Bubbles the Cat
Bubbles the Cat - Anniversary Sale supporting RE-PLAY 2020
One of the massive perks of being an indie game dev is that there are no barriers to be able to use my videogame to help other people through supporting charity events; and with the world the way currently is, I definitely feel that there are others who need help far more than I do.
So from the 9th-16th April, Bubbles the Cat on Steam is not only 50% off, but I will be donating ALL money made from sales of the game during this period to @WarChildUK as part of their RE-PLAY 2020 campaign.
War Child is a charity that supports children in war-torn regions of the world. They protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children caught in conflict. You can find out more information, support them and check out great streaming events at their Tiltify page.
Please also check out the other amazing games on sale during this period!
Thanks very much - and stay safe!
Bubbles the Cat Version 1.0.0.16
Controller Vibration
If you're playing Bubbles the Cat with a controller with vibration functionality, you should notice this is now supported for most in-game actions!
- Controller vibration can be turned on or off in Options -> Control Options. By default, it's enabled.
- Please note that this feature is only active whilst using a controller to play the game - this is to prevent you from jumping out of your seat when your controller vibrates and you're not expecting it!
Visual Accessibility Options
These options can be found in Options -> Display Options -> Visual Accessibility Options. These can all be changed mid gameplay without requiring you to back out to the main menu and take effect as soon as you select them.
- Change Laser Colour - Should aid players with colourblindness.
- Screen Flashes - Although used sparingly and never with a quick repeating pattern, some players may wish to eliminate all screen flashes entirely.
- Background Detail - Colourblindness or being distracted by animated elements may make the game challenging to play for some players. Consider using this option to reduce background detail.
- Food Animation - Some players may find the flashing cat food animation distracting. This will completely disable this animation without impacting gameplay.
Difficulty Balancing
A small selection of levels very early in the game have had their par times adjusted to be slightly easier to attain - these were a little out of step with the overall difficulty progression.
- World 1-8 par time increased from 27.5 to 29 seconds.
- World 1-10 par time increased from 31.5 to 33 seconds.
- World 1-11 par time increased from 12 to 12.5 seconds.
Bug Fixes
- Slightly widened trenches in World X-9 to make these less nightmarish to use.
- Fixed an issue where pursuing spike walls were playing their sound at full volume. This now varies based on your distance from the wall.
- It is now possible to use the keyboard to back out of the controller rebind screen.
The Bubbles Breakdown
It’s been a little over four months since Bubbles was released on Steam; it’s now out on three platforms and that’s given me enough time to assess what I think went well with the game and what didn’t.
With thanks to Jojoo for this art! Check out the rest of her work here!
What Was Bubbles’ Goal?
Before we dive into the breakdown, it’s important to understand what I was hoping to achieve by developing Bubbles. It was - first and foremost - a learning project for me. I was learning a lot about how to program a game on the job and I’d never released a game on Steam before. I was also managing outsource myself and performing daily, more menial business stuff.
That said, it was important to me that I made a good game - that is to say a critically well-received game. With no-one else to answer to, this meant I’m entirely responsible for ensuring whether the game is fun or not.
It was - crucially - not the game I had picked to make millions of dollars. Platformers are kind of notorious for being hard to stand out on any of the big storefronts unless you do something really, REALLY special; I certainly don’t have the budget or time to compete with games like Celeste!
I’m very glad that I picked this route, as I’d read many times that you should never make your first project your dream game as you will inevitably make mistakes.
What Went Well!
- The game is - at the time of writing, at least - critically well-regarded.
The game has received some fantastic write-ups from the gaming press, including Kotaku UK, TechRadar, 148Apps, Pocketgamer and Keengamer. It also has good reviews on Steam and other platforms and a lot of YouTube and Twitch content creators who play the game seem to be enjoying themselves!
I’m really happy that I managed to make a fun game above all else.
- The prototyping went well. I managed to come up with a fun game pretty quickly and iterate on mechanics that worked well (the different bubble powerups) and strip out those that didn’t (the Lemmings-esque puzzle/platforming aspect).
Getting this right early paid massive dividends later on as it made level design so much easier. I’ve previously worked on projects where these elements weren’t quite right at prototyping and you have to resolve these gameplay elements around content that has already been built; suffice to say, this approach costs you time, money and sanity.
- The project was a good fit for my goals - I got to develop a decent understanding of coding, learn about what was involved in publishing a game to Steam (and what to avoid) and found out just how much other stuff is involved around making games that isn’t er, actually making games - e.g. doing tax returns, contacting people, going to events, social media management etc.
- Music was an amazingly good fit. Although I initially wanted a more pure chiptune soundtrack to fit with the rest of the game, I trusted Dan’s judgement and it absolutely paid off. Trust your experts.
- The game is reasonably polished. Barring a handful of weird, relatively minor issues with the cat customisation options, the game seemed to launch without any horrendous bugs that caused crashing, lost saves or progress issues.
- The game has decent level design (with some exceptions) - players seemed to by and large get what I wanted them to do and I think there are some levels that have a cool, fun and creative theme to them.
I wish I’d cut some of the fat off a few levels and done more of them - perhaps having 30 levels per world, but have them be about a third to half of their current length.
- The Boosts feature got a lot of love. I’m absolutely delighted with this as I’ve heard a lot of players say that they enjoyed the game when they might not have been able to do so. Accessibility was always a very important part of the game’s design and development to me and I’m thrilled that I’ve been successful here.
I actually only wish I’d expanded this further with features like a rewind function, on-demand savestates or the ability to reduce the game speed.
This will continue to be a core pillar for each project I work on.
What Didn’t Go So Well
- Level design went slower than expected. I'd budgeted about a day per level, but that excluded difficulty balancing which happened later on and doing an art pass. These art passes took way longer than anticipated and didn’t factor into prototyping. I should have done at least one level with a full art pass and then re-evaluated my estimates here.
- The game is too difficult in general. At the time of writing, I think something like 3-5% of players will see the end of the game in some form or other. This is supported by the game’s achievements breakdown (though it’s not quite the full story as it doesn’t include players who use boosts to complete certain worlds):
I wanted to create a game that would get challenging towards the end, but it seems I overdid this with the World 3 levels in particular being a big, big spike in difficulty - only 7% of players finished it!
This partly came about as I ended up committing most levels to muscle memory whilst making them. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of me being completely unable to judge difficulty. Luckily, I had some friends who helped me test the game, but I probably should have seen more alarm bells when people weren’t progressing much past World 3.
I was able to tone down some of the more punishing aspects of some levels in updates to the game, but I also didn’t want to make sweeping structural changes to levels when the game has a time attack component to it.
- This one is hopefully not visible to players, but my UI code is appalling. I’m hardly the best programmer as it is, but every time I wanted to change something in the UI, it was a serious headache and this probably added at least a week’s worth of work. I should have refactored this rather than trying and hodgepodge a lot of clunky fixes together.
- As mentioned towards the top of this breakdown; from the point of view of picking a game to make an untold fortune, this wasn’t the game to pick. I think beyond being incredibly hard to stand out as a platformer on Steam (with incredibly stiff competition from the likes of Celeste and Super Meat Boy), the game was positioned somewhat awkwardly.
Specifically, I suspect that more hardcore gamers would see the adorable art style and single button controls and think the game would be too simplistic for them. More casual gamers would see the terrifying World X levels and think the game is way too hard for them.
Whilst this is validation of how hard World X looks, I think this is indicative of the fact some people might have been put off by the game!
My trailers attempted to appeal to both, but perhaps it would have been better to release two trailers focusing on different aspects of the game.
My marketing push didn’t go particularly well. I think I started it too late (I started pushing the game about a month before launch and sent out very few pre-release versions) and didn’t spend enough time looking into content creators to share the game with. I also think they needed a bigger lead time on making videos.
I also don’t think I did a great job with the emails I sent out - whilst I tried to cut down on the text, I think embedding a few GIFs would have been a somewhat easy win and resulted in a higher hit rate.
For the next project, I should aim to have a solid preview build ready well in advance with the caveat that certain features may be added or polished before launch. I should also look to contact and get the press interested at this point too!
Things I’ve Learned:
- Continue to prototype gameplay early and rapidly, but don’t forget to do a full level to final visual quality for estimates!
- Build on the accessibility options from this game and better control the next game’s difficulty curve.
- Develop a UI framework ahead of time for the next game rather than make… whatever monstrosity I produced for Bubbles. Yuck.
- Better marketing messaging - be more clear with what kind of game I’m making, get copies into the hands of content creators sooner, get the Steam page up earlier.
What’s Next for Team Cats & Bears?
My next plan is to do a bit of freelance work to build up the coffers and supplement the income I’ve made from Bubbles and then prototype the next game. Once I’ve got something visually presentable, I’ll be happy to show you all!
Thanks for reading! I hope this has been useful. If you've been linked this outside of Steam and want to check the game out, here's a handy little widget to do so:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/945580/
Bubbles the Cat Version 1.0.0.5
Today sees the release of version 1.0.0.5 which brings cloud saves and tweaks to the game’s difficulty, including some more notorious levels.
