Game Creation/Design Catch All

Seemed like a good design approach for Breath of the Wild.

I started following this guy a few months ago and I have find it very entertaining.
Hope you like it;

Blender just released version 2.92

So many awesome features:
Sketchup style draw primitive tool (draw on any surface/polygon)
Updated snake brush sculpting tool that looks amazing
Another sculpting tool that tweaks profiles so it looks like a great version of soft selection manipulation
bones enhancements that look amazing
and 3x more

Blender has been knocking it out of the park recently and 2.92 is a grand slam on top of that

Nice, thanks for the head's up! I'll definitely check this out. Blender is awesome.

Vector wrote:

Backgrounds!

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwDsld9VEAEgeNa?format=png&name=large)

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwDsledWEAEAaVO?format=png&name=large)

Nice!

As far as the animations, you should consider adding a falling frame. Even if its just tilting the character's shoes downward, it will help. Also consider doing a landing frame where the character bends its knees on impact

Already have the falling animation! Not sure if we're going to do a landing animation as it takes quite a bit more work to add it in. We will probably add an effect on landing, however.

Ooh yeah. You could totally do a little puff or wisp of smoke on landing
Or if you are landing on something that is supposed to be metal, you could do sparks!

I am really enjoying messing around with GameMaker Studio. In basically two days of working on my shmup project I have gotten farther than I ever have with anything. I got almost this far with XNA back in the day, but with Unity I kept running into issues that would leave me banging my head against the desk and searching StackOverflow for days on end trying to come up with a solution. I've got enemies spawning with a timeline and then zooming around the screen following paths and the damn engine is doing half the work for me. No need to do radian math because GMS handles rotation in degrees and includes a handy direction property as part of every object and that variable is automatically updated while your object is following a path so all you have to do is update your sprite to use the value of that property as its image_angle value and now you have a space ship flying along doing pretty S curves all while facing the correct direction and you only had to write like 6 lines of code. I went to bed last night stuck on a problem and when I opened it up this morning I deleted what I did last night and had it solved in like 15 minutes and using much less code than my earlier attempt.

It is fun to make progress on my own and not just by following a tutorial and fixing the errors that have been introduced by changes in newer versions of the tool.

Wow nice

Yeah, StackOverflow isn't the best source of help for Unity. The Unity forums is probably a better place to look for that. GameMaker Studio is a great place to start though.
Another option is Godot, which seems promising. My son is currently working on a school project using Godot, and it looks to have a pretty good skill ramp up. I know that Unity can be a bit of a brick wall to start with.
A friend of mine has made a pretty amazing old school shmup with Godot called Operation STEEL

Godot looks really cool! As someone who really struggles with programming languages, visual scripting is huge for me.

Has the documentation or tutorials gotten better for godot?
At least on the 3d side it was a slog

I don't think Godot is very suited to 3D. I have to disclaim that this is just my opinion based on what I've heard other gamedevs in the industry, so their tools may have gotten better.

Those of you learning Godot might be interested in this:

Making an online multiplayer game with Godot and Nakama

On another note, I have just (re)discovered Construct 2.
I never knew it was so easy to make a Tower Defense game (with the tutorial template). Where has this been all my life aside from right in front of me since 2011...

That was an hour of getting up to speed with the inner workings and 3 more tweaking things like adding tower upgrades, and multiple enemy spawn points.

I'd feel a lot better if Construct 3 (the new version) weren't a monthly or yearly sub but $99 for a year isn't that bad.

The game I've been showing was originally built in Construct 2. I ran into some weird glitches with it and couldn't quite sort out how to get the game to run exactly the way I wanted to. It's such a good engine for testing concepts.

I can see that. You have to hunt a little bit for the way Construct likes to do things.

But at the same time it has the most accessible pathfinding I've seen in any engine. You just turn collision on some obstacles and walls, give a sprite a target on the other side of those obstacles and tell that sprite to "find path".

The other thing is I guess Construct 3 allows you to code javascript if the behavior isn't doing what you want it to

So my few hours with Construct 2 got me to thinkin I would try the demo of gamemaker studio 2 again.
I didn't realize I had gotten pretty far with a click move asteroids style game when I last tried it. So I fired that up too and I have to say, I really don't like the direction of GMS 2. It used to be more like Construct but they've gone all in on GML instead of Drag n Drop coding. Heck most of the tutorials are for GML and the ones that are designed for Drag n Drop contain quite a bit of GML code. And they've structured DND in a way that is essentially drawing GML code albeit very messily

Construct is the opposite. They've focused on preset mechanics or behaviors that you can combine with sprites to make games. And the behaviors are quite sophisticated with the previously mentioned pathfinding and also things like fairly comprehensive turret behaviors.

