itch.io

Oh, thanks for mentioning your Dev log.

I might have missed it, which would have been extremely sad.

A super relaxing game.

It puts you in a good mood ,

except when it's over, you wish Tsuneko Apple 2 and 3 had already been released.

The world needs more positive games like this.

Here are a few screenshots,  spoiler warning!

Thank you very much James , you put it very aptly. If there isn't already a review from you there, I would be very happy if you could write the same on steam. I can't emphasize enough how much positive reviews help offset the demotivating effect of steam trolls and people who haven't even tried to understand the game. But back to the topic. I think the points you mentioned are a result of me wanting to make a game that is unpredictable and surprising even for veteran gamers like me, but still contains many of the things I appreciate about the classics.

After almost 30 years of intense video game experience in which I have owned every console available in europe and played most of the popular games, I found it a shame that only a few extensive games are still uncompromisingly individual but instead often just plagiarize successful design.

That's why, at the risk of some inexperienced gamers thinking I don't know anything about design, I wanted to create something designed with love that counteracts this trend, just like earlier indie games, and frees players from the routine so that their passion for video games doesn't grow cold.

I hope my reply was not too verbose.

Yes, this game and "Bobo The Cat" were made with Game Maker. I used it for everything but the music and sfx. 

Thank you very much. I am still happy about every player and every positive feedback.   :3

I also wanted to congratulate you guys on your great work. I just played through the game on Xbox Series X. I'm not usually that interested in cooking games, however cooking the original Indian food was very varied and interesting. I had a lot of fun. But what motivated me the most was the story. From the very beginning, I was rooting for the characters and worried about their future. Although I have never been in a similar situation, I could always empathize with their complex feelings.

For me, the length of the game was just right, but I have to say that I would probably feel differently if I had paid full price. That's my only criticism.

Sorry, I bought it at the Nintendo e-shop. You can only give away physical copies or e-shop gift cards. Unfortunately, this game is not available as a physical copy or as a download code (as far as I know). So you can only recommend the game.

The puzzles are incredibly clever. It's very satisfying every time you solve one. The game is very relaxing despite the difficulty. I made it to level 5 and it took me a shamefully long time. I only solved puzzle 4 by chance ^^ But thanks to the level select option I will certainly try to continue where I left off at some point. 

thank you :3

I'm very pleased that you enjoyed the game. I designed it so that the side quests are as varied as possible, but I never expected that most players would 100% complete it. Thank you for taking the time to do this, it means a lot to me and motivates me to work  on the sequel even harder.

Have you ever tested a keyboard/controller with macros function or a program to write scripts for keyboards? I'm not familiar with it, but I've read that many gamers use stuff like that. So this might be one solution. But in general I would recommend to play the game with a controller, because you run with the trigger buttons, which you always have to hold down in racing games as well. I could go on why controllers are better for the health of your joints but I do not want to annoy anyone^^

Yes, it is at least as long as most full-priced metroidvanias. I don't think any speedrunner in the world can do it in 30 minutes. Under 5 hours would be a huge achievement even with glitches, which don't seem to exist so far.You're making good progress though. I'd say you've completed about 75% of the main game.

I'm not quite sure, but I think you mean the circuit keys needed in the crystal castle. This is optional. To get further you have to go to the left where the waterfall is. There you have to swim up the pool of water from the bottom to build up momentum so you can jump high enough. The rainforest leads to the ruins. 

Oh yeah, in the rainforest you also get an ability, so I have to correct myself. 

It's the first ability you will learn after the catacombs. It's in the rainforest ruins.

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, the game has a rather classical difficulty level as known from older games. I have already noticed that not everyone likes that.

The lives are saved,  but only down rounded  50% of the maximum lives are replenished (if I remember correctly). For example 2 of 5 ,  3 of 6 .

I am currently working on Bobo The Cat 2 and there are 3 difficulty levels there. On the standard difficulty all lives will be replenished at checkpoints. Also, when you die you are only reset to the checkpoint, but you don't lose any upgrades or solved puzzles.

What I want to say: For Bobo The Cat 1 I didn't want to compromise, because I wanted my first game to be 100% like I imagined it, but for the sequel I listen to the critics of the players.

Backtracking is possible in Bobo The Cat by the way but not immediately.  I wouldn't recommend it  before you learned the fast travel function anyway.

I think I am the only noob who was stupid enough to press alt+f4. I love the humor of your games.  It also has an interesting feel to it that your first ability is to move along the ceiling. Also speed and jump upgrades are of course always great :3 .Not entirely without self praise I can also say that cats are great so it was nice to talk to them.

