Class 25 - Level Up and Gore

Post 108

Level Up

So today I started to implement the experience system. My basic plan for how to create it is pretty simple. All it should require is a couple new variables.
Experience ("exp") and Player level ("playerlvl")


I ended up needing to use another variable. This variable ("xpgive") asks the game if it has already given the player this experience. Without this the experience would constantly be applied to the player resulting in a completely broken mechanic.
So another thing I wanted to do for the implementation of exp is add a working level system.
The level system is mostly a visual thing currently. But it does increase your maximum health. In the future I would like to have it give you the option to increase a variety of stats. When you currently level up it shows a level up indicator above the player and plays a sound.
Level Up Sound

Gore

Before I show you what the leveling up looks like, I also created a blood effect. This was an interesting thing I learned on my own. Basically when the player or enemy is hit an object is created, the object then picks on of the 20 images inside its animation and stays on it. This makes a nice splat on the ground and doesn't just paste the same image over and over again.

So here is a demonstration of the Blood and the Leveling up system together.
Tomorrow I am going to try to add something that heals the player, because currently they don't have any way to heal themselves.

Class 24 - User Interface

Post 107

User Interface

Today I decided to work on improving my UI (User Interface) for the game. The old version looked good but wasn't exactly what I wanted when it came to in-game positioning. It also required some code with lots of numbers to get some values right, this because the values need to adapt to the players current health, and max health. Regardless I ended up making of a version of this that works. But still didn't like it. 

So my next step in making my health bar was finding a way to make it mostly in code, turns out there is a specific GML function for health bars. So I decided to go down that route and use the Draw GUI function to create my Health bar.



This is currently what the health bar looks like, it has two bars, health, and experience. The grey border around the bars had to be sized pixel by pixel to get it to fit properly over top of the bars. Think of it like two pieces of a puzzle fit together to look like a whole picture.

Tomorrow I will attempt to make Experience and leveling up work in game and with the bars.

Class 23 - Blocking

Post 106

Blocking

Today all I managed to accomplish was a blocking mechanic that allows the player to successfully reduce the damage of incoming attacks.

Currently this reduces the damage from 10-30, to 5-10.
So the player still takes damage and can't just hide in a corner and never die. Right now the way the shield works is you press E and your character goes into a blocking mode for around 1.5 seconds. In this mode moving and attacking is impossible, making it strictly a defensive tactic.

The script is fairly straight forward, however it required a lot of variables to make sure everything new how to behave when the player was actually blocking.
At first when I created the blocking state, if you happened to be moving well hitting the block button you would stumble into uncontrollable slide, so that is why I have added the (speed = 0;) section of the code. This makes it so when the player hits the block, they plant their feet and hold their ground, kind of like you would expect from someone using a shield.
Blocking however feels kind of clunky. This is because of the the 1.5 second duration it traps you in. So in the near future I would like to make it only block when you hold the block button.

Over this past week of working on my challenge game I have learned more about code then the entirety of my first course in InfoTech as an independent student.
Next class is a long ways off. So honestly i'm unsure of what I will actually do for my game. But I will maybe try to make more enemy variations as well as new ability's for the main character.

Future Enemy Types, List of Ideas 
1. Heavy Enemies. 
2. Ranged Enemies.
3. Some sort of Boss.
4. Faster Enemies.
5. Enemies That Can Block Attacks. 

Class 22 - Not very Stealthy

Post 105

 Post for March,10th not 11th 
(I started this post on the 10th)

Stealth

Today I started to make the stealth aspect of the game, this was simply made by having a detectable variable inside the enemy objects. So when the player is inside the bushes they are considered undetectable. It also reduces the players opacity making them slightly see through. This was added as a visual aspect to know when the detectable variable was working, and because it conveys the fact that the player is hiding.

The stealth worked perfectly right up until... well honestly I don't know when or how it got broken. But it did. This is what it should have been like.

And this is how it works now. As you can see using stealth in this exact same situation looks considerably different when the code is broken, I want to say it looks a lot less friendly. I plan on fixing this next class or at least attempting to locate the problem and fix it another class. Sadly I didn't get around to making a blocking system just yet. But tomorrow I will look into making a blocking mechanic.
And possibly figure out how to create some good sound effects for my game.

Class 21 - AI Improvements, and Music

Post 104

Soundtrack

So today I played around with FLstudio to create some atmospheric music for my game. Currently all the songs I have created are a work in progress. This is my first real attempt to make music. Hopefully its not that bad and can properly convey the atmosphere and tone for the game that I want.

