Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

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Time: 20:18

Still experimenting with various features, the latest two being the idea of having two different levels within one room and stairs to connect them and the second being an attempt at a line of sight system. Personally think both work pretty well though I still could tidy the code up a bit. Which comes to the decision I've made for going forward. Firstly is to actually code a bit neater and be more organised in planning, second to bring in more parenting, scripts and state machines into play. The main thing I've decided is that the goal of this project moving forward will be to make each room / area focus on a specific feature. One area might be a battle, the next could be stealth another could be a simple block puzzle or switch pushing. I suppose the best way of describing it would be something along the idea of the Wario Ware series of games only I'll be doing it with various gameplay features. This will be more of a personal exercise as opposed to something I will be planning to release.... though who knows how it might end up eventually. One day this might end up being a really good lesson for a tutorial series....

As a side not I'm loving the idea of a kind of "dev mode" where the player is able to see the inner workings of how things are working. This is something I'd like to include more in the future.

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Testing, Testing

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Time: 16:24

Still in-between any kind of real project, just been running with some idea's seeing if I can pull them off. Found a really nice way of doing NES style Legend of Zelda style rooms. These have the massive advantage in that changing area's now doesn't mean I'm changing rooms in game. It also gives me an overall better view of the game world. This method though wasn't without obstacles though.

The first of which was since the entire world is loaded at once enemies and objects in rooms off camera would still actually be doing stuff, which not only is a waste of resources but would end up with objects not where they should be when the player enters the room. This was fixed by essentially "pausing" the game for everything that wasn't directly in the players view as well as when the player leaves the room resetting them back to default values.

Somewhat linked to the first problem was happens if the player destroys objects in the room before leaving? If they never actually respawn then eventually the game map will have no challenge to it. Now on the flipside if you cleared a room out, left, then returned right back only to find everything has been reset this too has problems. My solution was to simply put the respawn onto a timer, this way if a room was returned to after a short time had past the player would find the challenge returned, however returning right back to it, say if the player had taken a wrong turn, they wouldn't need to fight everything again. This also prevents players from being able to "farm" certain areas for item drops etc.

Now not all objects and enemies will want to follow this pattern, bosses and mini-bosses need to stay dead forever and certain puzzle elements such as switches need to stay flipped just as examples.

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Where's Wally?

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Time: 22:17

Been a while since my last post so what have I been up to? Been slowly working my way through Farming RPG Tutorial: GMS2 by FriendlyCosmonaut. I've been enjoying working through a different perspective to coding as well as. I've learned allot more about using arrays and data structures. Although I'll probably never end up making a farming style I've always had a thing for tower defence style games and there's allot I can use from this tutorial in that respect.

The more advance speech system, which I am almost finished going through, allows for much more flexibility than the one in my previous game. I'll admit I probably should have followed the tutorial a bit more closely as some changes I made early on are coming back to haunt me! Although I can't see there really being a game worth releasing at the this it has been a great learning experience.

Another fun learning experience was playing with the day night cycle, which again I may or may not use in its current state but may just have different areas have differing effects.

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