January 2014 – Globero Games

The end is nigh. Muwahahahahaha!

mstop_4 Gonna Catcha, interface January 22, 2014 0 Comment

It is a joyous occasion; Gonna Catcha is now feature-complete. Everything I set out to do with the game is done aside from a few tweaks here and there. In v.0.9.0, I made two major sets of additions, along with some minor improvements.

The first set of additions are two additional screens in the attract mode. The first one is a brief introduction to all the characters in the game, and idea I borrowed from Mappy:

Meet the folks.

The game itself did not have any detailed depictions of the two main characters Pohena and Donum, so I put (relatively) large portraits of the two on this screen. Both still adhere to the 4-colour palette limitations of all sprites in the game, if you break them down into individual 8×8 tiles. (It was actually much easier to do than I imagined.)

After the introductions, the attract mode switches to a gameplay demo. This where the game’s autoplay system plays back one of my attempts at beating the first round with both characters. As was the style at the time, the attempt was poor.

You suck at this game!
I’ll buy YOU for a dollar!

The second set of additions are the tutorial sequences that teach players how to play the game, replacing the instructions screen in the previous version.

… …

Yeah, I got nothing.

The tutorials demonstrate, by example, the basic rules of the game: what each player character’s job is and what they can or cannot shoot. There are four in all; they are shown before Rounds 1, 2, 3 and 8.

Enough talk! Go download and play it right now!

This game plays so good, it plays itself.

mstop_4 Game Maker 8.1, GameMaker: Studio, general programming, Gonna Catcha January 4, 2014 0 Comment

Welcome to the first post of 2014! I’ll been working on the autoplay system (for the “How To Play” segments and the attract mode) for Gonna Catcha since the last time I posted. And since it’s also been a while since I uploaded something on my Youtube channel, let’s make it a twofer; here’s a short video of it being tested:

As I was coding this, I realized that creating the autoplay system would have been a lot easier if I was using Game Maker 8.1 instead of GameMaker:Studio to make this game. That’s because games made with Game Maker 8.1 could be coded to be dynamic at runtime. That is, you could add, remove or change graphics, sounds, rooms and even code while the game is running.
So what does dynamically-generated game assets have to do with the game playing itself? Well, the assets of interest in all of this are timelines, a series of code snippets that are run at assigned steps in time. Once a timeline is assigned to an instance and is set to run, it will automatically fire off the code snippets at their predetermined times. If I was using Game Maker 8.1, I could record player input to a file and then save it to the disk. Later, when I want to play the input back for demo purposes, I could read the data from the file, translate it into a dynamically-generated timeline and let Game Maker (and my player input code) handle the rest.
Unfortunately, due to cross-platform incompatibilities, the ability to dynamically add and change game assets at runtime had been restricted in GameMaker:Studio. In particular, most of the dynamic coding functions are gone. Fortunately, the all of the dynamic timeline functions survived the cut; well, all of them EXCEPT the function that allows you to ADD new code to a timeline. Without this function, this function, it is impossible to created new timelines with new code from scratch on-the-fly, pretty much destroying the above method of creating an autoplay system with a surgical strike.
In light of that, I tried to think of other ways to do this. First, I tried to record the player input into a human-readable format then manually translate and hardcode it into a timeline. However, this method was too tedious and took way too long to do, and if I wanted to re-record a play session, I would have to retranslate everything from scratch. Next I tried to build the timeline from scratch, but it was also too tedious since it was too hard to predict NPC movements, even though the random seed was fixed.
In the end, I decided to create my own timeline system. It’s not as through or functional as GameMaker:Studio‘s native timeline system, as it can only take control of the player characters, but it’ll do.