Update Week 15

Long time no see! Weekly, bi-weekly, what does it matter?

I’ve decided to take the jump and switch over to Game Maker Studio 2. The reason being that sooner or later, I’d do it anyways and so why wait?

I could import the old game into the new version run it without much trouble. Studio 2 creates a couple of compatibility functions. But the whole resource tree is a mess, and there are a lot of opportunities to improve on the stuff I wrote in GMS 1.4, now that I again learned a little bit more.

I also made an improved attack animation. It actually took the longest time to do the blade flash of the actual slash. Not because it took long to draw, but because I couldn’t decide on how to visualize where the attack hits while still making it look decent. So I tried a ton of different ways until I settled for this one which most clearly displays the time and area when the attack actually hits.

This is also the first time I drew the sprite in its original size from the beginning (not counting the one attempt I made in Pyxel Edit some time ago). It’s nice to be able to see from the beginning how it’ll look in the game, and I hope to be able to make more consistent sprites in the future. (And filling in colors is also a lot quicker. 🙂

Update Week 13

Weekly updates start with this post.

I want to form a habit of keeping track of what I’m doing, and where I’m progressing. Also perhaps if anyone were to read this blog, it could add some additional motivation for getting things done.
Unfortunately, I no longer have as much spare time as I did in February when I started getting into this stuff and could make progress more rapidly.
As a hobbyist I don’t have any deadlines to meet, but I feel it’s necessary to focus my efforts at least somewhat.

 

The sprite to the left is for yet another new project I have started. The umbrella thing was more or less me implementing stuff as I learned along the way, without much aim. I do intend to go back to it eventually, but…

 

 

… at some point  I thought I wanted to make a ranged weapon, and I tried to add a machinegun sort of thing. I drew the sprite to the right, and animated it a little bit, and then I realized that it’s totally out of place for the game I was making.

Also, since I kept exploring new ways of creating sprites, their look kept changing and I had to make a lot of small adjustments to keep the different animations consistent, which was really annoying.

In the meantime I’ve learned some things about random level generation and randomness in general.

The idea I have is to make a game where the player can enter sequences of spell-words and each sequence will trigger a different spell. Which sequence activates which spell is shuffled at the start of the game. You can try out different spells, but there are negative effects as well.

I already implemented much of the above, but I only made the player running sprite today, and there are no spells yet expect a test-fireball. So by the end of the next week, I’ll hopefully have finished the player sprite (idle, jumping, casting animations) and implemented a couple of interesting and fun spell effects.