Never too late to update!

I'm deep into development on my next game, MicroCosmic, but Cataclysm is still the game that I bring to work for the kids to play whenever the opportunity comes. And every time I see them play, I think of things that I wish I had done differently (that are too baked-in to change), and things that I could update if I could muster the ambition.

It's a weird feeling to open up a much older version of Unity, and start mucking around with a "completed" project from years ago. But I've learned a lot in that time, so why not polish up a few little things that bug me about the game.

Breathing Bombs

Up until this update, I used colour to indicate the progress of a bomb's fuse. Red (or pink) yarn bombs would gradually turn darker red, and blue ones would turn darker blue. The problem is that the blue ones would become a little hard to see against the black background. This was a bit of a problem for the blue player as well. So I started by making both of those blues a lighter shade. Then, I scrapped the whole colour changing thing altogether. Instead, bombs will "breathe" when they are about to explode. I'm sure I've seen this in dozens of games before, and I should have done it a long time ago. I'm very happy with it.

Ghost Bomb: More ghost-y

I re-drew the ghost bombs to make them look more ghost-y. The visual wasn't reading, so I decided to double the size of the bomb to accommodate this. It doesn't have much of a gameplay impact except that I had to also make the detection range a little bigger. I also decided to remove the sprite that shows its detection range. It used to change colour to indicate who it was chasing, but this was both ugly and unnecessary. It's more fun when you don't know exactly where that threshold is for it to turn and chase you.

Roman/Arabic Numerals

I don't know why, but it felt very natural for me to display the cats' lives in Roman numerals. This was always a minor annoyance for the kids who haven't learned Roman numerals. You can now press 'N' to toggle between Roman and Arabic numerals.

Other small changes

Gauntlet (and its Remix) have been slightly modified. I might have made other small changes, but nothing exciting.

The future of Cataclysm

Two things that I still want to do: Update the Force Bomb's "force area" to get rid of the hideous sprites and replace them with particles, and fix the framerate dependency in the player movement. I spent a whole night trying to deal with the movement issue, and I still can't figure it out. I was so inexperienced when I started Cataclysm, and that was some of the first stuff I did. Eventually, I hope to work it out, but my priority is going to by my current project.

I've also been feeling bad about removing the Linux version (years ago) after being featured on a website for Linux games while that version was up. The issue was that I'm not experienced with Linux at all, so if something worked for me on Windows but not on Linux, the process of troubleshooting and fixing was too much. I heard that it had a minor display issue, and at a certain point, I updated the way that the UI displays, but I hadn't checked to see how that affected the Linux build. I also didn't have the time/energy to deal with it, so I just pulled it down. Maybe I'll give it another look at some point, but it's not like people are clamoring for it.

I hope that people are having fun with Cataclysm. Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions.