Tag Archives: gamemaker

GameMaker: Angular motion


It's like drifting. On a spaceship. In space.

This is an example of managing angular motion in GameMaker.
In turn, that means having angular speed with acceleration, friction, and limitation.
Such can be particularly useful for simulating a more 'smooth' rotation behaviour, when object will not start or stop rotating instantly.
If combined with relatively properly written code for linear motion, this can grant pretty nice behaviour for space games.
Also there's a "trail" effect added, originally just to demonstrate how it works.
Everything is pretty nice and simple.

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GameMaker: Studio theme – GMGreen+

Today, instead of doing something possibly more interesting for a hour and some, I've spent those to edit standard theme that comes with GameMaker: Studio.

Modifications are as following:

  • Active window now has grey border, rather than a indefinitely green one.
  • Window captions now have a slight tilted line texture. Makes these a tiny bit less boring to look at.
  • Window control buttons are now better-spaced and cleaner.
  • Window border is now 3px instead of 4px, also with smaller amount of "rounding" on top of windows.
  • Fixed issue with 2-3 magenta pixels appearing near top-right corner when resizing MDI windows a lot.
  • Menu text is now of light-grey colour.
  • All sorts of buttons now have a grey colour for currently active one, and easier to distinguish green border for mouse-over.
  • Checkboxes now have an actual (non-triangular) "check"
  • Radio buttons are now properly anti-aliased.

I'll try to also include an icon file soon, but until then, a preferred method of installation is baking up of original "GMGreen.skn" and placing .skn from archive on it's place. Restarting GameMaker: Studio is required, obviously.

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GameMaker: Animating backgrounds

This simplistic example demonstrates how to cycle backgrounds in a room at a fixed rate, as you would do with images in a sprite.
Obvious advantage of cycling (animating) room backgrounds is that these are handled and drawn by engine, which makes them generally faster than something you can achieve in a short amount of time.
Seen method supports any number of backgrounds larger than zero.

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GameMaker: Turn-based battle engine

Today I've spent some time making this intermediately impressive turn-based battle example.
It supports infinite number of unit "teams", configurable properties, inheritance, and more.

Built-in system will also attempt to reduce chances of developer (you) accidentally messing up something.
And there's easily configurable AI built-in too.

Overall, I somewhat got carried away while making original example, which was planned just include turns with unit selection.

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GameMaker: View following two objects at once


This example is going to be of great use for everyone making local multi-player games, as well games requiring to display two objects on screen at once generally.
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.

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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.

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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.

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GameMaker: Pointing to an off-screen object


Illustration

This intermediate example demonstrates, how to create a rather nice interface element being an arrow that points between a on-screen object (normally player) and a off-screen location, that needs to be reached. In this case, arrow indicates exact direction to target, and is made to clamp accurately to screen edges (preserving direction vector), to avoid confusion on behalf of player.
Such feature is specifically useful for exploration games, where goal(s) may be at different distance from player, and some guidance is required.

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Source code follows,

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