Tag: Game Maker

Game Maker Wave Motion Tutorial

Following up on my motion and position tutorial, I present a tutorial on wave-motion. This was something I wanted to include in the original article, but I realized that there’s enough complexity to this concept that it merited its own separate article.

Wave Motion

Wavelike motion is any motion that involves periodic oscillation, not just linear undulating motion. (Other types of wavelike motion include pulsing and concentric ripples, for example.) But we’ll talk mostly if not exclusively about linear undulation, since it is easiest to understand, simplest to implement, and the basis for many others.

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YoYoGames Announces GameMaker on Steam

This is some big news. YoYoGames is now distributing GameMaker Studio on Steam.

Apparently, this also will enable GameMaker developers who use Steam to release their games directly on Steam in the future. I have to look into this; I’ve been wanting to find a way to get games into the market for a while now. This might make it a whole lot easier

Update: It is possible to distribute games via Steam, through the Steam Workshop, but not for money. Sadface. :(

Come on, YoYoGames/Valve, let people who create content with your tools derive income from that content! It will incentivize content creation! It’s a bit strange to be selling a $500 *professional* software development suite to game developers and then make it more difficult than it needs to be to generate income with it.

LD48 24: Evolution. Karyote alpha

It’s not much at all yet, but I have an alpha build of my entry for Ludum Dare 24: Evolution up and running in HTML5.

Karyote

It’s not really playable yet, at the moment I’m just working out some motion and object prototypes. Graphics are all placeholders. You’re always in the center. Move with the arrow keys. Left/Right turns, Up moves forward.

Somehow, I’m doing another game with a microorganism theme. LD#23 was Bactarium, LD#24 will be called Karyote. You control a single celled organism that mutates as you play.

I still need to figure out what exactly you’re doing in the game, but I have some ideas that I haven’t implemented yet, so I’m a little further along than it looks as far as the concept goes. I’m designing as I go, mainly this is design by fiddling around. That’s a dangerous way to go on any project, but when I don’t have much of an idea to begin with, I find it’s one of the most reliable ways of getting me going. Hopefully I’ve learned enough lessons from previous projects to avoid messing up the code architecture, so debugging and feature changes don’t turn into a nightmare toward deadline.

Making a Configuration System in Game Maker, part 2: Requirements

If you haven’t yet, go back and read Part 1

Design choices

Since we’re starting from (basically) nothing, we have a lot of decisions to make. Therefore, thinking about the design of your configuration system first before you start building things probably is a good idea.

Requirements

First, let’s think of the features that we need. When I brainstorm features, I tend to go crazy. I think about everything I might possibly need. I think about all the things that would be OMG SO AWESOME to have. I find it helpful to do this, but I have learned that while having all these ideas is great and exciting, in the end you have to build everything, so every idea you come up with represents a lot of work and a lot of testing.

I’m only one person, working on these projects in my spare time — not a design house, or even a full-time lone developer, so if I want to ever have a hope of finishing my work, I have to scale back to the essentials. So why think about everything I can imagine?

  1. I like my imagination. It’s awesome, and using it is fun.
  2. The more I think about things, the better my ideas get.
  3. When I think complex, even if I don’t ever build the whole thing, I can at least create a design that will better accommodate further development later if I want to extend the basic implementation. I might do the extending, or someone else might do it later; it doesn’t matter. Building code as a foundation for future code is a good thing if you can manage to do it. Doing so correctly means avoiding having to repeat yourself in future projects.
  4. Even if I don’t have all the resources or talent that I might need in order to implement a design, having a good design documents makes it that much more likely to inspire others to contribute something to the project.

A very simple Options system might consist only of a single screen. But as we’ll soon see, there may be need to break things up into multiple screens, especially if we have many different options or categories of options.

If we have multiple screens, we’re going to need a means of navigating between them. This can be as simple as a group of rooms with room_goto commands linking them up, or it can be something else.

To design our Configuration Options system, we need to address a few things:

  1. Features: What options do we want the user to be able to configure? What choices do we want each configuration option to have?
  2. Interface/Controls: How do we want to present these options to the user? How will the user interact with the interface to set it?
  3. Implementation/Integration: How do these configuration choices get applied, technically? How will these configuration options interface with the game itself?

Features

Some of these will be fairly standard, common to many games, while some will be highly specific to the specifics of this game. I’ll address the standard ones, but don’t worry — once you see how we implement the standard features, it will be easy to set up config options for the features that are unique to your game.