1. This is the first rendition, I would highly recommend setting it to loop

- First Song - 

2. This is a better take at trying to make a creepy soundtrack

- Second Song -

3. This is a remade version of the Second Song for a more ambient approach, this currently is the version I am using in my game. 

- Second Song Ambient -

AI Improvements 

After a great deal of time I finally managed to make the AI somewhat interesting. Currently the Enemy Object runs off two scripts, "Scr_ enemy_movement" and "Scr_enemy_attack". Both these scripts are called into the objects step event under certain circumstances. Like when the player is 100 pixels close to the object his movement script kicks in, if he is 10 pixels close, his attack scripts activates and he starts swinging.

Another thing I added to the scripts is a Detection Variable, this will allow me to make some pretty "sneaky" updates in the future. Which is something I will look into tomorrow for sure. 

Currently my plans for tomorrow are to add player death, possibly something to do with the detection variable and blocking.

Overall I learned how to do a lot today, this is currently the farthest I have ever been in code, and its getting really complicated... But I still somehow enjoy doing it. So that's good. I guess. 

Class 20 - Atmosphere and Combat

Post 103

Atmosphere & Combat

Today I worked on my game for Howie and I's competition. Currently I have managed to implement an attack for the player using an "Instance_create(x,y, obj_hitbox)" which just creates a little red circle that only exists for 1 frame, this object is what applies the damage to my enemies. Which are also working, to a degree. I am having a lot of problems when it comes to AI however. I have manged to get them to move towards the player, which is easy. But I have to get them to move towards the player in a way that makes them feel alive. Also I would like them to have a detection range, so I need to find a way to do that properly. I also have a working hit marker system. When the enemy is hit and takes damage they flash red, then return to their original colour, which is something I learned how to do today jsut by playing around with GML functions such as "Image_blend".
I also have added a great deal of sprites to the game.
Here is a list of the current in game sprites.
And two GIFs of the games current environment and atmosphere.
And One of the current Combat system, NOTE that the red circle is strictly visible for development reasons and can easily be turned invisible by a simple option in its object settings.
Currently I have a simple option to change the time of day by hitting "1" for day or "2" for night.
Combat

Atmosphere #1

Atmosphere #2

Large Pile Of Corpses

Small Pile Of Corpses

Dead Tree

Campfire

Imp Enemy

Class 19 - Challenge Accepted

Post 102

- This post is for Monday, March 7th.

(Forgot to hit publish, so the date is wrong)

Hack "N" Slash

I have started on multiple Game Maker Projects throughout my time in Info-tech, and it is probably extremely annoying to read that I am starting another one. But I have a valid reason to start another project. Howie has challenged me to a game off competition thing. Basically Howie and I will make a game within a specific time frame, probably around 1 week and then we will see who's game is better. The reason I started a new project, instead of working on an older project is because we need to start from scratch for our competition. Currently we have not officially started the timer for our competition because Howie is still having trouble finding inspiration for his game. Luckily I have not run into the same problem yet, and have a pretty decent direction to go.
The idea for my game contender is a semi-sidescrolling hack 'n' slash. Now what I mean by "Semi-sidescrolling" is that its mostly Xaxis movement, but has a touch of Yaxis movement. And of course "hack 'n' slash" means you run around and well... hack, and slash things, preferably enemies.
So far the game development has been going pretty well, now that I have all the coding knowledge from all my other previous projects I can move at a much faster pace. Not to mention my game is super tiny, and I don't mean its a game with hardly anything in it. I mean its super small, scale wise.


So far all there is to do in the game is move, Up, Down, Left, and Right. But tomorrow I will attempt to add enemies and attacks for the player.

Class 18 - Explosions, Enemies, and Crashing into Walls

Post 101

Today I am doing my blog for Fridays class, the reason I delayed this post was so I could add a lot to it and make up for some of the more lack luster posts of this month. Last blog post I said something along the lines of "Next class I will either do, Crashing into walls, Shooting, and maybe even a proper space background". But instead of doing one of those I did all three. And an added bonus of enemy ships.

