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Resources for Learning GameMaker

Some of my favorite GameMaker resources

I started messing around with GameMaker back in Summer 2014 starting from knowing nothing about game programming. The closest things comparable I had done were miscellaneous html and css work and some basic Flash AS2 projects way back around 2007. I found documentation on GML scripting and other topics to be very accessible after some searching.

I’m hoping to add to and edit this post over time so it can continue to be a relevant resource. Below are some of the more useful tutorials and topics I’ve found while working with GameMaker: Studio.

Getting started

Shaun Spalding
https://www.youtube.com/user/999Greyfox
Main platformer demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysShLIaosk
Shaun Spalding has a solid series of digestible topic based tutorials. Some are one offs and others have continuity from one to the next. Lots of good information on starting out setting up a platformer and also some useful simple to implement topics like setting up game saves.

TigForums: GameMaker tutorials by Derek Yu
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3142.0
Some of these tutorials may be a little outdated, but the topics are broken down really well. These were written by Derek Yu of Spelunky fame. They’re worth browsing through to find useful things, like how to set up a sprite font and use it in game.

Best Practices When Coding in GameMaker: Studio
http://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/75
This one is less programming specific and more of general advice on things to aspire for or avoid in project organization. Opinions may differ and some of this might seem a little abstract coming from the start, but a lot of the info in here is good having in mind before you even begin a project.

Cool specific topics and tutorials

Switch case and state machines
http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=532465
Trying to plan out how you’ll program a complex phase based boss or a game element that needs to transition between discreet stages? Wrap your head around handling this in a state machine using a switch() or else you may find yourself in situations where you have overlapping if conditions, or difficulty flagging variables on and off to switch you between your states. Switch states need to be defined as macros (constants) in order to work which some people find tedious, but it’s well worth it for the amount of control and clarity it gives you.

CSANYK – Drawing text
https://csanyk.com/2013/05/gamemaker-tutorial-string-handling-and-drawing-text/
CSANYK has a lot of interesting topic tutorials. I’m only calling out the drawing text one since I’ve referred back to it many times.

Yellow Afterlife GameMaker tutorials
http://yal.cc/category/gm/
The same goes for YAL. Lots of interesting stuff and things you didn’t realize you could do (or you would want to do) until you see them. Dive in!

Starting with gamepads
http://www.gmlscripts.com/script/joystick_get_button
Gamepad deadzones and analog stick setup
https://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/89

General topic interesting stuff

Jan Willem Nijman’s presentation on ‘Game Feel’
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/207954/Vlambeer_cofounder_shares_advice_on_building_better_action_games.php

Other advice

Search wisely! I find when trying to learn new software for design or now for programming a main early hurdle is just knowing what to call the thing you are trying to do in relation to the environment you’re trying to do it in. Especially in GameMaker, since there are so many built in functions with names that make sense to me in game-speak, once you know what something is called you can much easier find out how to do it. Starting off with “I want to have these things do this, and then go like this!” might be distillable down into a noun or a verb you can search around.

Use that middle mouse button (scroll wheel)! When you’re coding in GML you can click on functions and engine constants with the middle mouse button as a shortcut for bringing up the manual entry for that element. This is great if you know what a function is named but need to refresh yourself on proper syntax or arguments that you can pass through.

R.T.F.M. (in this case, read the frigging-awesome manual). Continuing from the previous point, the manual is full of practical examples of code snippets and some useful suggestions here and there. You don’t need it from cover to cover, but spend some time looking at adjacent functions relating to the task you’re trying to do. I’ve found it very easy to browse and navigate.

Halloween Forever Dev Blog: Boss Parade

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Halloween Forever Bosses are coming in strong!

Over the last week or so I’ve been spending most of my work time animating some larger enemies (be they level bosses or minibosses). Either way they’ve been coming together with some really fun results.

Spoilers below if you don’t want to preview boss content!

Let’s take a look at what is shaping up:

Big Blue Ogre

A big blue mean looking ogre! When he shouts he might barf out a projectile or send out a shockwave. Will need to sort out some effects for that. The red fireballs the devil boss fires may be cool too, red projectile against his mostly blue palette.

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I like how his heavy stompy walk came out!

