Kingdom Of Loathing

So I've been playing that game in the title quite a bit now, and have decided to form a guild, it has a fully kitted out rumpus room, and I've started to building a clan wars army.

The guild is of course named after this blog.

Sorry

Yeah no update yesterday, but I have a really good reason. You see something whent wrong with Game Maker for awhile there, but YOYO Games finally got around to fixing it.

So I spent yesterday catching up on my work. See? I told you it was a good reason. Or at least it's a good reason to me.

Another Shooter, Update 1

So I promised an update on Monday and here it is. Unfortunately no download this week as some of the changes I'll be mentioning are taking a while to implement. Part of the problem is that I refuse to release a version with known bugs.

New upgrades- Even more dakka to upgrade to!
New Level!- And with the extra time I may even finish more levels!
Increased Viewing Area - This one is taking awhile, but the game will be much better with it!
Second Level Boss is Now the Boss of Level 3
New Second Level Boss!

New Decorative Boss Items
Decreased Enemy Bullet Speed - They moved way too fast before.
Tons of Bug Fixes! - Yes the health item actually works now!
The Explosions are Now Blue- Too keep bullets from being lost among them.
Rusher Enemy Exp Gain Increased! - From .1 to .5

This Guy

Level 1 Redesigned!

And Likely Much more as I continue working on it!

The Boring Mechanics of Another Shooter, Part 4

Told you there would be another one of these.

Today I think I shall cover, the basic turret.

I've covered the power of harnessing  variables and objects so you should know where I'm going with this

mygun = instance_create(self.x,self.y,t1)

So the first step is to have whatever you want your gun attached to create the gun and give it a variable.
This is of course to prevent your turrets getting confused about what they should be attached to.


Getting the gun too stay is also fairly simple.


in the end step event
mygun.x = x
mygun.y = y

This tells the gun to move to the center of the object, you can use + or - to make an off center gun, like this-

mygun.x = x + 5
mygun.y = y


That will move it 5 pixels to the right.


Now for the most important part, as what is the point of a turret if not to point at stuff you want dead?


if instance_exists(player) [1]
then image_angle = point_direction(self.x,self.y,player.x,player.y) [2]

As for firing, well you should already know this.

And that's all the typing I feel like doing at the moment, see you next time






1:This is to prevent errors if you die.
2:The first set of coordinates is the origin, self uses the objects origin, the second set is what you want to point at, in this case the player.[2a]
     2a:For a player aiming with the mouse substitute mouse_x, mouse_y for the second values.

An Update About Updates, How Meta of Me

So I think I've come up with a good schedule for my blog and it is as follows-

Monday: Update about whatever game I happen to be working on at the time as well as a new download if available.

Tuesday - Thursday: New entries in the current series, i.e. The Boring Mechanics of Another Shooter, Part Whatever.

Friday: I put up a new Q&A answering any questions I've gotten over the week, and if nobody asks me anything I'll just make stuff up like I did in here.

Saturday & Sunday: I think I'll take these days off, maybe do a bonus update as a thank you for any donations I get.


I'd like to note that the schedule starts today, so The Boring Mechanics of Another Shooter, Part 4 will be up later.

Announcing the Winners!

And here are the Winners.

Left 4 Dead 2 - http://steamcommunity.com/id/BuildMoarBeds
The Orange Box - http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197994743020/ - aka Compybuilder
Dungeon Defenders - http://steamcommunity.com/id/VIPER-SVB

Due to the way steam gifting works I'm going to have to add you to my friends list, so don't be surprised to see a friend request from "Freak". Accept it and I'll send you the game.

The Boring Mechanics of Another Shooter, Part 3

So tell me, what's the most important part of a bullet hell game? Why the bullets of course, they are the true star of the show!


So let's talk about one of the more common patterns used shall we?

By which I mean the swirly doom pattern.

So how does one go about making this pattern? Well this is slightly less easy than those other things I said would be easy. Time to examine some code!

This is all in the alarm zero event. Yep all this just for one simple pattern.
if shootstage = 0 {
if shoot > 0 { [1]

mb1 = instance_create(self.x,self.y,heavydakka) [2]
mb1.direction = angle1 [3]
mb1.speed = 5
angle1 = angle1 + 10 [4}

mb2 = instance_create(self.x,self.y,heavydakka) [5]
mb2.direction = angle2
mb2.speed = 5
angle2 = angle2 - 10

shoot = shoot - 10
alarm[0] = 2 }
else { shootstage = 1 [6]
shoot = 180}}

if shootstage = 1 {
if shoot > 0 {

mb1 = instance_create(self.x,self.y,heavydakka)
mb1.direction = angle1
mb1.speed = 5
angle1 = angle1 - 10

mb2 = instance_create(self.x,self.y,heavydakka)
mb2.direction = angle2
mb2.speed = 5
angle2 = angle2 + 10

shoot = shoot - 10
alarm[0] = 2 }
else {alarm[3] = 30}} [7]


I think that's enough for now.

 



1: The shoot variable is used to tell how far the sweep should go, the shootstage variable is used to reverse the sweep for another go.
2: This part of the script tell the game to create an instance of the bullet and assign it a variable, in this case the variable is mb1, short for My Bullet. The variable will then be reassigned to the next bullet fired and so on.
3. Adding the variable to the front of the command tells the game to perform it for the object with said variable, in this case telling the bullet to move in a direction equal to the variable angle1 at a speed of 5.
4: And of course you need to increment the angle variable in order to get that nice sweeping motion hence this part of the script.
5: I wanted it too fire two waves at once so I added another set of variables this time assigned to mb2, that moves in the opposite direction
6: This is where the firing arc reverses, it simply says if shoot is zero, and has thus traversed the full 180 degrees, then set shoot stage to 1. The following actions are all the reverse of the first ones making it sweep it's bullets back to the front.
7: After the shoot variable is zero again alarm 3 will get set instead of alarm 0 [7a].
     7a: The alarm is basically a timer saying wait x then perform actions with x being the amount of steps you set it to.