Ah the holidays, a time of chaos, confusion, friends and distant relations all gathering in one place. Due to these various distractions it is difficult to get much work done hah. Anyways this week I mainly fiddled around with creating a way to spawn a boss mob. In this instance I decided to have the player gather three tablets and spawn a boss.

It was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. It was just a matter of setting up some global variables and then having them be set to true when a tablet is collected. An and statement then checks to see if all the variables are true in a step event and then spawns a boss if they are. The boss then destroys the invisible object that spawned it to prevent more bosses from spawning.

However, the boss location is yet to be determined. I could have it spawn in the dungeon and seek out the player or have the player see out its room. Or I could have the player move to a room dedicated to the boss upon collecting the tablets. Even that option has me asking if I should place an object for the player to touch to go to that room or just have them warp there after collecting the tablets.

I suppose I am getting ahead of myself though, first I need to make a boss that is somewhat interesting to fight. Some sort of golem that tosses rocks around, perhaps it bounces the player back upon contact as well.

So I completed the little scenario game idea I was making and dubbed it: Trial by knight. It is a mission to collect 10 treasure piles while avoiding or dealing with the armies of enemy knights and traps in the dungeon. Minor bugs remain at this time, but I found the game breaking one that was crashing the game (massive memory leak due to my sloppy programming lol). Still I learned a lot about what certain code does in GML. Also I do appreciate the internet, because someone out there somewhere knows how to make the engine do what I need it to do. Wonder if anyone will ever invent a sort of language to code translator, that would be nice hah. In the meantime I guess we all have to learn a little coding ourselves on independent projects.

And here is the video overview of progress from last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmIhDjdr45I&feature=youtu.be

lots of progress over the last week!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MjPA03F3E8&feature=youtu.be

The video pretty much speaks for itself where I am headed with this project. I figured I would make a quick mini-game out of what I have atm, then continue creating what I really set out to do (make a sort of dungeon crawler rpg). There aren't a lot of games that focus on their dungeons, in fact most dungeons, while they do provide interesting boss fights etc, seem a very small part of games. Most of the grand quests talk about the world and maybe send players into a dungeon to get some item but rarely is a game built around dungeons. The best example is probably the Diablo or Torchlight style. That is what I love, those games where you go in a dungeon and see how far you can go. What mysteries wait in the depths of some cave or ruin? What monsters lurk in those shadows? Why do they exist, whats the history of the place? And of course, what sort of treasure can be found?

 However, I dislike the level of power characters can get in a game like Torchlight. I mean, yeah there is the more difficult extra dungeon, but I like each mob to be somewhat challenging. To the point where taking more than four is usually suicidal unless one can find an interesting strategy. The hordes of zerglings melting under siege tank fire never really appealed, which is how some dungeons work in games.

Anyways, enough of my rambling. See you next week with more progress!

While working on that project for Infinite Death I mentioned I also wanted to spend some time looking at coding and making a quick game of my own. 4 hours later I have something like this:

Which basically sets up the character so that it moves via WASD (which is how I usually prefer to move in games). It is using an animation from an old unfinished game for now, and when it stops an idle animation faces whichever direction it stopped at.

I suppose I am getting ahead of myself though. The game concept is basically dungeon crawler, and I am just looking to demo some levels to see how it would play. Eventually I would love to see it develop into some sort of MMO, but one step at a time.

I have found quite a few game maker tutorials to be quite helpful, and coding is a lot more flexible than drag and drop; though I am sure my code will be messy and inefficient for a first try haha!