Thank you, I did not know about this statistic. It's very helpful.

Nice to hear/read from you. I'm very glad you like my little game. Originally, more spinoffs were in the works and completely planned out, but I need a break from release anxiety etc. , to fully concentrate on the development of my next big game. I'll see if I can find any logic holes in the code of the fur balls. I reprogrammed everything from scratch for this game, because I thought I should adopt a more conventional programming style. But basically my own way of programming worked better.

Yes, the Tsuneko room is very heartwarming, as is the cute drawing style of Tunegoro :)

Sorry for the inconvenience.   I guess this might be caused by Windows Defender.  Had the same problem with my first game. Windows doesn`t trust Game Maker, Itch.io or anybody.  You might look if it is in quarantine. Also make sure to unzip the file before starting it.  If nothing helps you can try running the browser version https://gx.games/en/games/gvnext/first-cat-on-the-moon-starring-bobo-the-cat/   it doesn`t work as good as the .exe version but it should work.

Sorry my bad. I had found around 15 levels. I didn't think there would be 27. Somehow I had the impression that I could no longer reach new levels, no matter which exitflag I took and I was too proud to activate the easy mode. Have now tried it again with infinite jumps and after a while I found a few more rooms.

The theme song you chose is very emotional and fitting.

I would have liked to see more levels and photos of Snake. He seems like a cool cat, I'm sure we would have been best friends. My heart goes out to every cat owner who has to go through such a difficult situation.

I hope this is interesting instead of just offtopic and I apologize in advance, but in Bobo The Cat there was originally a snake too. As an Easteregg under a cardboard box before the first stealth section. I guess you get the joke. I deleted it though so as not to distract the players. 

Interesting  I thought the first room is harder to find. ^_^

You're right, i wouldn't have thought of that, as i thought people know best what graphics settings they need to use, but i think i'll add that they should first test if the pc is running in performance mode and if the dedicated graphics card is being used.

Thank you this is very helpful. It is reassuring that most people are well equipped. I'm currently testing the final Full HD resolution for Bobo 2 and have already designed tiles, sprites, lighting, weather effects, day and night cicle and backgrounds for it. It looks like the final graphics will consume 20-27% of my GPU so it would be less than 75% for you. I decided to use at most 2 shaders per room.  One for water/fire and one for background effects. Everything else is not worth neglecting potential players. 

And I am happy that you collected all lives :)

Yes the game could use a little more depth but I didn't want to exhaust the full potential yet, it's just a foretaste. My next game will also introduce a lot of cool features but won't fully exploit them yet. 

In any case, I'm very glad you were able to enjoy your trip. Did you find the secret section without help?

I originally wanted to leave out the charged furball so that it would be more surprising in Bobo 2, but I left it in so that players would have something to discover.

I shouldn't admit this, but the stairs thing was a bit lazy and I knew that.  At that point it is helpful to use the cat sense to see the gap. 

Thank you for enjoyed the game and I am very grateful for your support.

Thank you for the nice comment. I would describe  the scratch dash/tornado as a sprint but if you mean a run button, it's the same button as the dash. Holding the button makes you run and pressing it makes you dash. I didn't make a tutorial because it's part of the fun  to find out yourself. You don't need the charged furballs for this spirit container, there is a second method. You can stack small furballs on the left or right high ground. It's completely optional to discover the charge ability. I was even more surprised that tunegoro found out that you can defeat invincible enemies with it, didn't expect anyone to discover this already.  Thanks for spreading the word :3

Also, I'm very glad you spent so much time playing the game. 

it's true that you have a lot of abilities at the beginning, but you can see the key assignments in the options and you can also experiment a lot. if you don't collect the extras, you can play through the game without most of the abilities. 

I enjoyed the game so much that I tested every possible combination. I gave the grandma all food as well. But she was always more happy to see me than interested in the food :3

Thank you for the nice feedback. 

I was amazed how fast you grew to a real speedrun pro in this game.

I don't know exactly what you meant by what happened in this world. There are too many possible interpretations.

I'm very glad you enjoyed the secret room.

There you could hear my first vocal song. Me, my cat daddy and my cat mommy all 3 sang for you. We composed the nyan song especially for you :3

https://bobo-the-cat.itch.io/first-cat-on-the-moon

A cute little Jump'N'Run  :3

I look forward to your comments

Today was a very exhausting day, so I'm glad to end it relaxed with this game. It was like a vacation. A very positive atmosphere. I showed my grandma the rabbit ears, discovered worms and made a boat trip. Very Kawaii game. 5/5 catshaped star

One thing I still find difficult is making technical decisions. Developing for console would be much easier, since I would have fixed hardware specs there. That's why I experimented a bit with shaders for this game to find out how far I can go. I didn't use blurshaders or anything because even my pc would be overwhelmed with them, but still.

