Introducing: Nuclear Throne Together v9877

As you might know, last year I made Nuclear Throne Together, which is a mod for Nuclear Throne that adds online multiplayer, fixes some bugs, improves the cooperative mode, and otherwise is very nice.

Just about this time last year, Nuclear Throne update 98 has released, which remains the most recent official update of the game.

Today I've released what is the largest update to Nuclear Throne Together to date.

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GameMaker: Showing a progress bar in the taskbar

Showing progress bar in taskbar in GameMaker

Since people have asked, I wrote another tiny GameMaker extension.

This one allows you to display "progress" on the game's taskbar button (Win7+ feature).

You can change status (none/unknown/active/paused/stopped) and set the current/total progress.

The feature is intended to be used for displaying progress of continuous operations, such as showing download progress, file operations, and so on.

There are numerous unexpected uses too - for example, personally I'm guilty of [mis]using it to display battery charge, since taking a glance at the taskbar button is much easier than making out percentages from the tray icon, and a button turning yellow/red in taskbar is easier to notice as well.

Much akin to the previous published one, this extension provides exactly one function with a number of constants for various options. And there's C++ code included too, if you're curious.

The extension can be obtained from itch.io or GameMaker: Marketplace. The demo project shown on the GIF is included in both packages.

itch.io marketplace

Have fun!

GameMaker: Flash window / taskbar button

Today I wrote a tiny GameMaker extension that allows to "flash" the game's window and/or it's taskbar button.

This is most often used to notify the user of something happening in the game while they don't have the window focused - for example, if you have some sort of matchmaking system in a multiplayer game, you'd want the user to become aware that someone joined their game even if the game window is currently minimized.

The extension is incredibly straightforward (a single function with "flags" for options), is documented, and includes C++ source code for ones curious about it.

itch.io Marketplace

GameMaker: Passing variables into Create event

Time to time I see questions being asked about whether it's possible to set variables prior to instance' Create event being executed or otherwise passing values into the freshly created instance.

Most often, people will say that, no, you can't do that, but here's a bunch of strange workarounds instead (executing in alarm event \ moving all Create code into a user event).

Now, as you might be suspecting by the title of the post, that is not quite correct - there's a bunch of substantially more valid methods of approaching the problem. This post covers them.

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MouseLock & PointerLock for GameMaker


(click for web demo)

I made a small GameMaker: Studio extension that provides a unified API for "mouselock" between desktop and web (HTML5).

The way this works is by utilizing built-in mouse snapping functions on desktop targets, and using Pointer Lock API on HTML5. It bridges between the two, and you get simple functions like mouse_lock(), mouse_unlock(), and mouse_delta_x & mouse_delta_y for getting the mouse movement offset while mouse is locked.

So, if you ever wanted to make some web-based first-person shooters (or just games with mouselook) with GameMaker: Studio, now you can.

The extension is free and can be downloaded from itch.io or GameMaker: Marketplace.