2013-12-01
Finished a small executable to test weather effects using particle. You can download the installer under Downloads.
The executable contains four types of weather effects - rain, thunderstorm (heavy rain with lighning), snow and sandstorm. Each effect is done with GMS' built-in particle system and graphics. That's why the raindrops are a bit too thick, I was lazy so I didn't create graphics of my own.
Please note that the background images are not my own, I got them via google image search. They belong to their respective owners.
2013-11-14
Minigame for decyphering memory cores is now working.
First level is completely laid out, I will start to implement it.
I'm also running tests on background effects, such as rain or snow.
2013-09-28
My new job really demands a lot of time. I get up at 7AM, come home at 8PM. Since I go to bed at midnight at the latest, I hardly have time to work on the game during the week. That sucks but it can't be helped.
The tutorial is completely playable now. Vaykin can dash now and has his first attack, the claw strike.
Next I'll start to lay out the first actual level.
2013-09-05
I spent the day drawing a background picture for the pause screen. Thinking back, I'm still not happy with the fact that I can't just freeze the whole game and display a pause menu without creating an entirely new room. It should be possible, but that would require pause scripts in every single object. Well, the way it is right now seems to work fine, and I rather like how the picture turned out.
In other news... shame on me for blaming GMS for my escape key seizing to work. I found out it's not GMS, it's Photoshop. I installed a copy of Photoshop CS2 on Windows. And for some reason, whenever Photoshop is running, the ESC key doesn't work. When I quit it, it works fine. Odd, isn't it? At least I don't need to reboot anymore to fix it.
2013-09-04
In other news... GMS seems to mess with my keyboard driver. At some point, the ESC key stops working altogether. Have to reboot to fix that. WHY YOU TOUCHIN' MAH DRIVERS?!? YOU GOT NO BUSINESS TOUCHIN' MAH DRIVERS!!!
2013-09-04
There are times when I think that none of the features I want the game to have are easily created. I spent the whole freaking day trying to figure out how to implement a pause screen. Yes, a freaking pause screen. So GMS offers a way to freeze the entire screen. But that only works with a pre-made dialog box which doesn't look good as it uses the operating system's window scheme. And it only has the options YES/NO. The game freezes while this is active, but you can't freeze the game otherwise. What to do? Create a new room that serves as pause screen (which I originally didn't want). Problem here, once I return from the pause screen, the room I return to is being reset. I can prevent that (make the room persistent), but I want the rooms to be reset if they're entered the regular way - through doors or something (and of course in case of a new game). So I had to toss variables around, check from which room I came (pause screen or somewhere else) and react accordingly. Which sucks because a room's creation code (the code executed when the room is first created in the game or restarted) won't be executed when the room is persistent.
So I basically had to make an object for every single room that keeps checking wether the last room I was in is the pause screen or some other room that should not trigger a reset. That means several lines of code to be executed 30 times per second. Stuff like that always makes me a bit anxious. I'm sure any computer that is in use today can handle this under normal circumstances. But considering how buggy GMS can be, I'm not quite sure how well it handles its resource. I already noticed that I had to clear the cache and recompile the game a number of times when the wrong sounds were playing, or sounds weren't playing at all, even though they were set correctly.
Well, it works so far, pause screen and stuff. Feels good if the things finally work the way they should.
2013-08-19
I placed the original intro in the download section. If YoYo Games ever includes the possibility to play videos again, it will add it to the game. If not, you can watch it before playing and pretend it was part of the game. ;)
I also added new screenshots and a new concept picture.
2013-08-18
Since I'm currently doing all of the resources myself, that includes voice-over. I'm not a very good voice actor, but I'm doing this game in English and none of the people I know speak English well enough to do voice acting for me. Since I did some recording today and had a lot of outtakes while doing so, here's a complilation of the outtakes, just for fun.
2013-07-31
So one of the reasons why I chose GameMaker was that it could play movies. You know, intro, cutscenes, stuff like that. Turns out that this is all past. GameMaker 8 had this feature, but its successor, GameMaker Studio, doesn't. Why? Compatibility issues. Videos are played through the operating system's own video player (Windows Media Player in case of Windows), and since "we" want to be able to create games for all kind of platforms (Windows, MacOS X, Ubuntu, iOS, Android, ...), "we" have to remove anything that might not work everywhere. So, MP3s are also played through the OS's own player, but background music is not removed. The graphics engine is also different on each system. Hope they're not gonna remove that either.
I'm also being told that they removed this feature which is used by almost all of the good games of this planet, because movies make games big (can't have a 20MB game with a 50MB intro, can we?) and they don't want developers to clutter their games with movies. So THEY wanna tell ME what I put in MY game? Hello?
I just hope they'll re-include this feature someday, there's enough people who actually wish for it. Meanwhile I'll just use screenshots of my movies instead. If they don't re-include the ability to play movies, the actual movies will be available on this website.
2013-07-29
Got a working test of the Chimera. Still needs some work and the graphics aren't final, but it's working. So one can now walk around the Chimera (the ship one's gonna fly around in) and look at stuff.
2013-05-12
Got a working test for the shoot'em'up-levels. Still lacking enemy bullets and one boss weapon, but it's playable.