You don’t need to support all of these options, but the following list is a good start for what you might want to consider:

Graphics

PC hardware very commonly has different graphical capabilities, due to differences in hardware, particularly the video card and monitor. While just about any video card is going to be capable of playing most Game Maker games at full quality, there is still the monitor to contend with.

Display settings

It might be easiest to force a specific display mode, but that’s not a flexible approach and may not work for all players. By far, it’s better to assume that the display mode the game starts up in is the player’s preferred (or only) graphics mode, and leave it as is.

If you want to enable everyone to play your game, it’s a good idea to give them some control over how the graphics of your game will be displayed on their screen.

The easier approach is to allow the player to set the display settings through the computer’s control panel, and just run in whatever mode the display is set to when the game runs.

More professional looking games usually offer the play an in-game configuration menu that allows them to change the same settings without having to leave the game program. It’s a convenience, to be sure, but it does keep the user in your game.

Keep in mind, too, that in GameMaker, there’s a distinction drawn between the Display (the physical hardware), the Window, the Room, and the View. Most of what you might think could be accomplished by forcing a specific display configuration can be better accomplished through Widow, Room, and View settings.

  • Fullscreen or Windowed mode?
  • Display resolution
  • Aspect ratio
  • Refresh rate
  • Color depth

Fullscreen or windowed mode?

Most games play best in fullscreen mode, but sometimes players like the option of playing inside a window, as it allows them to switch between other applications more easily. The downside of this is that it becomes all too easy to mouse outside of the game window, and lose focus. You can set the game to pause if the window loses focus, but this is still annoying disruption and can mess the player up even with pausing the game.

When to run in a window?  As a general rule, I like to develop and debug my game in windowed mode, since it’s easier for me to get at other windows that I’m working in. But for finished games, I usually like the game to run fullscreen. I want the game experience to be distraction-free.

That’s not always the case, though. Casual style games, pausable games, puzzle games, and turn-based games that wait on you to act are good candidates to have a Windowed mode as an option.

Resolution

These days, it’s probably not necessary to change the display resolution. Just about everyone uses LCD displays with fixed resolution. While these screens are capable of emulating other resolutions, they do not look as good when they do. Games for mobile devices of course will play on a device with a specific resolution that cannot be changed.

In any case, the game should never force a specific resolution on the player; you may want to offer the player controls to allow them to change the resolution for themselves within your game interface, though.

If a player wants to set a specific resolution, they can always just use the display settings control panel on their computer. If you want to provide an interface for this to them in your game, you can, but it’s a convenience or luxury feature, not a necessity. Supporting multiple resolutions means a lot of extra work and testing for a developer, so unless you’re a professional studio with the resources for this, it’s probably better to focus on supporting one resolution well.

Don’t worry about supporting every possible display size right away, the amount of work it takes to do it well will kill your project. Instead, focus on making the game as good as it can possibly be in one default resolution, and if your game ends up being popular enough to warrant it, you can build resources (primarily different sized rooms) to support other display resolutions better.

If you do change display resolution in the game, keep in mind a few things:

  • Always change it back when you’re done. Use display_reset() for this. Keep in mind if the game crashes, this doesn’t get called, though, and may leave the computer in a resolution the player doesn’t want. This can panic a non-technical user.
  • Don’t change display settings without first testing them. Use display_test_all() with the settings you’re about to set, before you actually set them. Be sure to have some fallback code that gracefully handles what takes place if the new settings don’t test OK.

You probably do want to know what resolution display the game is playing on, though. There are a lot of reasons to need to know this. Use display_get_width() and display_get_height() to detect the display resolution. Note this will return the current settings for the display, not what the display’s maximum or native resolution is.

You should decide the minimum display resolution you’ll support. GameMaker’s default room resolution is 640×480, which is the old VGA standard resolution. This is a very safe resolution to use, because just about any display will support it, but is also quite tiny these days. It’s still not a bad resolution to start out with, though. The smaller the minimum resolution you support, the more devices your game will run on.

It’s good to support larger resolutions, too, of course. Most people do have larger displays these days, and it’s desirable to utilize all that space effectively. Very large display resolutions can introduce performance issues, though, so test your framerates when running at maximum resolution, and make sure they’re acceptable.

If you’re targeting a specific mobile device, learn what its native resolution is, and use that. Read up on guidelines for Android and iOS development to learn the recommendations other developers follow.

