Hey Lucid! Any more work on the engine so far?

Sorry I haven't posted here in a while. I have much more free time now. I'll have to put up some art in a sec.

yeah, the world tilting thing would be awesome but i would probably only do it unless you're going for the iphone... i don't know, you might as well try it out and see how it works.

yeah that's true. aspect ratio can be a pain though as far as level design goes

i have so much art i don't know what to show you! lol

Lucid - sounds awesome. I suck at programming anyways so I could do the design and artwork, as well as promotional stuff and direction and stuff.

As far as art styles go - I have quite a few ideas. One is just cartoonish and pleasing to the eye. The other is completely made of shred paper - making the game look like a "collage" and the katamari looking awesome. Another is to clay-animate the entire world. This would look AMAZING but be perhaps more work than it's worth. And the final idea is to go with the retro, 8-bit look. I lean towards the shred paper, with the Katamari being a giant wad of paper (starting out as a crumpled paper ball)

I agree. Short but sweet is what I'd like to aim for. It should be very polished. Serving as a construct business card sounds great to me. Let's establish a small team and maybe set up a forum for the team to discuss the progress?

Something important is to determine the aspect ratio of the game. I for sure want to use 16:9 but I'm not sure of the actual pixel sizes.

What I'd love to do someday is make a game similar to this for the iPhone using tilt controls

You guys want to form a little team to try and make this game? I think it's be great fun and an interesting experiment that could test the power of Construct.

We don't have to but I can't do this stuff on my own and you guys are awesome. haha.

Lucid - What I'm concerned about is... with private variables or whatever they're called, we should be able to have a large family of pickupables that all add different amounts of size to the katamari, right?

Well in the final product I'd like the katamari to take up more of the screen than it does now so it'd be pretty important that it moves slower, but yeah I want to at least add the dash move. Not sure if we'll need to climb walls, the game will probably be pretty straight forwards (literally. i mean horizontal) But the dash would be great, with some nice motion blur in there too.

smashing into things and losing pieces, absolutely. I may just make "junk" sprites that fly off your Katamari so we don't have to deal with actual pieces falling off the katamari. Unless there's an easy way to do this. It'd be nice if there was, so you could pick them back up again.

Ahhh, the blur makes a lot of sense now. And yeah your second method sounds much easier.

updated with zoom out feature, and large area to drop down and get alot of stickies to test out zooming out

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1013446/katama.cap

EDIT: there's a glitch where if you get alot of stickies at the same time your ball starts acting weird, if you press space, you can see it's because more than one ball spawned and the invisible balls are hitting eachother. fun stuff

This is amazing, I love what you're doing. The zoom seems to work very well and the katamari itself is also working well.

I noticed that glitch on your last upload. Somewhere, the deletion and re-insertion of invisible balls messes it up. Perhaps you can add a code that deletes any balls that aren't the "main" ball, by allowing no more than one in the playfield.

Also, the ball rolls too fast and too spinnish, it needs to be slower, more like the katamari and less like a car tire... and one thing that concerns me still is how, with all these events, this is going to work with tons of different pickupable objects.

By the "katamari sphere" you mean the invisible one right?

[quote:1n2t5mi2]The balls dimensions should be determined (somehow) by measuring the inner most pixel diameter of all the objects combined.

Here lies the problem...

May I first say you guys (especially lucid) are my fuggin' superheroes for being so damned helpful! You blow away the Clickteam community : D

now, ON TO THE KATAMARI! : O

okay, the problem about the circle enlarging is that it will pick up stuff the katamari isn't touching. So really the only way to do this is to "simulate" the sticking? I guess? I don't know.

everybody watch the video. my mind is broken. D:

I'm thinking of ditching the wobble thing. As nice as it is I've been messing around and I can't seem to find a system that doesn't break the way the original katamari moves.

That file isn't working xiao, btw.

I guess I suck at dropbox. D:

I must say, you guys are a lot more helpful than those at Clickteam forums.

Totally agree - this is like the most helpful community ever.

Okay, did all that and we have this:

https://dl-web.getdropbox.com/get/katam ... w=bea387b8

Works as it should. What I still don't understand is the ability to have these things (katamaris) grow. I'm not entirely sure myself of how it would work conceptually, not just on Construct. I tried adding the size value of the pickup to the size value of the ball when it picks it up but it didn't work out so well. The ball just awkwardly picked up things way out of its reach. Perhaps it's because in the events, things are still sticking to the red ball and not the green one? (The green one is the invisible one in my example.)

Also, the grouping problem. As it is right now, I don't see a way to be able to have stuff stick to the ball without needing to code every single object - the group thing doesn't work because the actions apply to the entire group.

it all makes sense

you'd be surprised how nice the wobble would feel

load up the original katamari thing I posted

and stretch the katamari a little bit

so it's an oval and then run a preview

it has a nice feel to it

very katamariesque <---that's a real word, look it up

That's true, it's a very nice feel.... hmm...

Well I think that what's most important is getting the invisible circle idea to work, and if it does, then maybe the wobble and oval thing will come next.

I'm pretty sure the katamari in the original video i posted has no wobble at all and it still functions fine...

This invisible circle... how can this work? I understand the concept, just not how it would be done.

The invisible circle needs to be the one picking up the objects, but they'd appear to stick on the real ball. I think this mechanic, once mastered, would fuel the whole game and it'd be easier from there...

Perhaps the circle should not be a physics object at all, but rather a platformer object that is somewhat "bouncy"? I'm not even sure if the katamari has physics on the video..