Project CATAM Pt.8

Hi all,

This is update is going to be a quickie and I’ll start by telling you why. Most who follow me are very used to instant feedback loops. Typically, my series of posts go like this: “I have an idea!” -> “I made the idea work!” -> “Here are more levels using IDEA!”…and so on. Project CATAM isn’t like that. There are more systems involved. It’s a large world that requires a lot of visuals and we do not yet have an artist working on this full time (for the record, Ellian will be on board full time as of March).

Project CATAM Pt.7

I forget which week this was, but it was a good one. A little unorganized, but a good one. I mentioned previously that I use a dropbox folder to communicate our progress to investors, as well as to the rest of the team. Along with the Change Logs sub-folder, I added another for Design Journal entries. I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the design of the game so that we have a better understanding of what we’re going to be creating as we move forward and Ellian begins producing art, full-time.

Design

This week I wanted to nail down a lot of the story elements. I think we have the plot in place now. It’s somewhat simple, but it gives the characters’ personality and motive. That’s really all we need for this type of game. I setup the opening scenes of the game, through the somewhat tutorial-ish area, and up to the first boss fight.

Project CATAM Pt.6

Week three is a thing of the past! If nothing more, it was another stressful week.

Water

Jonathan and I went back and forth about the water physics. Mostly balancing the technical features with the aesthetics that we could pull off. Originally, we leaned towards scrapping the surface tension effects that I had been programming so that we could make ‘plain water’ look more appealing, artistically. I spent a day tinkering with it and now we’re capable of warping the water’s surface while animating it and other things. So…happy medium, I guess. It still needs some refining, but it’s headed in the right direction! The effects are there, but the math needs to be played with.

Project CATAM Pt.4

The first week of official, full-time work on Project CATAM has come to a close. It was a very productive week, but it doesn’t make for much of an interesting blog entry. Rather than go into detail about what I worked on, I’ll touch on it briefly and then talk further about working with investors.

Project CATAM Pt.2

‘C’ is for Crown

Meet Crown. She is the protagonist of our world. This is the first draft of her in-game look and I’d like to tell you a bit more about her.

Project CATAM Pt.1

This is my first entry RE: Cool New Project. I’d like to talk a little bit about what the project is, how far along we are, and some of our development plans. I will be continuing this series in parallel with the “Creating a Platformer” series in order to keep a lot of the design and game-specific stuff separate from the programming tutorials that have been getting a lot of positive feedback.

CATAM?

Months ago I tweeted something about a project that I referred to as ‘#CATAM’. It is a project that has been on the back burner for awhile. It is one of my dream projects that I have wanted to work on, but couldn’t afford to invest time into due to its scope. It is a fairly large game that is tech-heavy, design-heavy, and asset-heavy. At the time, I could afford none of these. I didn’t have the time or resources to pursue its production any further than jotting down a few plot/character ideas.