To accomodate other resolutions, there are a variety of approaches. You can create a series of rooms and HUD graphics to provide a tailor-fit screen for every resolution you support. This is a lot of extra work, though. Scaling the game to fill the display can be an OK approach to take, and requires a lot less effort, but will result in a less attractive game with blurry edges due to the way the Game Maker runner handles scaling graphics. Another approach is to letterbox — draw the game in its standard resolution at a fixed 1:1 scale, and leave a black border around the edge of the screen, framing the game window. This can be good, too, but if you have too much black border it can be annoying.

Aspect Ratio

These days, you also have to consider aspect ratios, the ratio of the width and height of the screen. In the old days, computer monitors and TV sets in the United States all used 4:3.

Today, it’s a different story. On the desktop alone, people may have 4:3, 16:9, or 8:5 (16:10) displays. 16:9 is pretty quickly becoming the most common, particularly in 1920×1080 (1080p), and is also the ratio of HDTV, so if you have any desire to port your game to a game console, you may want to start out at 16:9.

And there are still others, albeit less common ones. If you’re planning on targeting a mobile platform, you’ve got even more possibilities.

If you’re building an HTML5 game, keep in mind that the browser window “chrome” (menus, toolbars, etc.) all take up space as well, which should be subtracted from the available display you have to run your game in, and this can change the effective “aspect ratio” of the web page unpredictably.

Enable/disable special effects which may affect performance (such as particles).

There are two main reasons for making these configurable: performance on slower machines, and user preference. Some players don’t like effects-heavy games, and prefer a sparse, cleaner visual experience without all the bells and whistles. Sometimes the screen can become so cluttered with particles that you can’t see the action, and it hurts your game rather than enhances it. So it’s nice to allow the player the option to not have these things in their game.

Refresh Rate and Color Depth

These settings are controllable in GameMaker, but there’s almost no reason for it. Most games shouldn’t have any need to mess with the color depth of the display.

In the 1990’s, it was more common to see variety here, but these days it’s pretty safe to assume that the computer will be running in 32-bit color mode. Oddball machines might be running in 16-bit or 24-bit color, and even more rarely you may encounter a display configured to run in 16-color or 256-color mode, but these are rare, and probably won’t have the necessary hardware to run a GameMaker game adequately anyway.

Refresh rate is probably also safe to leave alone. This setting is more pertinent to CRT displays, which are rapidly disappearing from the desktop computer landscape. Most LCD monitors use a 60Hz refresh rate, although there are LCD HDTVs that use 120Hz or 240Hz refresh rates. Older TVs used 30Hz.

Some people can notice a difference between refresh rates, and can tell you readily just by looking what refresh rate a monitor is using, especially if they are familiar with the display in question, but most people can’t, and don’t even think about such things if they’re even aware of them.

Some game developers will say that it’s a good idea to sync the room_speed of your game to the refresh rate. Keeping FPS and refresh in sync, or at least in a whole-number ratio, is not a bad idea. But the better way to do this is to set your room_speed to the display_get_frequency() or just assume a refresh rate of 60 and use a room_speed of 30 or 60. Keep in mind that regardless of what the room speed is set to, it’s fps that is the actual frame rate, and this usually fluctuates a bit.

Sound

  • Master volume
  • Music volume
  • Effects volume
  • Mute

Again, for the most part, these configuration options could be set by the user outside of the program, by using the volume knob on the speaker, or through the Sound and Volume control panel. But it’s a nice convenience to provide an interface to the user so they don’t have to leave your game to make adjustments. The nicest one is the separated music and effects volume. This will allow the player to adjust the mix to their taste.

One important thing to do is to remember the user’s preferred volume settings and automatically set them when the game runs, and set them back when the game exits.

The harder task will be to separate the volumes for the Master, Music, and Effects volume controls. Mute is actually very simple, and there are a few techniques that can be used. One way is to have a global variable called “mute”, and to set up a conditional before each and every sound function call. This is an inferior approach because it means you have to make sure you catch every single sound function call in all your code, whichis a pain to program. The other problem with it is that all those extra if (mute){} checks take processing power at runtime, albeit a tiny amount, it still adds up and could conceivably hurt performance.

