#thumbp

Hey kids, Iiiiiiiiii'm back! A little longer than I wanted to, but there is good news: My game has been restored to its pre-lost state! Hooray! Right now, I'm trying to fix two bugs that are hindering the flow of the controls. I'm waiting to see what the internet can provide for answers, as my current trial-and-error is not bearing any results. In the eternal struggle to working with game engines, you gotta learn to ask others, they is always someone that can help! Last weekend, I participated in one of my favorite events of the year, the Global Game Jam! The 3-day game-a-thon is a lot of fun and every exciting. You never know what awesome games you or your peers are going to create!

The theme this year was "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." In layman turns, we see the world how we want to see it for ourselves, rather than for what things truly are. The brainstorming process this year was unique. Being a quite rather than a symbol or a single word, it was open to much more interpretation than usual. Nonetheless, some of the themes I saw written on dry-erase boards revolved around self-image, deception, reflection, perspective, and somehow 'boobs'. (Please don't ask)

My experience at the jam this year was quite interesting. Our group started out with 6 people with a full game-dev team of talent. I thought prospects would be great, but then, our would up being 3 total. During our brainstorming session, all of us could not come to a consensus as to what we wanted to work on, or others simply didn't feel enthusiastic about it. With no hard feelings, people slowly peeled off our group to jam on their own game.

This left my and my remaining comrades in a bit of a pickle. We had some coding experience, but not enough to do anything outside of Game Maker (which I know). Thus began our 3-man project. We decided to start with the idea of a point-and-click adventure game where you are an alien that has landed in NYC and must observe humans, learn to communicate like them, and find your spaceship (the Astor Place cube) so you could return to your home planet. It sounded like it was going to be a great idea, until we ran into technical issues; Game Maker studio isn't compatible between Mac and PC! D'OH! That left us with only 1 last option:

Hearing about a nifty interactive-novel game engine called Twine, we literally learned how to use it in 10 minutes and began making the greatest Japanese Dating-Sim game we could pull out of our butts in 3 days!

My idea for this game was that it would seem like a typical dating-sim game where your goal was to try and win the heart of a girl. However, there was a big catch: Every time you made choices that where romantic advances, the results where negative, and the relationship between you and the girl got more distant.

(SPOILER WARNING) At the end of the game, the girl you are trying to pursue reveals that she is not interested in dating anyone, despite your best moves to win her over. At this point in the game, the player has two options: Accept that she doesn't want to date and be her best friend, or reject her denial and lose your friendship. Yes, that is right, I made a dating game about the 'friend zone.'

Playing along with the theme of the game jam, I decided to touch on the subject of adolescent love and the perception of self-entitlement; the idea that doing nice things for people aren't points you earn to trade in for a relationship. I wanted show that the 'friend zone' is not some shameful place, and that there is great value in the friendship you create with others, even if your relationship does not advance beyond that.

Click here to play my game for yourself. Its a download to a simple HTML page in a ZIP file that you can open in your web browser. Have fun!

On a side note, there was a company there called VoxieBox that was demonstrating a hologram-based gaming platform. It was totally cool and I want one!

In trying to make fixes, I changed some code and messed up my game a lot. In referencing a backup file of my game to figure out where I made the change, it somehow overwrote my current file, removing my progress from last week. Its not hopeless or anything, its just frustrating to be set back by a week when I only have a few hours after work to develop. GAME DEVELOPMENT!

Today I updated the scoreboard for Thumbp (currently placeholder) and the sprite for my trajectory line (also placeholder).

The purpose behind the trajectory line is to help show the player how the primary mechanic of the game works: aiming, charging a shot, and launching yourself into blocks. As the player holds down the left mouse button (charge shot), the trajectory line stretches to show how the projectile path changes with a stronger force applied. 'Showing not telling' is a very important part of game design to me. Nothing is worse than tutorials that endlessly tell you with walls of text how to jump, walk, talk, and etc.

You can draw trajectories too!

If you are making a game in Game Maker Studio, here is how you can draw a trajectory line too!

Get the direction of travel. In my case, the direction drawn from the player character to the cursor's current position.

dir = point_direction(x1, y1, x2, y2);

spd = Force;

Origin of the trajectory line equal to the player's position. xx = Player.x yy = Player.y

Get a vector point based on the established direction (mouse cursor position) and speed (force of charged jump). vx = lengthdir_x(spd,dir); vy = lengthdir_y(spd,dir);

Establish parameters for setting up the trajectory line. 'grav' is the in-game gravity. 'detail' is the number of trajectory points to draw. 'scale' is the size of the sprite that will be drawn for each point of the trajectory. 'step' is used to determine the number of for loops to execute.

grav = .25;

detail = 20; scale = 20; step = (1/detail);

Begin drawing the trajectory line. Uses a for loop to create vector points in the direction the cursor is pointing. The points are drawn using draw_sprite_ext, with an emphasis on decreasing the scale of the sprite size each time a point is drawn within the for loop.

draw_primitive_begin(pr_pointlist); for (i=0; i<1+step; i+=step){ xx+=vx; //add dx yy+=vy; //add dy vy+=grav; //add gravity to dy draw_sprite_ext(spr_Trajectory,0,xx,yy, scale/20, scale/20, image_angle, image_blend, image_alpha ); scale -= 1; //draw_vertex_color(xx,yy,c_red,1); }