Cat, NO!

Hey, cat. Coming over to watch? I'm playing a new game. Umm.. Cat? Can you not walk in front of the screen? I need to see what I'm doing... NO! That's not what I meant! Please get off the keyboard! You're messing with my controls! Uh, this is a problem. Cat, can you please move? You can still be on the keyboard, but maybe not that key... no, that is still a bad key. Look, there's so much space to the side, you could- NO, THAT IS THE WORST POSSIBLE KEY YOU COULD PRESS! OH NO. NO. CAT, NO!

In case you want to skip the tutorial: WASD/Arrows to move, Shift to speed up, Space to fire. Destroy white ships for points, don't shoot at red ships.

The itch.io embed seems to have some odd problems, such as being unable to refocus the game after clicking outside, so you can also play the game here if you're encountering these (it's the same version as the one uploaded here, I promise): https://suyo.be/games/catno/

Created for the GMTK Game Jam 2020 (Theme: "Out Of Control").

Made with Phaser 2 CE, graphics made in GIMP, sounds via SFXR, BeepBox and me smashing on an old keyboard with a microphone next to it.

Font by Patrick Lauke via CC-BY 3.0 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/667357/carrier_command

~ SHORT POSTMORTEM THOUGHTS ~

I feel good about limiting the scope of the game extremely hard - drawing is not my forte, so keeping it to a very simple shmup left me enough time to spend a few hours on making sure the cat looks at least okay and even add some animations to it. I think it adds a lot of personality to it when it wags its tail while smugly staring you in the eyes. However I wish I had tested the game some more, there is one bug I still cannot reproduce consistently where the menus freak out and press all buttons at once, and in the end, I didn't have enough time to fix that.

Some more balancing on the spawns would've been nice too - right now, red ships are completly random, so some players might get really lucky and get none at all for a long time and can rack up a lot of points, while others can get three in one formation and lose points on it. I'm very happy about the difficulty ramp up though - it's very quick, but that keep play sessions short, lets the cat have more influence on the controls quicker and encourages replays.

Finally, while I picked the obvious "out of control means messing with the controls" interpretation of the theme which can easily get frustrating, after watching Mark's streams I feel like I got lucky on it. First, the key bindings stay the same, so it doesn't require the player to "rewire their brain" every few seconds as games where keys randomly change do. Instead, it's more about realizing which keys are "broken" and adjusting your key presses accordingly.

The other, big thing is adding the cat. Without a "virtual scapegoat" for the RNG, frustration about it quickly bleeds off on the actual game which leads to the player quickly quitting because they feel like the game itself is working against them. Instead, one can blame the cat for it - I noticed this when Mark played Clumsy Goblin, where, whenever the titular goblin would randomly move out of the way just before making contact with the ball, instead of vocalizing his frustration at the game ("really?", "come on..."), he said things like "oooh, you clumsy goblin...", which might just slightly make the player feel better about the game?

I guess another part about this is that every cat owner knows how this game feels in real life, too. Relatable content and such. Anyways, thanks for playing my game!