thanks dudes!

As usual I just discovered some painful last minute bugs:
- draw order on enemy wheels is wrong (Z has been my least favourite letter for at least a week now)
- there is a weird bug that means sometimes screens are very underpopulated. I suppose playing Hard mode should counteract this a bit

Also the fun-ness of the game is quite variable - sometimes you get some interesting battles, sometimes not. Ho hum. I think fixes/tweaks will have to wait til version 2...

And some final screenshots:

(http://i32.tinypic.com/2quu636.jpg)

(http://i30.tinypic.com/2poxr2x.jpg)

Hey guys, had a bit more of a play now so it's time for some slightly tipsy feedback! I like the game a lot and like you, I think that a lot more can be done with it.

First off I love the graphics. I think the way the level generation works fits the tile sets really well. There's room for more variety in some of the sets, but by and large the level graphics are great. I think it would be awesome to have progressively more distorted and dark areas as you get further down into the cave system. Or something like that.

The enemy sprites work well, I think. It might be interesting to have some variation in size, and I hope to see some of the chained enemies you were looking at near the start of this thread.

Level generation works well but I think you've limited yourselves too much with the room size. The player is very fast and this makes the cave systems feel very claustrophobic.

On that note, I'd like to talk about the player movement. We did discuss this already, but essentially I think everything in the game is far too fast and immediate. And big. It's har dto see what's coming, where you can dodge, etc, because things are generally moving quite fast and there's little lead in the view. I get the feeling I would enjoy it much more if I were able to dodge things more gracefully, and hover competently. At the moment the homing elements are only really dodgable by getting something in between you and them. It would be cool to see the enemy launch a bunch of missiles into the air, and then watch them turn around and home in on the player. A lower rate of turn would make the missiles easier to dodge, but having more of them would make the game more interesting. Right now it feels like the missiles are kind of fast kamikaze enemies. I'd like to be dodging, hovering and firing at the enemy with loads of these things buzzing about the place.

Let me feel and see the dynamics! The player's upward acceleration is really high, so it makes it really hard to hover. Sure there's a hover key, but it's hard to use that and really be effective in combat. Similarly, I can't really fine tune the player's horizontal movement because as soon as I start moving he's zooming off and takes ages to stop. I want to feel like I'm wearing a jet pack!

Now, I believe I mentioned this before, but since the player's guns are completely horizontal, it would be interesting to make something of the vertical gameplay - mostly this was the dodging and hovering stuff I Was talking about earlier, buit it also has an impact on the level design. How about making the levels a bit more spacious so there's room to jet about dodging and firing? It would be interesting to see what limiting the player's horizontal manoeuvring space while leaving them lots of vertical space would do to the gameplay. How about making hte screen resolution larger? I'd like to see more made of the outdoor platformy sections where hovering would be much more important. Something like Joust maybe!

Moving off a screen by accident is frustrating - I'm sure you have plans to fix this, but it is annoying to instantly flick out of a room and back in to find all the bad guys restored. I also keep getting shot by dead enemies.

I'd also like to see a bunch more shooter enemy mechanics in there - lasers that have a warning line before locking on and firing; gun emplacements; enemies that explode into swarms of smaller ones, all that jazz. Maybe some procedurally generated puzzles too? Even a simple key/door mechanic would spice it up a bit.

Now might be the right time to point out that Exile is one of my favourite games ever and this game could be a lot like that given the chance - jet packs, caves, lots space ship parts... really, this could be pretty fantastic given the chance to evolve! I really want to see more!

Drunken essay! Thanks man...


Yeah, I know what you mean - I might make some tweaks there (since there's general patching/tweaking going on). Low upward acceleration didn't really occur to me as I suck at balancing player movement ;D


Well, *had* plans... I was going to put a trail of recent screens in, with the IDs of the things that had been killed, so they didn't respawn. I didn't think it was too much of a big deal, but it does feel unsatisfying if you've spent ages battling them. Longer term (when the planet is bigger and there's more to do) I was thinking of figuring out a GTA/Morrowind style continuous world.

MMmmm I thought I fixed that  :-X


Yeah that enemy stuff is pretty similar to some ideas we had, but just didn't make it. Puzzles... yeas :)

I was definitely thinking of Exile whilst writing this. Also Jetpac (similar vertical/horizontal action you mentioned, and similar repair-the-spaceship business). Not sure how to exploit the vertical movement/horizontal shooting, but I know what you mean. Maybe some vertical tunnels in the caves with enemies on ledges.

Heh, so true :)

As is, all the enemies have heads etc, but they are built in such a way that they can have smaller / bigger heads, or even be without one (so it can be made that the enemies without heads are a bit stupid, just patrolling left-right, the ones with a bit bigger heads are a bit smarter and fire at you etc)... let's hope we'll manage to put it in the next build!

Here are some other things that didn't make it for the competition build:

(http://i28.tinypic.com/nvtgsi.gif)

(http://i25.tinypic.com/2v0j49u.gif)

(http://i32.tinypic.com/23moopx.gif)

Tweaked/patched v0.2 build available - see first post...

Shrimp I'm finally gonna check your game out tomorrow, I promise!  It looks so cool.  To use the Bitmap Bros' palette was an inspired decision - they sure knew how to use 16/32 colours.  Such a shame they sort of fell off after the 16-bit era. 

It's sort of got a look between Gods and the Chaos Engine (which was actually quite a different colour scheme for them.)  I must admit my favourite colour scheme was probably the 16 colour golds and silvers of Xenon II (maybe I should use them one day, hehehe.) 

Hey awesome!  I particularly liked the cat sprite and the wheeled enemies!  The movement was fluid and the gameplay worked well.  I intuitively figured out what needed to be done and was able to escape the planet with my cat intact!  Hoorah!
Cheers,
--Zack

Thanks! Hope it wasn't too easy (bugs + misjudged last-minute balancing!) - please have a few goes on Hard Mode if so ;)

@superflat, the art's all Mr RayRayTea, except some placeholder stuff and a few projectiles. You can look forward to some jump/fly/walk/etc animations in the next version!