catpowered blog

Tom Palmer

📍 Portsmouth, England https://catpowered.net/

Developing my first game with NPC behaviours (fireSALE)

Context We (myself and Emmy) signed up for the UoP Game Jam this year with very few plans in advance, hoping one of the themes would inspire us when announced at the start of the jam. The university game jam was open to anyone, both remote and in person. I

Let's make a server to store all those replays!

I wanted the extra challenge and an excuse to learn Rust. This means we need to actually make a server to store this on!

Creating a binary format for game replay data

One of the features we wanted to implement in 'Don't Miss the Bell' was the ability for players to view "ghosts" (in-game replays), allowing them to learn from top player's techniques and routes.

Let's make a game manager singleton!

It's become pretty apparent that we're going to need a way to keep variables constant between scenes in our game for a variety of purposes. The first things that come to mind are sound/keybind settings, and keeping track of things such as game state such

It's all coming together! (game jam 2)

A lot has happened since I last posted! I've now implemented a much more aesthetically pleasing main menu, and we have sprites thanks to our artist Emmy! We also continued work on the new movement plan from my last post, and now have a flat level that I&

Prototyping a 2D character control system (game jam 2)

Over the last ~2 weeks, we have completed a prototype for how the movement in the game will feel, and have enough sprites to start representing what the game will look like in a finished state. My main contributions at this point have been towards the menu systems and support

Planning a Fighting game (game jam 2)

Over the course of the next month, myself and 4 others have been tasked with building a fighting game together. I'm looking forward to having a producer this time to allocate work properly, and avoiding the mistakes I made last time, especially relating to time management. We have

Spacebar Shuffle (one-button game jam)

In our games development module we were tasked with developing a one-button game in groups of two. My main contributions were towards 'mapping' out the music my partner made, creating a way to load 'maps' in-engine, and synchronising the notes displayed on screen with the audio