Yesterday, Game Maker Studio was finally released. I was originally not going to get it, but I decided otherwise.
I managed to spend to a couple hours last night using it (many assignments due soon and exams are not far off). In that short time, I spent looking at the IDE and I am impressed. There are many improvements to the Game Maker experience. The .exe files are complied rather than interpreted. Documentation has had a much needed overhaul. Extra data structures are always a boost.
I cannot wait until I have some extra time to make a game with it.
In other news, I have a twitter account, you can follow me now! Woo! @redoctober23
Thursday 24 May 2012
Friday 11 May 2012
Fractal terrain generation
Back in March 2012, I received an assignment from my game design class. The assignment told me to design a game world map for any type of game. People who know me in real life would know that I'm not very artistic. So I took a lazy approach to this assignment; I generated it.
World generation is something that has always interested me; I blame Minecraft. I have spent countless nights reading about different ways of generating terrain. This assignment was the first time I ever used this knowledge. I decided to use the diamond-square algorithm (this is explained very well here), for the generation of the map. In short, the algorithm takes a flat map and moves the middle points up or down by a random amount.
It needs to said that the algorithm generates a height map. This height map was used to make an image. For my assignment, I used negative numbers as water and positive number for land. Here was one of the test results for the algorithm:
Of course the final generation was edited in photoshop; removing unnecessary green points and other minor changes.
World generation is something that has always interested me; I blame Minecraft. I have spent countless nights reading about different ways of generating terrain. This assignment was the first time I ever used this knowledge. I decided to use the diamond-square algorithm (this is explained very well here), for the generation of the map. In short, the algorithm takes a flat map and moves the middle points up or down by a random amount.
It needs to said that the algorithm generates a height map. This height map was used to make an image. For my assignment, I used negative numbers as water and positive number for land. Here was one of the test results for the algorithm:
Saturday 5 May 2012
Postmortem: Mystery Men
Mystery Men was made in January 2012 for the Game Maker Community Jam #5. It was made in 72 hours.
While this was my third GMC Jam entry, it was actually the first to be based around the theme. The theme was facade, which in a nutshell, means "an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality."
Mystery Men itself is a slightly altered version of the party game mafia, where you are tasked to identify and lynch mafia members. The main component of the game is the conversation system between the in-game characters. They are able to talk about a range of topics, from the jam itself to who they think are the mafia. This serves are the player's tool in determining who is apart of the mafia.
The game was mostly well received. Many people liked how the theme was used and how the conversation system turned out. A review by GMC user 11clock said, "...some of the comments that the people say are hilarious, and it's fun trying to figure out who's Mafia." On the other hand, disliked the limited graphics and non-existent sounds. In any case, youtube user raocow did make a video on Mystery Men:
Mystery Men tied 18th place out of 64 games and can be downloaded here.
Mystery Men itself is a slightly altered version of the party game mafia, where you are tasked to identify and lynch mafia members. The main component of the game is the conversation system between the in-game characters. They are able to talk about a range of topics, from the jam itself to who they think are the mafia. This serves are the player's tool in determining who is apart of the mafia.
The game was mostly well received. Many people liked how the theme was used and how the conversation system turned out. A review by GMC user 11clock said, "...some of the comments that the people say are hilarious, and it's fun trying to figure out who's Mafia." On the other hand, disliked the limited graphics and non-existent sounds. In any case, youtube user raocow did make a video on Mystery Men:
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