The weekend of January 27-29, 2012, Cleveland Videogame Developers are participating in Global Game Jam 2012 (twitter hashtag #GGj12). This event will be hosted at Lean Dog Software.
Cleveland Game Devs on Meetup.com
Event page on Meetup.com for GGJ12-Cle
Registration for GGJ12-Cle
Hot on the heels of 0.24, I’ve released Boobie Teeth 0.25. In this release, I’ve gotten the mini-map function implemented the way I want it. The mini-map is now transparent, and (if you care about Game Maker internals) is now based on draw commands rather than a View. The code that draws the mini-map is based off of an example I found on the Game Maker Community forums, by a developer who goes by the handle Supertramp.
Download from the Releases page, and play it!
Boobie Teeth 0.24 is out today. Mostly refinements in this release. Probably the most notable new feature is the wave motion. In the shallower part of the level, wave motion will be felt; dive deeper to get under the waves. I also made the level spawn event fair by having the new fish be created in a position avoiding the player, thereby avoiding unfair deaths. Some additional code refactoring under the hood.
As always, you can download the game from the Releases page.
I went to the Cleveland Videogame Developers meetup tonight. It ended up being a special meeting for me, because I got to meet Dan, who was one of the founders of the meetup, but hadn’t been to a meeting in about three years.
In talking to him, I learned that he also was instrumental in helping Mike Substelny set up Lorain County Community College’s Computer Game and Simulation Design department. It was in Mike Substelny’s class that I got my start with Game Maker, a year ago. Since then, I have started out my first game project, been invited to contribute technical review on an upcoming book on Game Maker, spoken about my experiences at the Notacon conference, and in doing so I’ve realized a 30-year childhood dream and become the person I’ve always wanted to be.
It’d be easy to say I did that all by myself, but really, if it weren’t for Dan, everything else I’ve done wouldn’t have amounted to anything. For everything else I did, and as much as I’ve always wanted to make videogames, it didn’t finally come together until I took that class last year. So, however indirectly, Dan’s partly responsible for me getting my legs under me and able to move forward.
After telling him about the things I’ve been up to, Dan told me that it sounded like we had a lot in common. We both aspired from a very early age to design and make video games, we both had taken a long path in life to becoming programmers, and we both have yet to complete and release our first game. That last part threw me for a loop, but it’s true. When I asked him what games he’s made, he said he had a couple of projects that he was working on, but hadn’t released anything yet. [It seems like everyone in Cleveland Game Devs says that! :( ] I just hope that I’m enough like him that some day I run into someone who, although I had no idea, I had some small yet significant part in their life turning out the way they’d hoped it would when they were six.
I have completed my Safe Zone extension for Game Maker, and made it available.
Altogether, here’s what we now have:
SafeZone.gmk – the original proof of concept, which creates a non-wrapping, square safe zone around the protected object.
SafeZone2.gmk – improved proof of concept, which creates a circular safe zone which wraps around the protected object.
SafeZone5.gmk – Further refined, now the function incorporates parameters which control whether the wrap applies in the vertical or horizontal directions, or both, or neither.
SZ5.gml – the raw .gml of the script code written for SafeZone5.gmk
SafeZone_1_0.gex – The Safe Zone extension, v.1.0, based on the SafeZone5 code.
SZ_GEX_demo.gmk – a demo project which incorporates the .gex rather than scripts.
This extension could use further refinement, as it assumes that literally anywhere else in the room is safe to place the new instance. If you have solid objects in your room, or multiple other objects that you do not want to collide with upon spawning the new object, this obviously will not hold true. But for certain types of games, such as single-player free-flight games, this should be quite useful.
I got a working demo of a safe zone spawn which works with wrapping rooms. I refined my technique for determining the safe zone, and now instead of being a square, it is circular.
I like this approach, it works pretty well. Basically, rather than trying to literally “wrap” the safe zone around the edge of the room, I create five safe zones. They are at protected(x,y), protected((x+/-room_width), y), and protected(x,(y+/-room_height)). In my instance_create loop, I merely determine whether the new instance’s candidate x,y location is within some distance of any of these five points.