Cloud Saves
- The game now cloud saves. Existing saves will be converted to this new format and your progress will be shared across all your Steam-enabled computers!
- Please note that the game will upload and use your save data from the first computer you load the game on. If you have played the game on multiple computers, to ensure your progress is correctly synced, please load the game from the computer which has progressed the furthest!
Difficulty Balancing
- World 2-10 par time increased from 18.5 to 19 seconds.
- World 3-7 par time increased from 37 to 37.5 seconds.
- World X-23 par time increased from 38 to 38.5 seconds.
- World 3-10 bonus area tweaked to be less obnoxious.
- World 4-5 bonus area lasers slowed down.
- World 4-15 middle section opened out to make it easier to dodge charge-lasers.
- World X-21 tweaked in multiple places to make timing required less precise.
- World X-22 end section tweaked by removing a troublesome spikeball.
- World X-23 second half tweaked by slowing down the spike-wall speed transition.
Bug Fixes
<*> Resolved an issue where hat options weren’t being correctly saved if the player didn’t complete a level.
Thanks for playing Bubbles - please let me know on the discussion forums if you encounter any issues with the new version or have any more feedback.
Post-Launch Update
I’ve taken a break after the game’s launch to recharge and work out what my next steps are (with some work on Bubbles here and there when I get the chance). Here’s a quick update on what’s coming up next for Bubbles!
Cloud Saves
I was hoping to get this in for launch, but was a little worried about breaking the save game system so close to launch without being able to give this a very good test.
The update containing this feature should be going live within the next week or so! You can sync your save game across multiple different machines or even get the save game back if you uninstall the game!
Difficulty Balancing
From seeing folks play the game and some of the feedback I’ve got, it looks like I’ve overtuned the difficulty of a few of the game’s levels - particularly in World 3 and beyond. I’ll be looking at making minor tweaks to a few levels to make them a little less crushing.
To be clear, these should be very minor tweaks to levels - spikes rejigged, lasers slowed down and so forth. I don't want to create unbeatable times for levels due to my changes if I can possibly help it.
I’ll likely be rolling this update out at the same time as Bubbles arrives on other platforms. Oh yeah, speaking of which...
Other Platforms
I’m looking to get Bubbles over to a few other platforms! Soon you’ll be able to play Bubbles on your phone - the game fits well on mobile devices given the control scheme and the short levels! I can’t wait to show you the first screenshots of the game running on a phone.
How GameMaker & Tom Francis Changed My Life and Might Change Yours Too
Inspired by my friend Simon at Inexplicable Games who had also recently also quit his games industry job to become a full-time indie game dev, he pointed me to a video series done by Tom Francis of Gunpoint and Heat Signature fame that introduced how Game Maker works. You can check it out here.
I’d sat on a Game Maker Studio license for about 2 or 3 years by this point, having purchased it from a Humble bundle and figured that well, perhaps now would be the time to do something with it and regain my love of making games.
For my day job, I had mostly used Unity and with my existing programming skills being somewhere between ‘non-existent’ and ‘criminally embarrassing’, this video series was well pitched, with Tom getting straight to the meat and potatoes of making a game rather than coding theory. It was terrifically easy to follow and I got through the series in about a week.
By the time I’d watched the last video, I decided to try making my own small game, a side-scrolling shmup that I made over the course of about 2 weeks, doing a couple of hours work each evening. I completed the small game and felt hugely accomplished.
On and off over the next couple of years, I’d dip in and out of Game Maker, creating small projects to enjoy making something simple and creatively liberating, whilst slowly improving my programming skills to the dizzying heights of ‘not that great’.
An opportunity arose at the end of 2017 to take a year off work and see what I could do on my own and I took it. Just a little over 12 months after I left my job, I’ve just released Bubbles the Cat to the world. And I absolutely loved the process.
You might also have considered making games, but perhaps been held back or dissuaded by the following worries:
“I have no idea how to program and it looks incredibly scary / I’ve bounced off previous attempts to learn.”
So did I! The video series is very well pitched at complete coding novices and GameMaker takes away some of the more frustrating elements of programming. Plus, there is a tonne of resources you can use to help you when you get stuck (more on that below).
“Bad MSPaint drawings are the height of my artistic talent.”
Mine too. There was a reason I hired freelance artists to take care of that! That’s fairly expensive though and hardly practical for making smaller experimental projects and there’s only so much excitement you can get drawing red circles or cubes wandering around featureless environments.
