Game Maker Studio

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

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.

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.

GMC Jam #6

Just informing everyone that the GMC Jam #6 started today and that I won't be entering it this time around.

This jam's theme is tranquility, it is not a terrible theme, but it doesn't inspire me to create a game about it. On the other hand, this jam introduced a constraint on submitted games. This jam's constraint was to "include one or more achievements to unlock within your game, separate from the main goal or objective."

I find this constraint to be hilarious, you can imagine games with pointless side quests or random achievements for the weirdest of things. I will be keeping an eye on this jam just to see what other ways this constraint can be used.

Aside from the theme, I am also stressed with aspects of my life. This is the main reason why I do not want to do this jam and why I have not updated this blog in a fortnight.

Information about the GMC Jam #6 can be found here.

Postmortem: Spencer Street

Spencer Street was made in October 2011 for the Game Maker Community Jam #4. It was made in 72 hours. I consider this game to be the first real lesson in game creation.

This game was inspired by one of entries from the previous jam, which was created by CoolGamrSms. This game came 2nd in the jam and featured high score arcade based game play. I designed Spencer Street to feature a similar game play.

The objective of the game is to kill commuters by making them run onto the train tracks (then hit by a train) anyway you can. Some of the methods are completely random, flooded drains, smelly people and turd are just a few examples. Your score is dependent on how many people your able to kill.

The game played well. It was fun, but no great. The graphics were alright. The idea did turned some people off from playing it. While others weren't able to read the instructions. This leads to a major lesson that came from this game; assume that everyone is an idiot. The bottom line is that the game was very 'meh', might be seen to be good to some people, but certainly not great.

Spencer Street came last (likely tied with another 20 games) out of 59 games and can be downloaded here.

Forever incomplete: Geometry 2

Geometry 2 was to be the natural successor to Geometry. I started development in January 2012, but within a month I scrapped the project.

I wanted Geometry 2 to take the good parts of the original and expand upon them. One major feature I wanted to include was a visual representation of the area that each player controlled. This is shown above, however the game never got past this point because it was scrapped. The reason being that the visual effect was just too much for some people.

The project was ultimately a failure, but on the other hand it is a good example of controlled exploration of game design and development. I did learn a lot from this project, it was the first time that I created an interactive mini map, a pie graph and other features. Even in light of this failure, I still would like to create a complete game that builds on Geometry but it will take a different name.

Zero hour games

For me, last night was the end of daylight savings. It also happens to be one of my favourite nights of the year, simply because you get another hour of sleep. However it also lets you do something in zero hours, because you can spend a hour doing something between 2am and 3am before the clocks are turned back a hour.

Naturally, I made a small but fun puzzle game in zero hours. The itself gave you a string which was encrypted with an key. The purpose of the game was to guess the key, so that the string could be recreated.

The encryption was done using XOR logic. The interesting thing about the XOR function is that:

orginalMessage XOR key = encryptedMessage
encryptedMessage XOR key = orginalMessage

This could make for an interesting puzzle that could be used in many games. Unfortunately, XOR logic is not really common knowledge.