The current script I wrote up is working, but it just uses a distance in pixels. My original approach calculated a distance automatically, based on the size of the objects’ sprites, and a padding factor, which I liked. I’ll likely create a version of this script that works that way in the next day or so, when I have a moment, and then package the whole thing up into a .gex for distribution.
Until then, the .gmk source is already up on the site.
One other note: One of the annoying things about Game Maker is that when you write a function, you can only return a single value. In most other languages, you can create classes of objects, which can be used to encapsulate as many values as you like, and return the entire object. Game Maker kindof lets you do this, but you have to create a Game Maker object, which it a bit more literally object-like, in that it carries some baggage with it. I think that my function would be more useful if it simply returned a set of (x,y) coordinates without actually creating an instance there. But I can’t return both x and y — a function can only return one value. I could return the id of an instance of an object, however, and simply spawn an empty, spriteless object at those x,y coordinates, and allow the developer to either change that instance into whatever kind of object they needed there, or else grab the x and y values from the object and destroy it. It’s an idea I’m toying with, not really sure which way to handle it is best at the moment, but it’s fun to play around with ideas.
In Game Maker, it’s non-trivial to spawn a new instance, avoiding collisions with existing objects in the game. This can make it tricky to create games with “fair spawning” so that the player isn’t automatically killed when a new, randomly-placed instance springs into existence.
It isn’t terribly complicated to work around this problem, thankfully. Basically, the approach I take is, knowing the x,y coordinates of the instance or object that you want to want to avoid collision with, and the size of that object’s sprite, you can define a “safe zone” around the instance you wish to protect.
I’ve whipped up a quick demo in Game Maker 8, showing a technique which seems to work pretty well. This is a very simple illustration of the approach, and could be refined further to handle wrapping the safe zone around the edge of a room, or to handle enemies of randomly varying sizes. To make it easier to understand, I’ve actually created an object to represent the “SafeZone” . This is unnecessary, as the dimensions involved can simply be calculated on the fly, using the right GML.
At long last, I’ve gotten back into developing Boobie Teeth. I’ve released 0.23, available as always on the Releases page.
In the two weeks leading up to Notacon 8, I worked on Boobie Teeth roughly 16-18 hours/day, making great progress, but had about burned out by the time I got 0.22 ready for the presentation. I really like pushing on a project like this, where I’m interested and motivated, but probably can’t sustain more than 12-14 hours of focused effort a day for very long. I had intended to take the next week or two off from the project and focus on some other things — housecleaning, getting ready to start a new job in May. For a number of reasons, this summer has been full of misfortunes which kept me out of advancing the project as I dealt with various crises. But things have settled enough, to where I can now resume working on it.
This release was actually mostly done between 4/16-4/17. I had a few ideas from playing 0.22 that I wanted to put in quickly during Notacon weekend, and got it done quickly. There are only a few changes in this release, not as much as I probably had intended when I started 0.23, but since so much time has passed between then and now, and I’m not entirely sure what else I might have decided to include had I kept working on it — there are a number of things on my list that I might have thrown into this release if I’d kept working on it, but at this point I’m not too sure what they were.
I briefly considered just ditching what I’d done for 0.23, and going back to 0.22 and start over again on 0.23, but I decided in the end to keep what I’d accomplished in 0.23 and just put it out, then start 0.24 with fresh direction. The additions which I did make to the game seem to have been complete, so rather than drop them and add them back later, it makes more sense to keep them.
I think that in 0.24, I’m going to focus on a few performance optimizations so the game will scale up more before dropping frames. It’s about at the limit of that right now, in my demo level, which won’t do if I want to do a few things that I want to do when the game advances to the next level. I really need to be able to put more objects on the screen at once without things slowing down.
http://www.packtpub.com/game-maker-8-cookbook/book
I am contributing to this book as a technical reviewer, and it’s my first time getting credit in a publication, so I’m kindof excited and happy about that.
[Update 1/11/2013: After several months of delays, I have heard from the publisher that this book is about to be canceled. However, I am now working on reviewing a book on GameMaker: Studio from the same publisher, which looks like it’ll be a much better book.]