Day 69: All Over the Place

Today I did some work on various things, whether it was from helping Justin and Ty with some of their problems, to drawing a sprite of a tiny fly... let me explain.

I started off today not knowing what I wanted to work on. I noticed that the start screen was looking a little out of place, at least in terms of obj_Menu with the selection sprite looking too vibrant. Currently it is a bright red, standing out on a dark and dull background. What I had in mind was to make a particle effect that goes around the buttons instead. I thought of using fire, and once I got something I was happy with, I had a change of plans. After showing it to Jake, he suggested we use flies instead, which I think would be really cool for the game. I started on that, but after a slight complication with my sprites and backgrounds in particle designer I was getting bored, and wanted to move on to something else for a little bit. It was convenient at that time that Justin needed help incorporating my zombies into his game, and Ty also needed a bit of help figuring out how to make some sounds play.

(That's about it for today...  I forgot to take a screenshot of my particles, so here's my picture of a boat. I'll try to get some more stuff done with the particles tomorrow so I have something to show for my efforts.)

Day 68: Broken Arm Blues

Today I started off the day by trying to fix the players broken arm, as shown above. When jumping, the arm's y position becomes different from where it should be on the player. When the player jumps, the arm does not follow it right away, which I find to be quite odd. I tried to make them equal in code, just by saying obj_Arm.y=obj_Player.y, but I am already using that as the basis for the arm's positioning on the player. That means that the code I am using is either not going to work, or there is another error. I think I could try rounding the x and y values of the arm and player  so that they are only exact values, but I don't think that will fix it.

After getting tired of that, I decided to work on the background for the start screen. I added some text for the game title onto the background that Jake made a while ago, and add on the menu items. As you can see, there is a black border around the edges of the screen. While typing this post up, I just realized that it is the border of the glow sprite that is causing the darkness effect with a slight glow in the middle. I just need to move obj_Menu, because it is being centered around that. Next class I will add the finishing touches to the background, like editing the selection sprite and changing the text color, and then I may work on my hotbar sprites. 

EDIT*

With some critique from Jake on the positioning of the text, I have changed the start screen to look even better. I had to move obj_Menu, which screwed up the glow, and would normally be hard to fix. However, I was able to make it work by creating an empty, invisible object that sits in the middle of the screen, and making the glow follow that object. 

Day 67: Change of Plans

Instead of working on the game itself, today I decided to work on my music that  I started a week ago. I finished the track, and  I have to say I am extremely pleased with the result. half way through making it, I changed a few things, added in a few different chords that work well in this key, and added a bit more of the flute part. That and a little bit of repetition later, the song is complete and ready to be heard.

The finished track and any other music I make in the future can be found on my soundcloud:

Tomorrow I plan on going out to look for a nice electric keyboard, which will really help me in creating more music. It will be much easier than putting in each individual note, as I will be able to test stuff on the fly. Next class I will definitely be working on the game, as I will be able to work on the music at home rather than just at school. 

Day 66: Health and Ammo

Today I continued work on my GUI and as I proposed yesterday, I finished the health bar and ammo text. Currently they are both working, and look really nice. It took a while to get the health bar in place, but once that was done, everything became quite simple. From there, I was able to use the coordinates of the health bar and text to help determine where to put everything else, and it made putting in the ammo text much easier as well.From there I had to edit the hotbar sprite to remove one of he gauges on the right side to accommodate some space for the ammo text. I added in a bit of a shaded background behind the text as well just to add some more depth. Also, while in debug mode, I noticed that there were many instances of the bullet objects as the game goes on, and I realized that they are just going on forever(which isn't necessarily good). I made it so that the bullets get destroyed if they travel a distance of 650 units away from the player in either the direction of left or right. That way I can help to reduce lag for the future. Tomorrow I will work on making a "selected weapon" type thing for the hotbar, in the sense that it is just showing what weapon is being used at the moment. So basically just a sprite that will hover over slots 1 through 5 accordingly.I just need to make a good sprite for it, and find out where to draw the sprites over each box.

Day 65: GUI and Slopes

Today I did a bit of work on the GUI, being around the spot where the ammo will go. I may have to move one of the meters that I made if it is in the way of the ammo text, but that is no issue. That or I could just make the text smaller. I also need to add the health text, which I am going to change to say "HP" as there isn't really enough room for "Health."

The talk of slopes also came up earlier, so I decided to play around with the code that we have. I temporarily disabled our current code that didn't work very well, and started experimenting. I was able to come up with one thing that did work actually sort of well(although it is pretty unreliable.). It checks whether or not there is a place free to the side of the player, and if there isn't, then checks for a place to the side and up from the player. If there is a place, it sends the player up and to the side in that direction. In some situations it works extremely smoothly, but sometimes it doesn't. I may need to come up with something new, or maybe our movement code just sucks. Tomorrow however I will go back to the GUI, and I will put the text on properly and make it look nice, as well as applying the health bar. If I am able, I might also place the clock somewhere if I can. 

Day 64: GUI Stuff

I worked on the GUI today. I was having some troubles deciding how I wanted it to look, but I finally got something  I am happy with. Instead of having a separate health bar, it is sunken into the hotbar; that will be where all important information is, rather than spread apart across the entire screen. I think it might be cool to make the hotbar look damaged if your health is low, having steam venting from the pipes, sparks flying and fire coming out of torn open spots, and even to make it look like glass is cracked and health is leaking out. I added some knobs and will have a few more things like that in the future as well. They just add a bit more texture to it, rather than having a flat color.

Next, I need to make a spot for the ammo counter on the right, and I need to think of a place to put the clock. I already have the cutout for the health bar, I just haven't moved the health bar itself yet.I need something on the bottom to look like it is holding up the health bar as well, I think that would look better. Tomorrow I will find a place for the ammo and clock, and I will try to add some more visual details. If I can't think of what  I want to do to it, Ill position the health bar correctly inside of the cutout I made for it. This is coming along well.

Day 63: Problem Solving

Today was a bit of an interesting day. Let me explain:

Over the holiday, a security update for windows 10 was released. This update was automatically installed of course. However, this update caused some issues to arise. With a few programs, namely Skype and GameMaker (and probably a few else) there was an "external exception 80000003" error that occurred upon the startup of these programs. This resulted in them crashing repeatedly and being unable to load. A fresh installation didn't fix it, and at the time I had no idea what was wrong.

After searching for a little bit, I found on the YoYoGames forums, that others were having the same problem, and it was revealed to me that it was the update that caused this. The directions one person posted were basically as follows:

>Boot into Safe Mode
>Go to Control Panel>Programs>Uninstall a Program
>Click view installed updates
>In windows updates, look for KB3132372
>Uninstall and restart the computer

That was the solution for me, and GameMaker ran just fine after that. Soon after, it was discovered that Justin was having the same problem, so I went to fix it. I messed up trying to boot into safe mode, but that wasn't 100% necessary anyways, just extra cautious. (I hit update and restart instead of normal restart, so booting into safe mode kind of failed). The problem was, the security update wasn't there, but I was still getting the "80000003" exception. After alot of error, and installing a different launcher for game maker, I checked the updates again, and thankfully it was there. One uninstall and restart later, everything is back to normal. Tomorrow I will be doing some work in GameMaker, probably on my GUI stuff. I don't know exactly what I was working on before the break, so Ill get back into that tomorrow.