Hi fella!. Happy to talk with you again and in this occasion I want to let you know that we made a brand new game for Web Browsers! that’s right! you can play it with installation needed and for free!

What is UFO Catching?

This game was made for a Game Jam hosted by Game Maker Studio and Opera GX and as you can guess with the thematic “UFO”. My approach to this jame was make a totally different take of the thematic “UFO” and avoid make cliche things like, and UFO abducting animals, people, or an UFO shooting to asteroids or other UFOs, etc. Not saying that those games are bad, but my idea was to grab the UFO theme and push it further.

How I came with this idea?

I was watching a guy on YouTube who live in Japan and he went to a local arcade and he started to play on those claw machines and one of them spot my attention and he mentioned the name of that machine “Maquinas UFO” or by it’s translation in English “UFO Machines“, so I dediced take those famous “UFO Claw machines” from Japan and make the game about that and adding the base elements of the jam (endless mode, 2 player based game, highscore based). In this game you controll the claw to grab the planets that are moving right to left on different speeds and each planet give you different amount of points, just make sure of don’t grab the trap ones because you can get stuned, with one life less and so on. Also you can lose lifes by missing the grab and crush on the floor.

How did I make the game?

Ok let’s get us a bit technical. This game was made under 16h (since I noticed the jam a couple days before the end of submissions) and we use some tricks in order to make it fast. The sprites were made on aseprite using indexed color scheme and the animation tags to separate the animations. Inside Game Maker Studio we used the 9 slide feature in order to achieve the stretch effect in the base of the claw. The claw that you see in game both players are the same object with different parameters, so if the say: this claw is the “P1” the object will take only the input set for the Player 1 and so on. With this we reuse the time a lot by just creating one player and using it for both only changing some attributes.

About the sounds we used a page called freesound.org where you can find a lot of free sounds effects and even music for your projects. The major pain point was the main music theme, I’m not a producer and is my weak point, but I found the song called ENERGETIC CHIPTUNE by Context-Sensitive. This song was free to use and fit amazingly on the game.

Did I win the jam?

Yes but no, I win a lot of experience once again and I learned that is possible to come up with good ideas sometimes and make them happen!. My time is really limited having 3 jobs and making this game was a real challenge. Also is good to mention that I counted with the help of a work mate to make the workflow faster. Congratulations for all the winners and I’ll defenitely participate in more game jams!

Yeah but, Where can I play it?

Hey! thanks for asking me.. I guess. You can play it for free on my gamejolt page :).

What do you think about the game?

Feel free to leave a comment down with your feedback or on the gamejolt page, please give a follow to the game and my profile to see the news about the game.


0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *