Day 62: More Parts

     Today, I did mostly as planned; I got a second flute part into the mix, and it sounds great. I actually made it a bit more complex than I thought I would but it is still somewhat simple. I also added in a second trumpet part to follow in the lead of the first part. The first part plays 2 eighth notes leading into a half note, whereas the second part does the opposite, playing a half note into two eighth notes. It makes for a full arpeggio while having a bit of harmony in between. I haven't really added any new instruments into the mix, as I think it sounds fine for now as it is. I may end up adding something later however, depending on whether or not I want to add another sound into a later part of the song. Other than that, I put in a tuba part that adds a bit of a bass tone, which gives a cool, almost epic sound. I might need to reduce the volume on the tuba part a little bit, as I don't want it to be too overpowering.

     I haven't added a percussion part yet, as I don't know how I am going to make it work. What I want is a roll on a crash symbol that gets louder as it goes towards the end. I can't seem to figure it out just with the plugins that I have for FL right now, so I might need to look for some VST plugins that could work. Overall, the piece is currently sounding awesome, just that a few things are to be played with a little bit. Next day I work on this, I will be looking for a plugin to use for percussion, and I will probably be able to add some more instruments into the mix as well. Other than that, there's not much else. See you in the new year!

Day 61: Catching Up

     I hope you had some fantastic holidays, and here's to an awesome new year! Now, my vacation away from school isn't quite over, but I have a little bit of work to do. It turns out that I had missed a couple of blog posts for December, so I've got to get these in. Plus, I was bored and needed something to do tonight , and thought that I may as well blog about it as it relates to our progress on the game.

     Late last night on December the 30th, I began working on yet another song to incorporate into the game. It will be the second ambience tune, or an ending theme (Not sure yet). Currently, it consists of a 4 part string section, playing chords in the background through the entire piece, a 3 part clarinet section, one, but soon to be more trumpets, and the melody played by a flute. I have also left space for a 4th type of instrument, as well as a bass part and percussion.

      The strings add a nice feeling to the piece, and they help to fill any empty spaces in the tune that would otherwise seem weak. It also adds another layer to the entire ensemble that help it sound more "full." The clarinet part is interesting; I have arranged it into 3 parts as mentioned before, and with that I have added a bit of a cool touch. Only one of the clarinet parts is moving at a time, with the others just playing dotted half notes (the piece is in 3/4 time). However, I set it up so that the same part doesn't move two bars in a row. This makes a really cool sound with the way  I have it set up. There is always movement, which sounds nice, but also keeps the piece moving instead of just dragging on slowly. Currently as for the trumpet part, I just have it playing a bit of an arpeggio, as I wasn't too sure to put for it. I might just leave it, seeing as it sounds nice, and gives another element of movement in the piece; and of course I will add more, I just haven't gotten to that. As for the flute part, I only have the initial melody part that plays along with the strings for the first 16 bars. I haven't made up a second part for it yet to cover the rest of the piece, but it shouldn't be too difficult. This part of it wont be too complex, seeing as there is a lot of action going on throughout the piece already, and I don't want things to get too chaotic. Sometimes a simple melody is nice once in a while; it's easy to follow and relaxing, which is kind of the aim for this.

     That's all I have for right now. It's getting late at this point, and I'm pretty tired as well. Tomorrow, (or rather later today... It's 1:30AM) I will make another post with any more progress I make before the new year. I will get the flute part incorporated, and I will add one or two more trumpets into the mix. I would like to play around with the bass instruments as well to see how they fit into the song.

All that, and maybe I'll try to figure out what other instruments to add and how to use them. 

Day 60: Recoil Failures

I worked on the recoil system again today. As per usual, I couldn't get it to work properly. I decided to do a bit of a different post today, just to see how it goes. Here are the things I tried today, and how they failed miserably.

mouse_y is sadly read only, so you can't edit it to move the position of the mouse.
window_mouse_set(obj_Mouse.x,obj_Mouse.y+1) doesn't work well at all.
window_mouse_set(x,y) works exactly the same as the above.
window_mouse_set(-obj_Mouse.x,-obj_Mouse.y+1) teleports the mouse off the screen, and even off the window into the corner of the monitor.
point_direction(x,y,mouse_x,mouse_y+5); this doesn't work either. I can't figure it out.

I found a few complex recoil systems, that I might need to try to implement. Tomorrow, I will try one out, and if I cant get it to work I wont worry too much about it. Ill try to find something online tonight.

Day 59: Recoil

[Yesterday] I tried to fix my recoil system. I had a pretty hard time getting it to work so I might just try to redo it completely. All I need to do is move the mouse upwards when you click the left button on the mouse. Should be easy, right?

Answer: Apparently not.

I might be approaching this all wrong though, there could be some other easy way to do it that I havent thought of yet. I haven't seen anything online that I can reference to, and every single thing I try turns out the same way. I need to try something else. In class, I also worked as a security guard, protecting Rhea and Justin's world in minecraft. They were busy building their project for the day and needed some help, so I decided to assist. Using command blocks I was able to teleport and kill anyone who joined nearly instantly. Next class I will continue working on the recoil system, but I can't guarantee results. We'll just have to see how it goes.

Day 58: Not the plan

Today I worked on a few different things. I was going to make the hot bar today, and I got a little bit done on that (but not much that is noticeable). I instead got some of the new sprites from Jake for the guns that are being redone, as well as the new character sprites. I haven't implemented the character sprites yet, but I did get the guns in the game and working. I also worked on getting so other features in the game, for example: I made it so that the player looks in the direction of the mouse/cursor. It looks much better that way, rather than having the player throw his arm behind his head and shoot like that. I am currently working on getting a recoil system to work from the weapons, but it isn't quite working. The cursor, instead of moving vertically, goes up and to the left, stopping at the top left corner. Next class I will work on perfecting this. I have tried a few ways of getting this to work but I am just getting the same problem each time. I think I might just need to take a different approach at this, using some different timings or something. All work for tomorrow.

Day 57: GUI work

On this day, the 57th of working on Game Maker Studio, I worked more on my GUI. I added a hotbar today, which will help visualize the fact that each weapon is assigned a key from 1 to 5. (It is actually in the center of the game's window, the screenshot just doesn't show it all that well.) I have finished the sprite for the most part, but I don't entirely like it. I am going to try to style it similarly to the health bar so that it kind of fits the theme better, and flows nicer. I have a few ideas in mind to fix the look of it... and speaking of the health bar, I noticed today that it is actually broken; in moving all of the code to a different object, I forgot to copy the code that draws the health bar itself, so I am going to have to draw a new one. It's okay, because I'd still have the same amount of work to do if I hadn't deleted it. I would still need to replace all of the values so I can move where it is being drawn, and change the size of it to fit the new size of the health bar. It should be pretty simple to figure out. That will be something I could work on next class if I have the time. Tomorrow I will continue working on the hotbar that I started today. Once I get a sprite that I am happy with, I am going to try making it work, based on which weapon I have equipped. All I need to do is make another sprite that shows which one is being used, and figure out exactly where to draw that sprite. 

Day 56: Problem Solver

Today I worked a little bit on my own game, getting the clock to show up on the screen in the right spot. I also added it to say "Time" right beside that. I wasn't able  to do to much on my own stuff, because for alot of the class I was working with Nick to get the dodging to work, and a bit with Justin to get the player to face the direction of the mouse. I got that to work, by making the game check if the mouse was on the left or right of the player, and then changing his sprites accordingly. With Nick, we were able to make the dodge work by pressing shift and a second key in sequence, based on the direction you want to go. It is a little weird and it doesn't work completely well, but I thought of a way to fix that while writing this post; there are variables in the game that  I made that define which way the player is facing, so all I need to do is check which way the player is facing, so when you press shift, he jumps in that direction. It should work alot more smoothly that the key press sequence, and should be alot easier to code. Next class I will add a little bit to the gui, so that it looks better. From there, I will ask the guys what needs doing, and if we cant think of what to do for right now, I will add some more of Jake's artwork into my game so it looks nice.    

Day 55: GUI

     As you can see in the above gif, I managed to get the sprites and text to show consistently through both rooms. However, they are quite small in comparison to the original, but I might just leave that. It looks fine as it is now. Also for some reason at the beginning of the gif, the player's moving sprite wasn't working, but it corrected itself. I thin k the was some lag that caused that or something, I don't know exactly. Today Nick (our newest member) and I talked about the idea of a dodging motion to get away from the zombies. I helped him to learn how to make an enemy as well, and I changed a little bit of his movement code so it could work better when colliding with the enemies.Once he is done with the dodge motion, we will be able to hit shit to get away from or past an enemy when we want to. There should be a cooldown on that as well. Also, there may be stamina, along with two separate speeds for the player, as if they are walking/running. Next class, I will work on perfecting the GUI that is being drawn. Then I will fix the bullets missing the zombies. It is a cool feature, but it seems like they are doing it too often. If I can get them to hit 100% of the time, then I can easily make a randomizer to make it randomly miss and go past the zombies. 