The better way to handle mute is to simply setting the volume to 0. This is done with the sound_global_volume() function, which we also use for setting the master volume. The sounds still play, but at 0 volume, you don’t hear them. You don’t have to add code for every sound_play and sound_loop function in your code. And since the computer doesn’t have to ask every single time whether the game is muted or not, it’s a lot less processing. sound_global_volume(0) mutes your game, and sound_global_volume(1) restores the master volume to full. Use a global variable to store the setting for the master volume as well, so instead of restoring the volume to full blast on unmute, you set it back to the master volume value.
globalvar master_volume;
//master_volume is set in the config screen.
mute() {sound_global_volume = 0;}
unmute() {sound_global_volume = master_volume;}
You can put the Mute function into your game configuration menu, or you can make it more readily accessible to the player by creating a control for it that they can access while the game is playing.

Separate volume controls for bgm and sound effects will take a little more work, using the sound_volume() function to control the volume for each individual sound in your game, so we’ll cover that in detail later.

Note: GameMaker Studio 1.1 introduces an entirely new audio system. The above code samples work with the old system.

Controls

  • Provide the player with a screen showing the current settings, and allow them to set up their own custom settings.
  • Allow the player to save their custom settings as a profile, load from a profile, delete profiles.
  • Allow the player to reset the controls back to their default settings, or to select a custom profile (such as for different keyboard layouts, etc.).
  • Provide the player with options to use various input devices (keyboard? mouse? joystick/gamepad?)

Difficulty/Game Options

  • Difficulty (Easy/Normal/Hard)
  • Starting level
  • Enable/disable (or throttle) specific features
  • Number of lives
  • Text size/speed (if you’re displaying lots of dialogs)
  • etc.

This part is highly dependent upon your game. You can set up an interface to allow the user to set these things, but integrating them into your game will be highly dependent upon your game. Some things (number of lives, starting level) will be trivial to implement and integrate; others will take a great deal of design sense and playtesting.

High Scores/Achievements

An Achievements system, again, will be highly dependent on your game. But we can probably provide some abstractions that make it easier to implement your achievement system in a consistent way, such that the specifics may be different from game to game, but they way they are handled will be the same.

Some features we might like to see:

  • Record more than 10 high scores
  • Record other types of achievements
  • Record achievements per player account
  • Clear achievements
  • Upload scores/achievements to an online “Hall of Fame” server

Localization options

  • Language
  • Keyboard layout – keyboard layout could tie in well with the Controls. A user with a non-QWERTY keyboard could set that here, or have it be auto-detected from a system variable, and automatically update the keyboard controls with default keys appropriate to the layout map of the local keyboard. But then, the user should still be able to override these with their own preferences.

Save States/User Profiles

If your game stores user profiles or save state data, provide an interface to the user to do things with them. Common activities include:

  • Create new
  • Delete
  • Copy
  • Rename
  • Edit info (for user profile data, such as user name, password, and other profile data).

What’s in the save state file will be a bit beyond the scope of this series, and in any case should be highly dependent on your game. While I won’t tell you what to put in your savefile, I can tell you how to set up some file i/o functions that will enable you to read and write your savefile, and maybe some suggestions for how to protect this information, validate it, and format it.

It’s also a good idea to save the configuration settings themselves. Configuration settings (graphics, sounds, etc.) should be separate from game savestate data (My character’s name is XYZ, He is level N, his inventory consists of…, he has visited the following locations… he has achieved the following goals… etc.)

We have a few design choices for how we want to do the config save. The simplest would be to simply revert to defaults every time the game is launched (ie, not save anything, but remember a basic set of options that will definitely work on any system the game is run on.) From a user’s perspective, however, this would become annoying, as they will need to re-configure settings to their taste every time they quit the game. The next simplest approach would be to remember what the settings were the last time the user set them, and to remember the defaults in case the Last config profile gets corrupted.

This is probably as far as you really need to go; but once you are saving profiles, you’re not too far from allowing the player to save multiple configuration profiles, or per-user profiles. We’ll probably implement this later on as an advanced feature.

  • Other stuff

  • Network: These days, you may also want to have configurations options for network (TCP/IP settings, firewall/proxy server settings, etc.)
  • Social: Or you might want to have some kind of social networking features, such as sharing your game progress with your Facebook and Twitter friends, inviting friends to try out your game, or even send friends in-game items to help them, and so on.
  • Hall of Fame/Achievements: Or a “submit high score to server” feature. Or you might have a registration and payment screen.
  • Update Checker: Or a “check for updates/download/install” feature.

These things are much more complex to design and implement properly, and as such will be outside the scope of this tutorial for now, but it’s good to think about them!