My suggestion would be to initially start using something like opengameart.org and freesound.com for access to a wide selection of royalty-free assets. If you want to spend a little money, you could consider something like Kenney’s assets, which may prove more cohesive in style.
“I’d love to make my own stuff, but I don’t have the time/energy.”
This one is hard as if you’re not happy in what you’re doing from 9-5, it’s extraordinarily difficult to have enough energy to fire up an editor when you get back home (especially if you’ve been doing it all day already!)
I found the best success in spending an hour each weekday evening working on small learning projects - and no more than that to mitigate burning out. Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day (you almost certainly will, what with other life commitments) - just get back on it the next day.
Another tip that can help you manage your projects and give you more bite-sized goals than ‘make an entire game’ is to use something like Trello to give yourself shorter, achievable goals like ‘implement player collision’ or ‘add player inventory’.
“I want make this really amazing game that does basically everything, but I find getting there too frustrating.”
When I was around 12 years old, I wanted to make a massive JRPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay, branching overlapping story and a massively deep and intricate combat system. I’d written a grotesquely enormous design document and if I could just get a solid engine, how hard could it be?
That game did not come to fruition.
It’s easy to get into a mindset where you picture a grandiose epic and that becomes the only thing you want to make; but it’s also easy to get discouraged at how long the project takes or if things don’t quite match up to your vision - especially from a low experience level.
Starting with smaller projects or prototypes and incrementing scope and complexity with each one allows you to get a better handle for the tools you’re using works, where your strengths and weaknesses lie and will allow you to finish stuff!
“I’ve hit a roadblock and I might as well stop developing now, I clearly can’t do this.”
Getting stuck on a problem can be enormously discouraging - you feel like nobody else is going to have the same issue and that there’s no way you can get around the problem.
Again, starting with small projects means that there’s less that can go wrong and makes it easier to track down issues and growing pains you have when you learn any project - for example, mishaps with collisions are easier to track down when it’s a simple whitebox room.
For Game Maker specifically, there’s a whole bunch of useful resources I found that got me out of pretty much any jam I found:
r/gamemaker Reddit
GameMaker Discord
Some helpful Youtube channels:
PixelatedPope
Shaun Spaulding
Heartbeast
If you’ve been idly (or perhaps not-so-idly) contemplating making a game, I hope this gives you the push you need to do it, as Tom Francis’ tutorials once did for me!
Devlog #8 - Welcome to World X
Unlocking
World X levels are unlocked in a different way to the regular levels - you need to have a certain number of platinum stars. Platinum stars are earned by getting all three stars in a level in a single, smooth run - usually meaning you need to find secret areas and take more difficult routes.
World 4-9 has two little bonus cubbyholes that requires tightly timed jumps to get all the food!
Fire & Flames
World X uses an angry, red version of each respective world to produce a very different looking level:
World 1 and World X-1
World 3 and World X-11
Mechanics from each ‘parent’ world are also used here, often in new, far more challenging ways.
Here’s some raised/retracting spikes from World 2. Lots of time to think about how you want to proceed and a generous window to hop up from.
Here’s the same hazard in World X. There is no rest, no safety, no sanctuary.
As such, the X levels are unlocked in tandem with their corresponding world. The difficulty curve is intended such that these are a significant step up from the main progression, but aren’t immediately oppressive - though it ramps up very quickly.
What Should I Expect?
Lots of hazards and lots of KOs. A LOT of KOs.
A goal I had in mind for the game from the very beginning was to keep the restart process down to a couple of seconds so you get straight back into the game if you make a mistake - moreover, there’s also a single quick-restart button (‘R’ on keyboard, back/select button on controllers) that allows you to instantly re-attempt a level if you miss some food.
As for more specific expectations:
- Almost all levels will have a zero tolerance for any wasted bubbles - you’re expected to get the absolute most from each jump you make.
- Most levels will expect you to know Bubbles’ platforming behaviour and won’t provide food to guide you - you’ll need your knowledge of the game’s systems alone to make it through!
- Although there are quite a few levels that are about brutal precision and game mechanics, there are a couple that will get you to use your bubble powers in fresh, new ways - for instance, this level has you use the Waller to hold your jump over a laser.
And the Reward?
Well, hopefully this will appeal to and satisfy players who want a brutal, punishing challenge that will stretch their skills to the limit.
The game has always been designed to have a satisfying conclusion no matter how you play - but the game will note the efforts taken to complete these levels and there’s some special treats for those players…!
Will you be the first to obtain all 375 platinum stars? Good luck!
