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[moonmagic]

   

Cloud Cats is a scrolling shooter adventure with different ways to play. Green Cat must travel through three planes to reunite with Red Cat, who will help open a portal to the Cave of Monsters. The three planes are Fruit Snack Patagonia, Moon Moon, and Birthday Island.

I wanted to make a shooter with mechanics that would support a couple of different ways of playing. Cloud Cats may be played peacefully or aggressively. The aggressive player shoots at her enemies, and directs the charged heart outward to destroy multiple foes. The peaceful player does not return fire, and directs the charged heart into a portal to communicate with Red Cat. Both players may graze bullets to increase their power.

The final game will feature audio cues for the impending portals, but those aren't in place yet. After grazing three bullets, a portal will appear. Touching the center of the portal will kill the player.

LATEST DEMO:
CLOUD CATS v.0.4

CONTROLS:

Left, Right, Down, Up: move
Z: use psi
Esc: pause

NEW FEATURES IN V.0.4:

- Improved controls
- Title screen
- Password system
- Pause button
- First boss / NPC mostly implemented (SGT. BARBERY_WILKINS)

COMING SOON:

- Mild inertia for Green Cat
- High scores
- Better screen transitions between levels
- Music
- Sound effects
- Peaceful ways to defeat bosses
- More fruit snacks and a boss for Fruit Snack Patagonia
- Trees, castles, and indigenous wildlife for Fruit Snack Patagonia
- More features that will probably take an inordinate amount of time to put in place

[shrimp]

Hey, I had a go on the demo. I like the aesthetics but I found the controls really very hard to get to grips with. Mainly it's the very high momentum/inertia/drift (not sure what you'd call it) on the player's movment, but also it was confusing that you have to press Z to "jump" up the screen. Is this an established feature in some existing vertical scroller? It took me several goes to figure it out.

The aggressive/peaceful choice is interesting. Will you have some reward for consistently following one of the paths, or will you allow the player to switch strategies without any disadvantage?

[moonmagic]

Thanks for playing, Ed. I had wanted to stay away from gameplay that controlled like a traditional shooter because I wanted to emphasize other conducts, but I agree that the controls seem irrationally difficult. I think it'll come down to a "floating" animation to convey the atmosphere I want, but I'll tighten up the controls and get rid of the jump / advancing wall of death.

My intent is to have bosses with different "win" conditions that appear if you have a certain conduct. Basically, each boss can be shot, which progresses the game, but doesn't result in the proper ending. If the player discovers the alternate "win" condition, it grants a bonus to the peaceful conduct. If the player is already peaceful when encountering the boss, subtle indicators as to how to achieve the alternate win will appear.

Of course, I'll recognize particularly bloodthirsty play as well; the player who insists on playing aggressively will gain abilities that make it easier to play the game that way. I'm going to try and have enemies respond more aggressively, too, like the old NES game ZANAC. I think I'll have an alternate ending that will recognize that play style, but won't be as rewarding as finishing the game peacefully.

Right now I'm working on getting the RPG-style dialogue going that will precede encounters with other actors. Having the entire first level playable along with an attract mode is my goal for the next release.

some new background sprites:



and a new enemy, tyrannosaurus fruit snack:

[moonmagic]

Haven't updated for quite awhile! I've been keeping a proper devlog over at LAZERCATZ, but part of me was hesitant to post until I'd reached a significant milestone. Last night I put in the title screen, menu, password system, and pause button, so I suppose that is going to have to do for now.

Glad I added a pause button with an "ARE YOU SURE?" message before quitting. It forced me to actually deal with deactivating instances, using an external file, and a few other functions that I wasn't comfortable with, and I feel like it has helped me understand GML a lot better. Of course, my code still has way too many variables and is generally a mess, but if I spend all my time fretting about it I will never finish this game. I'm still learning, and I'm sure the next game will be a streamlined river otter of a thing.

The controls are now completely changed over to the more traditional shmup controls; I need to add a little bit of inertia for Green Cat so he doesn't just stop when you let go of an arrow, but I don't think that'll be that hard. Spent a lot of time making the grazing system more accurate. And of course, I added the first boss (sort of; he is the first actor you encounter, and the relationship between he and Green Cat is more complex than it initially appears). He is a little bit easy, but he is supposed to introduce the mechanics of the game and not make you cry, so I think that is fine. There is, unfortunately, no way to beat him peacefully right now, because it involves sound implementation and I haven't decided how I want to animate that particular choice.

Blah blah blah. Let me know what you think! I have a lot of background art (like the castle, above) that I need to put in, too, but game design is never done, so of course that's true.