The Final Frontier

So first off lets talk about the brand new fancy space background, nothing to special in the technical department, but it sure looks good. This background is 500 by 500 pixels big. Currently its set to tile itself across the room creating a vast open space of, well space. The way I created it was fairly simple, I started by just making a 100% black image and used the "Add noise" function, this basically just puts a bunch of dots all over the screen. I then played around with the coverage and lowered it so the dots didn't cover up every last inch of space in the picture. Then I stripped the image of its colour and created another layer, painted that layer 100% purple, then I reduced the layers opacity, making the background slightly purple. This gives it a very old-timey cosmic feel. Hopefully you, the reader, enjoy this background as much as I do.

Collisions

The next thing I started to work on was Collisions, this was fairly complicated but luckily Howie showed me some of his magic tricks and helped me create it. So for the Collisions to work properly outside of the GML physics system, I needed some fancy pants code. The following code is extremly confusing and I am not entirely sure what it exactly does. But I will ask Howie more about it and see if I can learn how to create it without any assistance.
The code is located in a collision event inside a Parent Object. A parent Object is kind of like having genetics in code, you make another object the "Child" of the parent and it passes on its "Genes", the genes being a line of code. This parent Object is the master of all collisions, any object that can bump into things is put into it as a line of code, this way I don't need to have a collision code for every combination of every possible collision inside every collision object.

Crashing

That is the collisions setup, but it wouldn't look good without a fancy explosion when the player crashed now would it? No, it wouldn't.
So this is how I made a super cool implosion/explosion looking thing.
So here is a picture of the Death_Script. Basically what it does is when the players health is equal to 0, or below 0, the explosion object is created and a bunch of other cool looking settings that you can read for yourself. The second picture is the code inside the explosion object itself. That code just tells the explosion to restart the room when it finishes its animation.

Finally, the end of the collision code, the part we have all been waiting for... The EXPLOSION.

Shooting Lasers and Enemy Ships

Finally I added Shooting, and enemies. Currently both are pretty lame and not the best that they could be, especially the enemy ships. All they currently do is aimless fly towards you hitting everything in there path. The code for all the objects and things that go into making an object shoot is pretty minimal, so i'm not going to bother putting it into the blog, but basically it just creates an object that sets its direction and speed to the last location of the mouse at the time you pressed the shoot button. Here is a demonstration in GIF form. This properly shows off the visual aspects of shooting and destroying enemies in my game.
And the AI, isn't AI it just spawns, turns towards you and moves. Obviously in the future I wish to change this and have the ships move towards you in a more random intelligent way, or maybe even shoot back rather then kamikaze into you.

Class 17 - Spaceships

Post 100

Spaceships

Today I further developed my practice game into a more functional game. I added thrust to the spaceships sprite, for when it is accelerating to maximum speed. This makes the game feel more fluid and just overall looks good. I also created a custom mouse cursor for the game. I changed the cursor because the ship flys towards the cursor in the game, so it looked sort of weird just being the default windows mouse. Doing this is incredibly easy and only required around 2 lines of code and hiding the mouse in game from the global settings.

Something I also attempted to do was add a speed boost with the shift key. Now that by itself is fairly simple, but I also wanted the room view to grow wider as your speed increases, well using boost. This took many, many attempts. But after a few hours of after school work I managed to get it to operate the correct way! I still might play around with how much it zooms out because its hardly noticeable.



Next I wish to add crashing into walls, a proper space background, and maybe even shooting!
So that is what I will attempt to do next class!

Class 16 - Two Sets of Controls

Post 99

Today I wanted to learn more about how Scripts work in GML. As it turns out they are basically just another way to organize your over complicated code. How it works is you create a "Page of Code" and put in everything you want, in this case movement. You name the code something like "Scr_movement_code". Then you go into the location you want the script page to be called, and put in the name "Scr_movement_code();". This calls the script to that location and acts exactly how it would if it was in the page. So it really doesn't do a lot other then organize things neatly into their own sections, which is something I am very much into! 

Another thing I played around with was adding multiple control sets, which was incredibly easy to do. Sadly it is so easy its almost not even worth the time to blog. Tomorrow I will continue to work with code and scripts trying to further develop a little miniature game! I also might do some work on animations or sprites! Because we need a new background and a lot of new sprites!  

  

Class 15 - More Test Games

Post 98

Today I started to create another test game. This time I played around more with the enemy code. I was just experimenting with the basic code rotation code and ended up making a really strange unpredictable moving red square. The Characters movement is just a simple movement code using the "Phy" functions. This game doesn't really have much to show yet, but tomorrow I will attempt to improve it further. Sorry that this post isn't the best quality. During the weekend I might make another big post to make up for this lame post.