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If you are using an outdated (8.0 or earlier) version of GameMaker, and are trying to utilize examples and snippets from more recent versions, or creating systems that are intended to work correctly across multiple versions, this is going to be useful.
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Author Archives: Vadym
GameMaker: View following two objects at once
Effect here is, that view is positioned and scaled (if needed), to include two given instances at once.
Example provides a single function that does this sort of trick for you, absolutely painlessly and easily.
GameMaker: Connectable objects
I'm not a specialist on topic of weird helicopters, but this looks like one.
This secretly awesome example provides a system to 'connect' objects together, meaning that 'child' objects will be positioned relative to their 'parent' in means of both position and rotation.
Also you can (in turn) also make those 'child' objects 'connectors', meaning potentially infinite number of 'levels' of instances behaving separately.
For ones that might have this example from my old website, it is worth checking out again, since it has been rewritten almost completely, delivering quite cleaner naming, as well as easier access to child object properties, and some optimizations.
This example can be particularly useful for games involving 'modular' vehicles, as well as multi-object bosses.
GameMaker: Tower defense path-finding
Most of units turning back to take advantage of appearing hole in the maze
This example may be useful for ones making games of Tower Defense genre, as well as other games that require instances to dynamically re-adjust their path as new obstacles are being added.
System, included in this example, recalculates paths only when needed, thus providing minimum resource usage.
As well it detects if units have been blocked (to exclude possibility of cheating by enclosing units), and has a lesser sub-system to recycle & reuse paths.
Overall, should be intermediately useful.
GameMaker: Pointing to an off-screen object
Illustration
Such feature is specifically useful for exploration games, where goal(s) may be at different distance from player, and some guidance is required.
Source code follows,
Continue readingIntroducing: TestDX
Screenshot of program
This program tests a set of characteristics, some of which are related to behaviours in GameMaker games specifically.
Program includes English and Russian localizations, with additional ones being easy enough to add (if wished).
It can be considered non-interactive (apart from being able to pause tests at any time by pressing a key), however visual presentation is kept at good level, making two minutes, that it takes program to perform all tests, worth looking at.
To keep things 'transparent', a source is included in download. There is no set license for it, but makes itself useful, if you're curious, how everything works in test.
Some of code in source is quite rushed (often done in spare minutes), but I've added documentation to all scripts, and generally code style is kept intact.
Download
Description of specific test results below.Continue reading
GameMaker: Turret rotation (with limits)
It's actually pretty hard to describe what this does without an image.
Basic use for this would be to create units that cannot shoot backwards without rotating towards angle entirely.
GameMaker: Orbiting
Interactive demo. Mouseover to activate, drag planets around.
This is an example of making an instance orbit around other instance in GameMaker.
In contrast to other similar examples (and commonly given advice of the kind), it allows to define orbiting speed in a common way (pixels/frame instead of degrees/frame).
This is accomplished by calculating the distance to orbit' center (from current position), calculating the orbit' length, and thus converting pixel speed to degree speed.
New position is then calculated and instance' speed is adjusted for it to reach it the next frame.
This allows to use direction in collision calculations as per usual.
Overall, the code is simple enough but documented regardless.
Code follows,
Continue readingGameMaker: 8-way shooting with 4 keys
Example is simple, well commented, and would be rather easy to implement.
Love2d: A game in 8 minutes
A video.
Originally I planned to get everything done in 5 minutes (similar to previous GameMaker-related post), however I somewhat overrated my ability to type 3-segment function names that I'm not that similar with.