[moonmagic]

Doesn't rain but it pours, I guess. Worked a LONG time on some curtains to make for a better entrance to the astral plane; the guardian is modeled after a lamp we have next to our fish tank:

(click for video)

---

Really having trouble with the inaccuracy of GML floating point nonsense. Right now if the user decided (for whatever reason) to sit on this screen for a long time, the curtains would gradually open. That wouldn't be so bad, because everyone would get to see the lamp's waving cord tail, but I hate having my loops go funny.

Definitely ripping off Twin Peaks for this, but I like it. I think I'll overlay some dim neon flashes so that the curtains aren't just flat RED, see how that goes.

[moonmagic]

Seeing as I've spent a long time working on this sprite, I thought I'd post it.



(idle) (psi) (charged) (charged psi)

Also, here are the other fruit snacks; I took the annoying bob out of the t-rex.




Since I am structuring the game around NPC and boss encounters, it's going a little slower than I'd like; bosses have a very specific way they enter the playfield, so I can't just drop them into a scene. To do:

- finish the IKEA lamp guardian
- write a new dialogue for Barbery Wilkins
- animate and code EATS TAPES (this will take awhile, as he will be the biggest sprite yet, and I will have to figure out how to check collisions against an animating tape loop)
- write the code and place the remaining fruit snacks.

I'm not sure if that demo is actually up to date, but the game has changed a lot anyway, so...don't download it, regardless. Edit: The demo is up to date, but doesn't include the Gatekeeper, new Green Cat sprites, new portal sprites, or any new enemies or background assets for the Fruit Snack stage; just the same old Orange and Grape. Because I forgot to post it earlier, here is the new portal:



Although I modified the second formation in game maker to make it a regular hexagon.

Also, a mock-up of the background / foreground crystals for Barbery Wilkins' stage(s), since I'm just dumping art into this thread:

[Wander]

fruit snack enemies?!?

fucking brill.  i luv.

i'll have to play dat demo, but currently i have -0- time for anything. 

[mokesmoe]

I didn't shoot anything and still got an aggressive rank.

[moonmagic]

Hmm, that's weird. I just played it and even with shooting Barbery Wilkins (the only way to get past him without cheating) I still got a neutral rank. Not shooting at all gives me "mega peaceful." Thanks for letting me know; I'll have to look into this.

[mokesmoe]

I did reset the level after being aggressive, so the kill variable might not have reset.

[moonmagic]

Aha! Yes, the object that keeps track of conduct is a persistent object. I'm going to try to put a boss at the end of the next demo and a high scores table, and then the game will reset. I think I'll have the "retry" feature switch the player back to "neutral", since both the "mega peaceful" and "mega aggressive" conducts will have boons attached to them that I don't want to be available by repeating a level over and over.

Thanks very much for playing!

[moonmagic]

A choppy video of the new sprites in action.

I spent a week remaking the game engine because it had devolved into a hideous rat's nest of bad variable naming conventions and OOL travesties. It is much leaner now and easier to manage. It was rather humbling to see how inefficient I had become. If I added a new enemy or scripted event I would have to write it into almost every object in the game. Now I have two controlling objects to handle events (like the text box you see in the video) and almost all of the mechanics are in place. It's exciting: I can actually see the game getting finished like this.

Point of comparison: the encounter with the T-Rex fruit snack in the video was completed in an afternoon. The Barbery_Wilkins encounter from the demo took me a week. Since the boss encounters are all basically the same (text text text shooty shooty shoot), this is an encouraging development for me.

A few more things before I am ready to start tackling the level design: the conduct system needs to go back in (along with associated state changes) and the warp and death animations (and associated room-hopping) need to be put in. Also, I need to redo the lasers and the remaining bullet types. I'm not quite happy with the orbiting bullets: I would like to get them to fly out of the enemy and then orbit around the enemy before falling, but that is a task for another day.

[jph wacheski]

i really like this,. not sure what is goung on though, i can charge up by grazing then the portal opens if i go in the game ends?  sounds will make this way better,. . fullscreen option please!

please have another key to skip all the text (for the 100th time!),. X key?  I press Z fast then fire when I am not aggressive,. . . love the dino. 

[moonmagic]

In the next version I have added a "slow ship" button to help with grazing the new bullet patterns. You will be able to skip text with that button and not harm your conduct.

You also brought up something I've been thinking about; I am thinking about adding a "no talking" option that changes all NPC dialogue to a single line that may be skipped faster. For people that are playing for score, et cetera.

The mechanics probably would enjoy a more thorough explanation; I will make up a manual soon.