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Flying Eyeball Popping Skull

This design and the green hydra below are some of my older ones. Made them during the first content phase of Halloween Forever before I released it on itch.io in September 2015 and I didn’t yet have a place for them in the game. Now though I think there will be room.

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I finally have a use for these pink eyeball sprites I made way back then too. I’m thinking it will fire the eyes out of it’s sockets at Pumpkin Man. Still need to animate the optic nerve on the eyeballs flicking around some…
halloweenforever_skull01

This is a combination of a few states for the eyeball bugging out / popping out sequence. Takes a little imagination to perceive it for now, but it will make more sense once I’m combining it all together in GameMaker.

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Two Headed Hydra

This weird hydra thing wound up being the origin for the flying green heads in the Bloody Mansion and beyond. Now that the full boss is shaping up I’m going to try and include something that better relates the single heads and the hydra together.

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Looking at his walk now it needs a little more vertical bounce to it, but I’m happy with it overall. 4 legged walk cycles are tricky!

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The hydra is going to need a few more states too. Not shown is a projectile firing / spitting animation I made. I’m thinking she could use some alternates of these states with heads severed off…

I have some inkling of where these all could go in game, but for now it’s useful to see them exist and move. If I wind up with too many cool things (is that possible?) I can always pare things down a little. I’d rather include all the cool things though!

Hope you enjoyed checking out the updates! Check out Halloween Forever on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/425650
Also come join me on Twitch when I’m streaming gamedev or playing games! twitch.tv/imaginarymonsters

deathstate_halloweenforever

Deathstate and Halloween Forever interviews

I’m not sure what happened, maybe a full moon or some ley line action taking place, but I wound up getting to participate in some nice articles and interviews recently. I hope you enjoy them! Links to everything below.

Playboy.com – Indie Horror Games Have the Freedom to Get Really Weird

http://www.playboy.com/articles/indie-horror-games-freedom-get-weird
Max Weinstein reached out to Deathstate to be part of an article he was writing for the Fear and Loading column on Playboy.com (http://www.playboy.com/series/fear-and-loading). I couldn’t be happier with the result! Matt Leffler and I both got to expound on the dark nature of Deathstate and talk about what creeps us out the most in the game.

The Night Keep Halloween Forever Interview

http://nightkeep.com/podcast/episode_16___halloween_forever/
J. Daniel Edenfield and I spent a Sunday evening over Skype talking about Halloween Forever, making new retro indie games, and d.i.y. culture. Really enjoyed meeting Daniel and getting to chat for a bit!

Indie Luchador Vs. Workinman Interactive (Deathstate Interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrryPRrrrOs
Matt Leffler and I joined Eric Lee Lewis of Indie Luchador for a solid conversation about Deathstate. We shared some Freudian portal secrets…also I got to talk about Halloween Forever and where that is headed.

All in all it’s been a super fun couple weeks for media and getting to meet cool new people and see their projects too.

Check out Halloween Forever on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/425650

Also come join me on Twitch when I’m streaming gamedev or playing games! twitch.tv/imaginarymonsters

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Halloween Forever Dev Blog: v. 1.021 and content sprint

Halloween Forever v. 1.021

I’m playing catch up a little, realizing I’ve been getting work done and documenting it a lot on my Twitter and Instagram but doing a poor job of having some descriptive lasting posts to talk about it. Also I’ve been hemming and hawing over where to actually post my Halloween Forever dev logs. Even if I wind up reposting this stuff to Tigsource or Steam it seems best to have it written down here first!

The other week I posted v. 1.021 to Steam. The build notes from that post:
– Recompiled the game using an older more stable SDK. Trying to resolve the no-launch issue some users have been seeing. If you update and still are unable to launch the game please let me know.
– Added first pass of a Config menu available from the title screen. This features keyboard control remapping and the ability to restore defaults and save control presets for next launch (presets will be saved when you click Save and Confirm). It’s still a work in progress, needing some new button sizes and positioning. Also you can enter in duplicate values and break controls for the game. Restore Defaults if you accidentally save something unusable for now. I’m working on a check to not allow duplicate entries.

Not much playable new content yet, but the menus and save settings lays the ground work for me to be able to have some unlockable content in the game.