Day 54: IT FINALLY WORKS

Everything is fixable now, as I have figured out the problem. While working, I decided to fix my player sprites, as the were a little messed up for when the player was standing still with a gun. Once I finished that I went back to the problems I was trying to fix, and it hit me; the views. I noticed that the views were different, because I decided a while back to change the size of the view inside of the house, so that it would fit the screen better. I made it 512x384 instead of the previous 640x480. Because my text is being drawn relative to the view, it was being put just outside of the visible area. I have managed to get the Ammo text back into the view, and everything else should be pretty easy as well. Although, I may need to do some extra work here, because everything is quite zoomed in, due to the change of view. If it is possible, I want to try to change the way I draw everything so that it is always in the same spot. Maybe using another view, or something like that. (I have no idea, really...) The main thing is that I at least found out where things are, just outside of my view. That way I know they are at least being drawn, and they do indeed exist. Next class I will work on music, or I will be figuring out a new way to draw these things. I have no idea really. We'll just see what the day brings.

Day 53: A Mess of Things (And late posting... woops.)

Yesterday I worked on a very wide variety of things. From helping Justin fix his broken game, to working on my own game, and even a little bit of an attempt at music. Justin was having some real troubles with getting his views to look right, so I game him the dimensions of my views and did a little bit of simple math to get them too look right, just a little zoomed in/out, based on the size of the room. I tried to get some of my own problems fixed, but the only thing that I could manage was getting the ammo text to show up... sort of. It was white as I wanted it to be, (I was having trouble with coloring of the text.) but I had more problems than just that. It was in the top center of the screen, and appeared to be very small. I couldn't get anything else to work, and even then I ended up breaking that small fix. I tried to work on music at the beginning of class, but I couldn't come up with anything so I just went back to trying to fix some of my issues. Today, I will be working on my game, trying to get everything fixed. Hopefully I can come up with a solution, but I can't guarantee results.

Day 52: Change of Plans

So I had some ideas that I was going to be working on, including some visual stuff for an inventory almost, at least like a hotbar for the weapons indicating which number to press to equip each weapon. I also wanted to do a few cinematic type things just to see how the guys like them. One being if you get close enough to a zombie, it goes into a sort of widescreen view, as the battle intensifies. Instead, today Jake gave me his backgrounds for inside of the house and I implemented those into the game. I had to edit a few of the sprites to fit the screen properly, but other than that it went pretty well. I am having some troubles now with sprites not being drawn for certain objects, and all of my text is either black, or just missing entirely... I cant tell. Next class, if not working on the music, I will try fixing those problems. I may have just accidentally deleted some objects so it shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Day 51: Battle Music

I have been working a little bit on the battle music, as well as my second ambience track over the weekend. The battle track is going well, although the other is not. I am having trouble finding melodies that I really like and want to keep in. I think I am just going to redo the original ambience track in the pc version so it has a similar sound to the rest of the music  I am making, for I am using a different set of instruments, I got a vst pack free from the internet that gave me a bunch of orchestral instruments, which I am really loving right now. I am just lacking a sense of creativity in the sense of music right now, so I am having troubles writing everything at the moment. However, I do have a few cool ideas that I want to put into the game that I can do solely in gamemaker. Next class I will work on those. I will keep them a surprise until my next post, for I want to keep the suspense (and I don't know which thing to start on first... heheh).

Day 50: Computer Musics

I have started to learn FL Studio on the computer. I am making my second ambience track on it, and so far it is coming along well. I have started with a piano track, adding a bit of a bass line, a melody, and an attempt at harmonizing with the melody. It doesn't sound the greatest so I think I will be getting rid of it. The track currently loops nicely which is a bonus. It is only 12 measures long at the moment, so I haven't gone too far with it. I have just spent most of my time learning how to use the program in general. Next class I will be able to do alot more work, considering I now at least know the basics, as well as  I have google to help me with any problems I have. Next class I will be continuing on this track, potentially adding some more instruments like strings and wind instruments.

Day 49: Music

I FINISHED THE MUSICS. DONE.

I got the first track finished. I repeated a bit of it, as well as adding the second violin part, and it should loop just fine. If it doesn't, I can always throw it into fl studio on here and fix it up. Now that that is done with, I can make a second track. I have a few plans for that, but I am still unsure. It was tough to figure out how to properly export the file from my phone, but I finally figured it out. Tomorrow I will continue work on it, but other than that there isn't really much to say.

Check out the Musics here: https://soundcloud.com/user219276592/track-01-ambience1