Personally, I would like to see these type of features built in to Game Maker, and I hope that YoYoGames will incorporate features like this in time. When I say “built into Game Maker, I don’t  just mean having a library of available GML functions that one can use to build a configuration system out of. That is, after all, what we are going to do with this project. What I mean is, it would be nice if such a system existed as a ready-made component that you could just drop in to any project, and set up with just a few clicks or lines of code.

These features, and the interface the user will interact with to manage them, will be challenging and time-consuming to implement, and are not really “the game”. A good configuration system and interface is excellent polish for a professional-quality project. Game Maker’s purpose is to make game development easy by doing the hard technical stuff for you. So far, they’ve done that by focusing on the in-game building blocks that a designer would use to produce a play experience. Now that they’re turning Game Maker into a more professional tool, I hope that they’ll start thinking about including these kind of features, too.

Until then, we have to fend for ourselves. The above list of features represents a significant amount of work that we need to do. Setting up a system that is flexible enough to allow us to do this easily is no small task. If I’m lucky, by procrastinating long enough, I may find that they end up doing the work for me:) If I am going to do all this work, then I want to get the most return for that work that I possibly can by making a re-usable system that I can apply easily in any game. This means a de-coupled, generic system that can be adapted easily to a wide variety of projects. This is a good situation to create a Game Maker Extension (.gex). However, an extension will not give us a complete system — an Extension allows us to package a library of useful new GML functions that we write, but our built system will also need room, object, sprite, and sound resources, and a .gex cannot include those resources. Ultimately, this means that we may not be able to realize a dream of a drop-in system. But even providing better building blocks to create such a system would be better than nothing.

To begin, we’ll start small, and implement some basic things, and then iterate and refine our solution until we have something that hopefully works really well for a wide variety of games.

In our next article, we’ll discuss the code needed to make these configuration settings, as well as how to store and retrieve them.

Game Maker Studio Automatic Updates Failures (and workaround)

YoYoGames has been releasing updates to Game Maker Studio at a very fast pace lately. For a while now, new builds have been released every few days now, and it seems like every time I fire up the development environment, it’s got another update for me.

The last two or three of these have been extremely problematic, with very slow downloads, and repeated silent failures of the updater to run when the download shows that it is completed and the update is ready to install.

In the past, I have found that (on Windows 7, at least) one or two things might make the update process a little more reliable: launch Game Maker using “Run as administrator”, and exit the main Game Maker program while running the updater app. I’m not sure if these really do make a difference or not, but in the past when I tried these measures it seemed to help. But last night none of this made a bit of difference.

Yesterday, I spent many hours patiently waiting for the latest update to download. Each attempt took an hour or more, and when the updater indicated that the update was complete and ready to install, nothing would happen — it would fail silently, and on next launch, prompt me to re-download the same update again.

I tried looking for an alternate way to download the update, and it was difficult to find a direct link to the file — the only way to obtain it seems to be through the YoYoGames store. Eventually, I found a link that someone provided in the Game Maker Community forums, and began downloading it with Google Chrome.

About an hour later, I saw the download terminate as though it had completed successfully, but when I checked the file size, only about 50MB of the 93MB I was expecting was there. Obviously, an incomplete installer won’t work, so that appears to have been the culprit all along.

It’s clear that auto update fails due to heavy server load causing the download connection to fail, resulting in an incomplete download. When the program tries to run the update, it fails silently when it detects that the downloaded file is incomplete. When it tries to re-download the file, it starts over from 0% rather than resume from where it left off. These re-try attempts only add to the server load, and users re-trying but never succeeding only end up exacerbating the problem.

Even with the direct download link, if YoYo’s server is under heavy load, the download would fail when I tried to initiate download using Chrome. At times that I’ve had problems running the update, I’d get speeds of ~14kbps, which is terribly slow considering I’m on a cable modem that routinely tests at 20mbps. Under normal circumstances, this download should take a minute or two, not an hour.

Game Maker Studio seems to be a victim of its own popularity. YoYoGames needs to add server capacity to address this issue. Some mirrors or a CDN (content delivery network) would alleviate the problem. But the updater is to blame as well: It should not fail silently when the download fails and it has an incomplete file. By telling the user that the download is complete and the installer is ready to run, the user is mislead and does not have any way to know what the problem really is.

It would also help a great deal if the Auto Updater supported resuming partial downloads, rather than discarding a failed download. That way, users could complete the update after several attempts, rather than continue re-trying and starting over, and continuing to place a high demand on the server. After they complete the update process successfully, they’ll no longer place demand on the server, and it will become more available to others who need the download.

