Polish

It's a tad early for polish, but I wanted to start setting standard for the art in the game earlier in production. From previous iterations, mostly everything is more well defined.

Other things done is now you're able to die. Like when your character dies, you go to the game over screen and everything... which is of course incomplete, but that's better than your game being stuck in a soft-hang.


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Rat!

So the moment of revealing has arrive. The first bad guy!

Ugly little rat isn't he? He's also full animated as well with attacks.
I think I did a fairly good job of creating our first enemy of the game. There will also be one variant of him for a later portion of the level.


Other stuff done:

• Tandy can now gain Hiss at Level 4. This is the first move that utilizes the Buff system. Unfortunately the game doesn't have a way to coordinate / visualize to you that the buff is on / fell off of you, but rest assured, it's happening there in the background!
•  Characters heal to full when they gain a level. This is mostly a difficulty nerf. Since there is almost no resting until the end of the first area (I may add that ability later), it became nearly impossible to manage yourself on Licking and level gaining alone. Don't worry, I'll make sure the game still remains challenging

Also with this post, the first time you can download and preview the game.

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Memory

There are no cool gameplay or screenshots this post, merely update on progress.

Most of the past week has been spent tracking down and fixing memory related problems. Threading, and other misc things can cause all kinds of weird concurrency issues, and utterly obliterate your system (2 threads accessing a single opengl context apparently is grounds for a kernel panic).

That being said, there are plans, big plans in the coming week to see a lot more gameplay!

Saving

So I got leveling to work in that you can also gain abilities (or upgrade abilities). Thus Tandy gains her first ability, Lick.

In addition to this, I worked on Saving. Most of it is purely visual, but the logic flow is correct, and the only thing that needs to be done now is writing the file, and serializing my objects (I suppose that would be the important part of saving).

A video of this in action can be seen here

Leveling!

Little Tandy can now level up, with satisfying results!

Watch out!

Grabbed a placeholder image for the car so I could quickly test out the car battling. It works how I want it to.

Somehow I don't think there will be too many jaguars roaming the streets of our fair city.

The Alley Way

So the first level starts off in the alley way where Tandy loses her mother. From there, you set out on your adventure.

As you can see, the first map is rather large. One thing to notice are the roads are covered with Battle Triggers. If you walk Little Tandy out in the roads (not at a crosswalk or sidewalk), you have a chance to do battle with a car. I'll tell you one thing, no matter how hard you hit a car, a car hits back harder.

I've also planned out the rat story (simple as it may be, I think it will be rewarding to go through it).

I'm still unsure what I want to go on in the park and on the far right of the map. I know how I want the map / stage to end, but unsure the best way to go about it.

Idle Tandy

First draft of Little Tandy's Idle Stance in the Battle Engine (This is pretty close to what she will look like). As you might recognize from previous screens, the color scheme for the map walking Tandy is wrong. Tandy is a full blown cute tabby cat (just like on the title scene).

Rain Rain, go away

I spent much of the tweaking the rain effect on the first level. The overall tone of the level is downright depressing. Her mother died. It's raining. Dirty rats. How much lower can one get?

uDevGames: Day 1 and a half

So today is the first and a half day of uDevGames.

Programming

Last night I got the animation in, and might I add, it's beautiful, What took up 256k in previous iteration only costs us 128k this one. 

Design

So I removed Gold from this, as such a thing is ridiculous for a cat. What's a cat to do with gold. I've toned down the Leveling scale so that's it's much easier to do. As I expect this game to be much shorter, I want people to be rewarded more quickly. The downside to this is I'm gonna have to find more special abilities, or make each one less important. I suppose I'm not striving for truly difficult gameplay here, just something to assist with the story, while at the same time, having battle be interesting.

Art

Started a rough draft of the background for the first level. For initial battles in the alley.

 I'm definitely liking the pixel art characters, and Seurat style backgrounds / environments. It gives a certain contrast to the game. It's also much easier to distinguish characters on top of the background.