The most demanding room for the gpu is the first room which uses 33% of my gpu . I could imagine that many would have a problem with that though, since it's twice as much as Bobo The Cat. Now I'm torn on whether to make future games as I want them to be  or as gpu sparse as possible but even then it would most likely use about 50% more gpu than Bobo 1 because of the soon to be higher resolution. As you hopefully already read in the description there are graphics options again this time, but I can imagine that not everyone wants to use them. If there are enough requests I can also make a version of this game with less shaders. But for a big game like the upcoming Bobo 2  it would be too complicated to make 2 versions . So what are your thoughts on the matter.

First of all, congratulations for completing my game and thanks for the feedback.

I have noticed that many would like to see a more modern difficulty level and I will keep this in mind in the future.

I also have a plan to make the bosses much fairer.

There will definitely be more from me but for now don't expect anything as extensive as my first game.

This should not be a problem. If you know how, you can make almost anything you want with Game Maker. 

The thing with the external project I would not actively call into life. But if someone would like to submit a concept to me or a programmer would contact me, it would be a possibility. I've had several people email me, but so far they've all been interested only in contributing art.

One thing you could do is a picture for the title screen. We could discuss this on discord.

Oh that's what you meant by the easy path. 

That you want to help me find tutorials is nice, but I already decided several weeks ago to stay with Game Maker for now and can't give up everything anymore.

I'll keep that in mind for later, too, with the 3D design help.

What I could also imagine, if enough people would come together, that you could then create a Bobo game together and I would only act as a director.

Just as a silly thought .

 Since I can't guarantee that I'll need help, I would also, if you had fun with it,  share art you create on Twitter or Youtube. Whether it's a Bobo The Cat style picture/sprite/tileset or a reinterpretation of a song from my game. As long as it's clear that it has to do with Bobo The Cat I would definitely support it if I knew about it. No matter what it is.

Another silly thought.

But I'm also still curious about your art without Bobo reference.

My tag is   Bobo The Cat#8059

Actually, it's not the openness of unity that causes me problems. I had liked that. The problem was rather the opposite, that I had the feeling that they were trying to force the easy way on me. I'm sure if you know how, unity's collision detect system is better than game maker's but I hadn't found any tutorials showing me how. I watched tutorials for 3 days but they all used inflexible methods.

The system is just completely different

and figuring it out myself would have taken months.  

Regarding the sprites and music I hadn't given a clear answer because I can't evaluate it yet.

It's the same with 3d models. I want to try to make some for Bobo 2 but I would only need help with it if it turns out that I will not be able to achieve the results that I need.

This year I probably won't need any help. I would definitely find something in the long run that you can contribute but it would also have to fit my game in terms of style so that it blends seamlessly. 

Since the upcoming games are going further and further towards full HD, it wouldn't be pixel art anymore. Would you be able to do that? 

With creating rooms I meant designing levels and with decorating I meant beautifying the rooms by placing tiles and vegetation objects.

Unfortunately, the only methods I can think of would be to either send the project back and forth or replace existing rooms with new ones. Both variations are dangerous because they can corrupt the project in the long run and Game Maker has a tendency to corrupt projects anyway.

But it would be nice to see/hear some of your art to be able to keep you in the back of my head.

If you get stuck, you can always use the 100% walkthrough video. The link can be found on the Itch.io website of this game.

For the next projects I don't need any help because they will be very small.

For Bobo 2 which comes after that, I can't estimate it yet.

Overall I think I need the painting and composing in between to recover from designing the hundreds of rooms. I think I could use help decorating or even creating some rooms. However, Game Maker doesn't allow that so easily, because rooms can't be transfered so well. Unless anyone around here knows a good solution for that problem. 

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to switch to Unity. Learning the new programming language was  very easy and it was fun to use. Unfortunately the manual/documentation was not as good as Game Maker's.

I had problems figuring out how to calculate complicated collisions, because unfortunately all the tutorials used prefabricated collision systems and that was too inflexible for me. That's why I didn't get any further. I had already programmed a pretty good foundation, but at that point I wondered if the transition to Unity would take too long. Because I have a lot of plans, I stayed with GM (for now).

This game is simply impressive. 

-The varied mix of 2D and 3D.

-The otherworldly and catchy soundtrack.

-The many little stories.

-The creative puzzle design.

-The unusual sense of humor.

But especially the many tiny worlds with their different and unique settings.

I´m always blown away when I think of this game.