When the server was under heavy load, the only way I was able to complete the download was by using Orbit Downloader to handle the download. Orbit is a specialized download tool for Windows with robust capability to resume downloads. With it, I was able to successfully complete the download where Google Chrome and the Game Maker auto update feature both failed. Once downloaded, I ran the update manually, and everything worked as it normally should.

A bit of warning, I consider Orbit to be an annoying application, borderline malware. The installer wants to change your web browser’s default homepage, which it has no business doing, and it wants to install a toolbar. It is somewhat intrusive in the way it tries to integrate itself with the operating system and any browsers it detects. It’s nice that it has those capabilities, if you want to completely replace your normal downloading with Orbit, but if you don’t, it still wants to insinuate itself so that it always downloads anything you ever want to download.

It also has various social network integrators which have no point (what, am I supposed to Share with my friends on Twitter and Facebook everytime I download something, what it was, and let them know the link? Get real!) Also, it will — without asking — scan your computer to check for out of date applications, and notify you of available updates. Unfortunately, while it sounds like this would be a useful feature, it does not actually make downloading the updates any easier, and is frequently error prone as to what the latest version number is, leading to some false positives.

However, Orbit’s core feature of downloading anything faster and more reliably than just about anything else is good, as long as you can keep the rest of the junk that they’ve built around it tamed. Just be careful when installing the program to say no to most of the stuff it wants to offer you.

Otherwise, try to download updates during off-peak times. Early morning (6-7AM) if you’re in UTC-05 (Eastern US) seems to be good currently.

Currently, the form of the direct download link is:

http://store.yoyogames.com/downloads/gm-studio/GMStudio-Installer-1.0.exe

(I’ve been informed that this url will always contain the most recent build.)

Hopefully if users start using the advice above, it will help reduce the load on YoYoGames’ server, making the experience of updating better for everyone.

Make a Configuration System in Game Maker, part 1

One thing that’s still currently harder than it should be in Game Maker is creating an interface to allow the user to configure the game preferences. It’s a real pain to have to implement a configuration system in each game you make from scratch — it takes a lot of time away from the development of the actual game.

Game Maker is supposed to make game development faster and easier. It really should have features to allow making the parts of the game program that are not the game itself faster and easier as well. One may consider this a weakness in Game Maker, if one takes Game Maker to be intended primarily for making game development quicker and easier. Which, it is.

But, Game Maker also is intended to be an educational platform, so I see this as both an inconvenience and an educational opportunity. How often do you get to devise your own UI widget and implement them out of primitives rather than use some library?

Since Game Maker does not provide this out of the box, and due to the difficulty of implementing such a system even once with good quality, it’s very worthwhile to try to build a generic system for game configuration options, something flexible enough to allow it to be used in many game projects, rather than have to build anew for each new game you develop. The up front investment in development for the system will be regained in the re-use of the system in many projects.

This article is the first in a series which describes in detail how to design and implement such a system in Game Maker: Studio. In the process, I’ll be generating a number of Extensions which you may use in your own projects.

Unfortunately, these articles will necessarily be Windows-centric, as I do not have the means to test what I’m building on anything but Windows and HTML5. I’ll be making the source available, though, so if you want to try these out in Android, OS X or iOS, or (if needed) modify/extend them to work on these platforms, you’re very much encouraged to do so, as long as you share the source and keep it open.

I would welcome other Game Maker Studio users who are building for OS X, iOS, and Android who want to collaborate on this project to contact me.

Going wild with UI design

Many games (especially professional games) go crazy with interface design. The designer is encouraged to (pardon the clichés) think outside the box and reinvent the wheel. More than simply coming up with new skins for buttons, sliders, pulldowns, and listboxes, etc., they do something really special to integrate the game, or its theme, with the configuration screen controls.

For a superb example of such an implementation, check out the configuration screen for Derek Yu’s Spelunky.

Spelunky's ingenious in-game configuration screen

By the way, did you know that Spelunky was originally created in Game Maker? Later on, its developer re-did it for XBox Live, and released the source for his Game Maker project, so be sure to go check that out. Play the game, and see how the configuration screen is cleverly set up as a special room in the “normal” play world, where your explorer can trip switches that control the configuration of the game. Then look at the source to understand how this was implemented.