New Content in Progress

While I’ve been posting on social media small updates almost every other day I’ve been making sure to toss those images into my Media library here as well. Let’s take a look, shall we?
halloweenforever_bestiary01
Look at all those nasty creatures! I was talking on my stream last night about how I like grouping tasks together. Since I’m switching roles a lot while working on Halloween Forever it’s mentally easier for me to do a pile of dev at once, then do a pile of art, then a pile of level design, etc. Doing individual portions piecemeal and switching often causes me to burn out faster. Now that the menu stuff is settling (still needs polish) I’m starting to get some more art out of the way.

Here’s a cleaned up selection of those enemies (and alternate player characters?! What’s with all the fruit and vegetables?) The big blue demon changed the most. He was looking too much like a purple demonic rabbit, and also my friend Paul spotted him as an homage to the Ghouls N’ Ghosts Unicorn!
halloweenforever_bestiary02

Pumpkin Man and Butternut Bro? Not sure if it’s real or not.
halloweenforever_squashman01

I did start setting up a new room for World 4-1, the spooky church zone. No enemies or hazards yet, just trying to see what I could set up with the new tiles I had made.
halloweenforever_church01

Here’s a game view screenshot of Pumpkin Man in the dark swampy forest. The parallax and statue garden looks really cool in there!
halloweenforever_church02

Cool Gifs!

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I have some gameplay gifs coming together too but they’re each 4-6 mb each! Too big to post right now. Going to see if I can halve the framerate and still have them look ok. I think the size limit to post one to Twitter is 3mb…

Hope you enjoyed checking out the updates! Check out Halloween Forever on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/425650
Also come join me on Twitch when I’m streaming gamedev or playing games! twitch.tv/imaginarymonsters

Halloween Forever on Steam 1/19/2016!

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Steamed Pumpkin, Coming Right Up!

After a few weeks of tinkering with Steamworks settings and troubleshooting getting a build live, Halloween Forever is ready to launch on Steam! I have it set to go live tomorrow at 6am (not sure if it’s Eastern time. Probably Pacific, but I might manually tick it live earlier). The version going up on Steam doesn’t have any new content or features added, but I’ll be working on that more over the coming months.

Here’s the link to the store page and widget:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/425650/

What’s Next?

With Steam launch getting out of the way I’m starting to think about what I’m going to focus on getting done first. I might be tackling Steam Trading cards since it’s just a stack of designed assets and won’t require any dev to get out of the way. Also floating close to the top of my list is comping out some menus for controls remapping. Not sure when I’ll be trying to code that in but I want to see it first so I can scope it out. With both of these I feel inclined to tackle some of the less “fun” things first so I don’t do all the content I want to add and then run low on interest. Either way I’ll be writing about it here and talking about it on my Twitch stream, so keep in touch!

Thanks for reading. Until next time!

Halloween Forever game dev: Steam SDK first steps and some new level tiles

Getting started integrating the Steam SDK into Halloween Forever

This week I started spending some time with the Steamworks web panel. There are a lot of fields and tabs to fill in but focusing on one section at a time seems to be manageable. I was using this Gamemaker tutorial that I mentioned in a previous post as my guide so far:YoYo Games Ltd. – Using The Steamworks SDK With GameMaker: Studio

Using that I was able to get the Steam Community widget popping up when I launched a local build of Halloween Forever. Success!
https://www.instagram.com/p/_DdyIgP2H4/

Spooky Church level tiles!

For my Wednesday night Twitch stream I worked on some new level tiles for Halloween Forever. Still prototyping, but I think this spooky church tileset may have some potential. Also my friend Dan was requesting a frog enemy to appear in the game. Could be they’re the ones inhabiting the church! You can watch the stream via my Youtube account below. Follow me on Twitch so you can be notified of when I go live: twitch.tv/imaginarymonsters

Here’s a square screenshot of some of the additions that are shaping up for this new tileset.
https://www.instagram.com/p/_GTU1SP2O5/

Further noodling with the Steam publishing settings

After even more fiddling around with the build submission settings I was able to submit a build (not final, just for testing still) to Steam and have it appear in my publishing account Steam library.

I can’t actually launch it yet since Steam returns an error of “Failed to Start Game (Missing Executable)” even though I did set my .exe as the launch file. Curious thing! I’ll look into it and it might just be a wrong setting somewhere.

My goal for this weekend was “get a testing version of Halloween Forever on Steam”, so I can safely tick that off my list.

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