Thanks for reading! The game is due to launch very soon on April 12th, so if you like what you read and haven’t already, go wishlist the game! In the meantime, you can also follow the game's development on Twitter, where I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game or game development in general.
Bubbles the Cat releases April 12th!
The game will launch on Steam April 12th!
Bubbles looks forward to seeing you all then!
Devlog #7 - Boosts!
Difficulty & Being A Kid
Back when I was growing up in the late 80s, games were punishingly hard with a requirement to beat whole games without any sort of save or continue system and with very limited checkpoints; usually meaning starting from the beginning after a game over. Thankfully, this isn’t so much of a problem for most games these days as game design has moved forward to give players more frequent checkpointing whilst still preserving individually challenging segments.
However, when I was a very young kid, even this might not have helped much - I didn’t really get the concept of accurately landing jumps and couldn’t really see patterns through levels. I just liked making the on-screen characters run around a brightly coloured world, and that’s something I still see whenever I’m with kids playing a game - the act of just controlling something is joy enough.
Usin' the Boost to Get Through
To this end - and for players who would otherwise stop playing the game completely on reaching a point of frustration - Boosts allow you to give yourself infinite bubbles, full invincibility or even skip a level entirely. These can be turned off again at any time, so if there’s one particular section you just can’t beat and want to get past it, but then play as normal, this will give you that option.
Here's a very tricky section of a World X level without invincibility...
...and here it is with invincibility!
With infinite bubbles, you can fly over levels, which is pretty fun in of itself!
You can play through the entire game if you so wish with Boosts enabled, without having any of the main game restricted. At present, you don’t earn stars or achievements while using Boosts, blocking access to some hats and the unlockable super hard bonus levels - though I’m kind of on the fence about keeping cosmetics locked! What do you think? Should I loosen these requirements a little?
The Other End of the Spectrum
...and for those of you who are thinking this all sounds like it makes the game too easy, I’ve got something for you lot too. Check out the next devlog for information on the ultra difficult World X Levels - follow and wishlist the game to get these updates as soon as they’re out!
You can also follow the game's development on Twitter, where I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game or game development in general.
Until next time!
Johnny
Team Cats & Bears
Devlog #6 - Super Slick Platforming
Pre-emptive Inputs
After I decided to go with the approach of making the game a single button platformer, a lot of elements from previous prototyping seemed to fit into place. But the game was still frustrating to control in specific circumstances.
As a very quick reminder, you can spawn and jump off a bubble up to six times before needing to land on a solid surface to replenish them instantly. Wall jumping doesn’t consume one of your six bubbles and thus, judicious use of wall jumps is required in later levels to help ration your extra bounces.
Therefore, when something like this happened…
...or maybe you just pressed jump JUST as you were landing…
...needless to say, this was massively frustrating. You’ve used up a bubble and have been punished for something that's more of a technicality than a fun gameplay mechanic. Ugh.
This actually isn’t particularly difficult to fix and simply involves looking ahead a few pixels at the time the jump button is pressed and treating the input as a ‘normal’ jump rather than a bubble jump if a solid surface is ahead of the player. This is something worth considering if you have a double jump system in your own game!
Here's how it looks afterwards:
Much better, quicker, smoother-feeling wall jumping!
There's only 12 pixels in it, but that makes a huge difference to the game considering a jump as 'landed' and means no frustrating KOs!
Mantling
This one is more common in platform games these days, but it’s well worth considering if you’re also developing one. In very early prototypes, if Bubbles jumped towards a ledge but was juuust short of reaching the top, Bubbles would wall grab it instead, which a) looks ridiculous and b) is infuriating.
This was resolved by having Bubbles mantle the ledge if you’re close enough to the top of a ledge, making this waaaaay more fluid.
...but there’s a little more logic in place to prevent you from doing this if mantling would lead you into spikes as this would also be a big cause of frustration.
The player gently gets pushed down onto the block - looks a little silly if you're paying attention, but is so much better than climbing head-first into some spikes uncontrollably.
Keepin’ the Flow
What these all hopefully contribute to is a much smoother, less frustrating platformer - the idea should be if you miss the jump, you definitely missed it.
It’s also worth noting that some of these techniques also have minor speedrunning implications as if you nail your timing, you can leap away from walls fractionally earlier or climb up when you "shouldn’t" be able to. I’m really looking forward to seeing how speedrunners will break my levels!
Thanks for reading! These articles are a pretty regular feature that I'm running up to the game’s launch. You can keep up to date on when I do these devlogs by wishlisting the game. You can also follow the game's development on Twitter, where I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game or game development in general.
Until next time!
Johnny
Team Cats & Bears