Cataro: Magical Cat Adventure

[Seppel]

Hi!

I'm Seppel, and I've created a playable demo of my shmup game, Cataro: Magical Cat Adventure, The demo takes you through Stage 3 of the game. It's about 7 minutes long and full of cats and birdies.

You can play it here: http://tailkiss.com/cataro/



Scoring is based on point item collection, then a end-of-stage multiplier based on bullets grazed. Curiosity kills the cat -- graze enough bullets to trigger a Curiosity Bonus, a 5-second period where all bullets grazed count as 10 bullets grazed. Chain your Curiosity Bonuses for massive points!

Planned improvements
* Eliminate any lag by moving to stage3D.
* Better sound effects / explosions / eye candy (currently using placeholder SFX and stage3D will allow for much more pretties).
* Less rough menu transitions (menus were just added).
* Moon graphics needs to go behind the player.
* Put a "Watch out!" graphic on top of your character during Bite's first charge. That way you'll know to get out of his way.
* After reaching the POC, make items come to you even if you leave the POC.
* Make a new Stage 3 title card.

I'm happy to hear any feedback! I like this board's brutality.

[shmuppyLove]

It's not bad!

The difficulty jump from Easy to Normal is massive though ... On Normal I died very quickly, whereas on Easy I was able to make it to the boss' final form (I think).

Speaking of that, seems like the layer priority is a bit wonky there ... the moon was on top of the player sprite ... is that intentional?

[Seppel]

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it.

Oh right, the moon. Yeah, I need to make a separate special "layer" so the moon goes underneath the player, since it's currently set up that new objects are created on top of other objects.

Yes, the moon phase is the final form of the boss! I'll keep in mind that the difficulty jump feels massive. Could you try Normal vs. Insane and tell me if the difficulty jump is just as massive? I'd like to aim for having the difficulty discrepancy sort of even. Plus, I'd like to keep it to three difficulty levels. For example, Jamestown was just aggravating for having five difficulty levels. Even four feels excessive.

Thanks for the feedback!

[n0rtygames]

In the moon fight where captain kittypaws is drawing on the power of the moon to create a 7 episode long kittybomb or whatever he's doing - the moon appears on top of my player sprite so I think either you meant to do this (and its bad) or more likely that your draw order is messed up.

Is this correct? I suspect that it is not correct.

Some nice ideas here, keep up the good work.

Also:-

I like this board's brutality.

This boards brutality is not always a good thing. Keep that in mind. Hopefully you've been lurking long enough to know when to take certain things with a pinch of salt - remember to make your own game at the end of the day

and dont listen to trap15

[Seppel]

In the moon fight where captain kittypaws is drawing on the power of the moon to create a 7 episode long kittybomb or whatever he's doing - the moon appears on top of my player sprite so I think either you meant to do this (and its bad) or more likely that your draw order is messed up.

Yup, I added that to the to-do list. It will have to come after I update the graphics engine.

Some nice ideas here, keep up the good work.

Thanks!

I'm quite surprised by the positive comments I'm getting from everyone I've demoed the game for.

Unfortunately, I don't have much time to work on Cataro these days (which sucks, because 75% of the game is already complete).

I like this board's brutality.

This boards brutality is not always a good thing. Keep that in mind. Hopefully you've been lurking long enough to know when to take certain things with a pinch of salt - remember to make your own game at the end of the day

and dont listen to trap15

Oh, definitely. I can tell the difference between someone giving critique and someone giving preferences.

By the way, do you know of any popular Japanese shmup boards? I'd like to share the demo overseas, too.