Keep in mind that while Spelunky’s solution to the config screen is original and innovative, it’s not perfect — for example, it’s not terribly fast to use. There are always tradeoffs with any design — do what makes the most sense for your game and always with the user foremost in your thoughts.

If you want to, you can create an interface like this, but it’ll be more of a custom job. This series is geared toward building a foundation out of generic, reusable code. But the good news is, much of what we cover in here will end up being useful, because really the only difference between a custom configuration screen and a generic one is the interface, and we’re going to keep the other parts of the system abstract enough that they should be re-usable even in a custom system.

So, keep reading! Besides, it’s better to learn these basic approaches before trying to tackle something more innovative and complicated.

A word of caution, though: many times these highly customized interfaces look cool, but are terrible in how they function. They aren’t intuitive or understandable, or the controls are actually difficult to manipulate. Always strive to make your UI user-friendly.

There are entire bookshelves worth of books you could read to learn about good User Interface design principles. I don’t have space here to say it all, but in summary:

  1. Avoid forcing the user to have to think about how to do what they want to do. The UI is not a puzzle. Its purpose and function both should be immediately obvious.
  2. The UI should convey information clearly to the user. This information should be: the purpose of the control; the current configuration state.
  3. Controls should be easy to use and easy to understand how to use.
  4. There should be as few controls as are necessary. It’s a myth that people want lots and lots choices. They think they do, but what they really want are choices that are relevant to them, and the options that they want. A good designer can make most of these choices for the user without having to ask them their preference, but also knows which choices need to be offered to the user.  Look for ways to reduce the amount of controls you give to the user. Show only controls that are relevant in the current context. Combine controls when they represent mutually exclusive options.
  5. Provide sensible defaults. The default option should be the most sensible choice for the most people. Often, this is one standard option, but not always. Sometimes there are two or three good candidates for what may be a sensible default, and it is not obvious which one the default should be. Knowing which is the best configuration for a default setting may depend on environment and context. So, if your program can sense these things somehow, that can aid in selecting the most appropriate default.

There are always exceptions to the above rules. Like, I’m sure that for a certain puzzle game, a really innovative configuration screen that is itself a puzzle, and in its way serves to introduce the player to the game’s mechanics and gameplay would be awesome. But if you’re going to pull something like that off, you need to be very careful that your design works.


A Game Maker Weakness: No UI widget libraries

Game Maker has nearly nothing in the way of traditional interface control widgets. This alone makes creating a Settings screen very difficult for a novice Game Maker user. However, figuring out how to do this is an excellent opportunity for an aspiring Game Maker user, provided of course you can figure it out. Learning this will give you a lot of useful skills and insights about how to design both software and user interfaces.

In the long run, I believe it will be better for everyone if YoYoGames extends Game Maker to provide better built-in tools to allow developers to create polished, professional configuration screens without having to sink huge amounts of time into it. Preferably, some widget objects based on the native OS, but skinnable to allow the game to have its own look and theme would be the best way to go.

Until then, we have to make do, so we might as well come up with some useful approaches and share the knowledge about them. Fortunately, creating our own widgets out of Objects, a few sprites, and a little GML isn’t that difficult.

In the next article, we’ll talk about the Design of our Configuration System, and brainstorm the features we want it to have. I’m not just being editorially cute by using the “royal we” either — if there’s something you’d like to see in what I’m building, drop a comment.

Part 2

HealthHalo extension for Game Maker

I whipped this up in about a half hour at the April Cleveland Game Developers meeting. It’s a very simple, but useful function which draws a Health Halo [aka “health meter”, “life bar”, etc.] above the sprite of any Game Maker object that has member variables named life and maxlife.

Health Halos are very common in multiplayer and RealTime Strategy (RTS) games.

As always, the source is freely available, along with a demo project. Download the extension package .zip file from the Releases page

Notacon 9 Game Maker: Crash Course presentation materials for your consumption

Game Maker: Crash Course materials are online, open to the public on Google Docs.

Here’s what you get:

Presentation slides. Be sure to read the notes, there is actual information. More than would fit into the talk itself!

Space Invaders Kit. All you need is Game Maker installed and you can build it yourself! A great way to get started. Includes:

  • starter project file,
  • final project file,
  • final project .exe build,
  • sprite images,
  • sound files.
  • step-by-step instructions for how to do it!
  • project specification document — a good way to start out any project is to document what you want it to be. Follow this as a template for your own designs!

Notacon 9

Notacon 9 weekend is over.

