Tom's game design

I'm planning on editing a video out of this.

I have made this by using photoshop and pre-made assets that I had from the production stage. All I really had to do is resize things using the image increase tool in photoshop and just making the text with the text tool. When increasing the sprite I had to do some extra things to get the image looking pixelated. To do this I had to go into the settings of the image increase too and make it increase the image to the closest neighbour.

I am actually kinda happy with my final product. It's definitely not the best game out there, but for my first game, it's great. In this blog, I will be talking about how I got to my final product and some of the compromises I had to take along the way.  Time management My time management throughout this project could have most certainly been better. I found myself rushing to get the product finished within the time limit due to numerous reasons.  The first one has to do with myself, I was lazy at the beginning. One of my biggest problems is motivation and I didn't like the idea of making a 2d game, I wanted to get into the meat of things and go straight into the unreal engine and make a 3d game instead. This meant that my game took a while to take shape, but as it did it started to grow on me and as I drifted deeper into the code I started to love making it.  However, this leads me to my next problem, getting carried away with one thing. I'm a really st

While developing the lost woods I realise my old method of making doors is completely useless and far too time-consuming. So I set out to develop a new type. While I was at home, thinking about this I thought about how my wolfs even though they are all the same object, don't have the same hp. I thought to myself "they must be their own instances". So I was looking for a way to change the code in the individual instance. So I did what anyone else would do, go to the forms and in my searching, I found this.  Link to the post This code uses the creation code to set a room, and an X and Y location that room. Then once the player collides with the individual door instance it gets the "target room, X and Y". Once it does this you can send the player (as long as the object is persistent) to a new room. These mean you only have to make one room and just add 3 lines of code to the individual door. This was far more efficient. Did change the cold a little to mak

Making the Sprites Making the sprites for my game was very challenging, I couldn't come up with a sprite that suited my game and looked good. So I went to youtube to look for some inspiration and in my searching, I found a game called Dead Cells.  Dead Cells is a type of 2D Dark Souls. It has a tidy hud and clean character design and the game is amazing. I studied the frames of the character sprite closely and discovered it basically 4 or 5 frames for each step, this was shocking to me because it was a very pleasing to the eyes. After this realization I began to work on my sprite, I first decided to work on the sprite's movement before the look of this. So I took each frame from the character sprite from Dead Cells and drew the skeleton of it in photoshop as can be seen to the right.  I then took this skeleton and reshaped it a little as I didn't like the large leg movement and didn't think it would fit my game's theme.  So I made th

The Last Weeks These past two weeks have been crazy, but more stressful. I wasn't happy with my game at all. So I took time away from my blog and dedicated all of my time to the game, and I can now say I'm happy with its state for my first game. I have been extremely busy with it and have failed to upload anything to my blog, my struggles and my moments when I finally realise what this error is. I will be uploading a bunch of things in their own blog, sound development, making sprites and course, coding. 

Today and on Tuesday I have been working on the sprites for the rooms and designing the lost woods and how it works. The aesthetics are slowly turning into kind of an 8-bit game, with more bright colours slowly coming through as I realised the darker colours just made it look awful. But I believe that I can still make it a really fun Zelda like game. This is what level one and two look like at the moment.  Level one: I'm planning on making the background behind the crops brow to make a farmland look. you can also see that I've been playing around with particles, I added a smoke effect to the fire since last time. It spawns a little about it and lasts longer than the fire.  Level two: I did have a problem layering the trees, I overcame this by using the depth feature in game maker, I played around with the depth to make it look right. although now I look at this screenshot it looks more like a 16/32-bit game. This may be a bit distracting but I think I will

Colour in gaming can be used in maybe different ways, it can be used to show emotion, danger, e.c.t,  and the absence of colour is really unnerving. Game devs use colour to manipulate how the player experiences the game, whether it puts them on edge or makes them cry. For example in limbo, the game is completely void of any colour. This not only gives the game a special style and aesthetics, but it makes the player uncomfortable as they arent uses to the absence of colour.

Bug Fixing Today I have finally fixed a bug that I've had ever since I added the collision code, after a few hours of trying to fix it I gave up. But, today, I checked what the boolean in this line of code does, "mp_potential_step(ob_pl_player.x, ob_pl_player.y, enemySpeed, true);", it turns out when its true it stops the object from going through any other object, but when it's false, they can not go through solids. so I changed a boolean from true to false. And it fixed it!