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Game Maker Thread

 
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purplechair
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Joined: 28 Mar 2005
Posts: 378
Location: in my pants

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 4:58 pm    Post subject: Game Maker Thread Reply with quote

Okay. Okay. I downloaded Game Maker the other day, and about half an hour later I had made a game where a ghost shoots my friend's head off. This thing is easy as piss, so I approve.

I was going to leave this thread until after my final project was handed in (Monday!), but then I spent about five minutes fumbling around with the Path action this evening and I managed to make a little dude walk around his crappy little kitchen. All I need is to make a few different rooms, have some controls to switch from room to room, and then... well, and then I need to co-ordinate (8 rooms x 5) minutes of crappy little pixel drama. But that can't be so hard! The worst part would be making all the necessary sprites, especially if I have to make little speech bubble sprites for every line of dialogue.

Edit: God, I totally deleted the bit where I say what my game is! Basically, it's about five minutes of EXCITING CYBERDRAMA spread across the eight rooms of an arctic research base. The only controls are selecting which room to view, and all the little pixelly actors will walk in and out and have conversations and stuff. It'll just be a pre-programmed set of moves and text, and all the interaction lies with what you choose to view. Got it? Good. Edit edit: To clarify, this game design is part of my project (along with an essay that I'm REAL tired of by now), and I don't have to make the game, but I think having something playable would help make up for the inevitably underwhelming story. Well, it works for Square-Enix.

Anyway. The point is, SOME time within the next week, I'll be unlocking the full version and noodling around a bit in an unemployed haze. So I thought I'd make a thread so that... well, so I can pester dess for some help when I need it, BUT ALSO so that other people can talk about Game Maker related stuff too.

It's really, really easy!


(I also just got invited into Metaplace - after twelve freakin' MONTHS - but that's a slightly different kettle of fish)
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SuperWes
Updated the banners, but not his title
Updated the banners, but not his title


Joined: 07 Dec 2004
Posts: 3725

PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 7:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Your game sounds a lot like Voyeur, which was an old CD-i game where you sit in an apartment and stare across the street into a politician's estate, recording video and audio of his family in order to get a story for the newspaper. The big score was when you got to see his daughter kiss her girlfriend and sent the tape in to the tabloids.

It also sounds like what I remember of Night Trap and/or Double Switch, but I admittedly haven't played much of either of those.

But yeah, Game Maker's easy until you try to do something that goes beyond the boundaries, then it becomes arguably more difficult than just programming from scratch.

-Wes
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purplechair
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Joined: 28 Mar 2005
Posts: 378
Location: in my pants

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 1:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've played more than my fair share of Night Trap while researching this Sad Basically, it's a complete wreck of a game, because all the interesting stuff is going on around the family and the girls, but you have to sneak around looking at the boring ninjas to actually win. And there's no warning about when and where the ninjas will appear, so you have to remember (well, I imagine most people would write it down, but same thing) where and where all the ninjas appear and spend 25 minutes playing an arrythmic rythym game from memory, with loads of hilarious 80's video stuff going on that you have to NOT LOOK AT.

I downloaded Voyeur, but the only good CDI emulator seems to cost money, which kinda defeats the point of piracy. But I read some book that talked about it at great length, so I feel like I've played it anyway. Which reminds me, I have notes!

Tim Garrand - Writing for Multimedia - page 234 wrote:
Voyeur was a major step toward moving multimedia entertainment away from video games for kids and into interactive narratives for adults.


Oh, and:

Tim Garrand - WfM - page 4 wrote:
The potential interactivity of multimedia is awesome.
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purplechair
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Joined: 28 Mar 2005
Posts: 378
Location: in my pants

PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I finished my work, and I didn't have time to make a playable game of it, but never mind.

I'm making a scrolling shoot-em-up of sorts! I've got a character flying about and some enemies to shoot and today's little project has been to make a grassy tileset for the floor. But I haven't figured out how to tell the floor to block the player's movement, so you just end up flying through the ground and it looks dumb.

Judging from some of the example stuff I've looked at, I'm going about the whole thing really inefficiently, though. Is there some particular way I should be laying out my little script commands? Like, when it comes to shooting enemies, should I putting the commands for that on the bullets or the enemies? I'm currently assuming that it makes very little difference, from a technical perspective.
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