I gave my Game Maker Crash Course talk, which went well. I livecoded Space Invaders using Game Maker 8.1. This was my first-ever livecoding talk, and let me tell you, it’s not easy to talk intelligibly while coding!

I was really anxious about screwing the talk up the night before, but when I got into it I was able to keep my mental focus in both the talk and in the code, and got through enough of it in 90 minutes that I felt like I’d gotten most of the fundamentals across, and took Q&A at that point. The talk went much better than my first go at it at my sneak preview/dress rehearsal, which means the March 10 rehearsal did it’s job admirably — but there was still a lot of things that I glossed over and didn’t explain as fully as I’d intended in my notes and slides.

But I think that actually worked out better (it was more an ad lib to go off script than an error), because I ended up just sticking to the immediate project and didn’t digress into confusing subjunctive sidebars about all the other things one might possibly do in Game Maker with a given type of resource, Event, or Action. I only flubbed a couple times (apart from the intentional errors that I made to demonstrate how the process of building up a project iteratively really looks — building and testing incremental bits of progress toward the final project), and recovered gracefully and kept the talk moving, and I didn’t end up needing my detailed outline notes at all. I’m not sure how well the audio got picked up by the microphone, as I could not really hear myself over the monitors at all while I was speaking, but it will be interesting to see if they can do anything in post-processing to salvage the video.

One of the best things at Notacon this year, and possibly one of the best all time things at Notacon, was the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator workshop led by Mike Substelny and Tom Robertson. I was very happy that they came to their first Notacon in a roundabout way because of me. When I was working on my proposal for A Game Any Game, I approached Mike and asked him if he would like to help me out with a Game Maker workshop for the weekend. Mike was the instructor who led the intro to game design class at Lorain County Community College, which is what finally got me back into game design and programming, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to work together on a project like this with him. He declined at first, but after thinking about it some more decided to submit his own proposal with Tom, and that’s how that happened. I love seeing my enthusiasm for community events bring in more people and their energy for the things that they are enthusiastic about.

I saw a lot of friends this year, and by that I don’t mean the usual hacker scene personalities; I mean local people who I’ve known for years, but never had seen at Notacon before. Even though I always felt many of them would be into it and enjoy the talks and activities, and many of them were friends or friends of friends with people who went each year. I’m not sure whether my talking about how great it is to be there for the past three years had any influence or not, but it doesn’t really matter.

However, this year’s event was quite a bit smaller than past years, overall. I’m not sure why that is, and it makes me wonder. The same good feelings were there, about being at a great party with brilliant people, and actually in some ways maybe they were stronger than past years, the luminaries and bigger personalities who were missing gave the event a more down to earth and sedate tone and I think maybe allowed those who were there to embiggen themselves a bit to fill out the empty space more than they might have otherwise. I felt like there was something missing for much of the weekend, so many people who’ve been coming for years who weren’t there this year.

A Game Any Game was not as successful as I had hoped, but ever since I submitted the proposal to do it, I had this feeling that it would be difficult to attract participants when there’s so much else to do all weekend long. We had a few people come to the table we were at, to talk and get the software from me, and build a little start of something. And any amount of that to me counts as win. I hadn’t planned on making a game myself, as I’d wanted to be available to help others with their questions as they got acclimated to Game Maker, but with the lack of participants, I ended up working on a game and completed it just before the event ended.

It really isn’t much of a game, in fact it’s really pretty broken in some ways, and the code, if you look at it, it quite rough. As I worked on it, I had the feeling I used to get from drawing margin doodles while sitting around waiting for inspiration to grab me. It was less an attempt at designing something good, and more an experiment, to stretch my legs a bit and do something I hadn’t done with Game Maker before, and so I chose to do a game that used mouse controls. Doing the controls was a little tricky, mainly because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted, and I’m not certain that the approach I ended up with is the best, and probably it isn’t, but for the purposes of exploring the mouse functions and doing something with them, it was a good experience. I only spent maybe a total of four hours over the weekend seriously engrossed in building it, and much of the rest of the time I was working on it, it was an aimless, design-less exercise.

So, enough excuse-making, I think I’ve adequately established that this is probably not worth playing, but for posterity I’ll have the .gm81 file water if anyone wants to look at the code, build it, play it, or mess around with it. I don’t plan to develop it further.

I’m planning on getting back into MUST!GET!EGG! in the next week after Ludum Dare. For those who I met this weekend who might be reading this, that will be a more inspired creation and should be a decent game by the time I finish it.