The thing that made me want to go try GMS 2 again was that Construct 2's UI stuff seemed very lacking. So I am considering trying the Construct 3 demo as I believe they made pretty big strides in that area.

I know anything that helps you get up to speed with coding will help game dev job seekers. But that's not me. I want a satisfying way of getting these ideas out of my head and could care less about a job in the industry. I have already reasoned it is much better to do it myself than to try and convince someone else of my merits. Especially in a tone deaf and largely creatively bankrupt and gamer unfriendly industry.

I'm actually surprised how good I understand GMS 2's DND but it definitely took me going through a rather lengthy tutorial. Even then, I still need to find GML that others have written in order to accomplish anything complicated. It is exactly as you describe, though.

This is the best DnD tutorial I've found for GMS 2. It's the first of 19.

Yeah I've seen different parts of that series. They are good but I'm still leaning Construct 2/3.
Here is the tower defense demo in Construct that I modified over a couple of hours.

I tripled the number of spawn points, tripled the complexity of the maze/paths and added custom variables. These variable allow the turrets to gain experience (they change color to red) and do more damage. They also keep score but for some reason the score box disappears for good after 11 kills/points

edit: And... fixed the score disappearing issue!

Muahaha. I am a genius!
I changed the turret upgrade system to, instead of destroying the previous turret and spawning the upgraded version on top, with one controlled by animation frames. So now instead of creating new objects and making them acquire targets and fire and changing the damage, I just tell it to go to the next frame (with a beefier turret sprite) and add 1 to the bullet damage. With this system, I just have to create experience limits for however many more upgrades I want for the turret and create a new sprite of a beefier turret.

I know there are ways to have different animations and corresponding names but I wonder if it wouldn't be better to find out if you can play a range of frames from a single animation. That way each upgrade can have a few frames of animation signaling the upgrade without having to create and manage multiple animations and names.

Latest version of our shmup. Not being able to work face to face with my friend who is doing the art and some design on it is tough.

Very nice!

Are the "power up" lines a mechanic or just to test the different shooting patterns? It would be cool and unique if it is a mechanic

fangblackbone wrote:

Very nice!

Are the "power up" lines a mechanic or just to test the different shooting patterns? It would be cool and unique if it is a mechanic :)

I am not sure what you are referring to. So the color marking on the ship correspond to the current equipped weapon. There are four (only three are coded) being normal (black), spread (red), laser (blue), and missiles (green). Each weapon currently has 6 levels (thinking about scaling this back a little bit) which are represented by the little weapon pods that you can see changing under the wings. In the game you have two weapon slots (like in Contra 3) that you can toggle between. If you die the currently selected weapon resets to level 1 (haven't coded this yet), but the weapon in the second slot maintains it's level.

The ship crosses colored lines as it travels in the video. What is their purpose?

fangblackbone wrote:

The ship crosses colored lines as it travels in the video. What is their purpose?

Debugging the background manager

In GMS the max texture page size is 4096x4096 so if you use a sprite bigger than that it will lose quality when GSM reduces the size to make it fit and then scales it back up while running. One level in our game will be like 1920x54000 or larger maybe and we are using hand drawn backgrounds not tiles so we have to cut it up to insure that GMS doesn't reduce the size (and quality) of the backgrounds. So what I did was code a background manager object that will be customized for every room/level to progress through an array of background sprites using two different objects to scroll the position of the background (I am creating the illusion of movement by moving the background object down instead of moving the player and camera up). Once the lower object is off of the screen I then move it up to a Y position above the other object and changes the sprite it is using to the next index of the array. Since I was just working with that wooden tabletop background which is a tile-able image (so I couldn't see any seams) I needed to add something to distinguish the different sprites from each other so I added the lines and the numbers to help me debug it.

Sounds really clever!

I got the 4th weapon, homing missiles figured out today. It was an interesting conundrum to tackle in that it took about 10 minutes to add the basic functionality that ended up creating missiles that were so OP that they would be the only weapon anyone would ever use and it took a couple of hours after that to make them less OP and also solve a number of issues that would cause the game to crash related to how they are finding and tracking their targets. Everything will still have to be dialed in for the game but all the dials should be in place now.

That is definitely a hurdle I had using Gamemaker a while ago (and Multimedia Fusion even further ago). Fortunately now some engines have built in behaviors for "find nearest". Gdevelop then had a further problem where it wouldn't distinguish between each fired bullet. If the target died, it would retarget nearest and all other bullets, no matter how far away, would target what was nearest to that bullet or the ship.

Construct 2/3 thankfully is instance aware and has built in turret and bullet behavior. These objects have properties like detection range, turn rate, fire rate, object speed and distance traveled. So you can make them less accurate and slower and destroy themselves if they travel too far.