SoulScroll Revival III

Yes, friends, we are back at THIS LOCATION. HERE. Hosted on WordPress. Why?

Well, I moved to zymichost, as some may be aware, and then I noticed it had php safemode set to ON which blocked many of WordPress’s important features. Then, I switched to hostaider, which was great for a while, but for the last 4 1/2 weeks, their server has been down and I’m just tired of waiting.

Mario is Evil? – Written by dixee on yoyogames

I just read this post on the yoyogames forums, written entirely by Dixee. All credit for that hilarious article goes to her. At first you think it’s just going to be some sort of joke, or a spam post, but no; it’s actually a well-thought out and VERY plausible criticism of the Mario series. The best time to tear apart the credibility of a beloved video game character is any time, eh? XD

Here’s a sample of what she wrote. Go to the thread to read the rest.

SoulHow to make an Arc Of Sight

NOTE: Comments are locked. I no longer answer questions about the Game Maker tutorials on this blog; I suggest you take any questions to the Game Maker Community. For more info, view the FAQ page.

I decided to write up a more detailed SoulHow article on my old Arc of Sight tutorial. I’ve been getting some PMs on the Game Maker Community lately asking questions about it, so I thought I’d describe it a bit better here in my blog.

Tutorial Partner file: Link

Note: This example was created for GM7, and it works in either Pro or Lite. However, if you have the Lite version, go to the constants section of the game settings in the example and set “drawrotated” to 0. That will turn off the use of draw_sprite_ext. The sprites won’t rotate as the objects move in different directions, but that’s okay because sprite rotation doesn’t have to do with what’s actually being described in the tutorial. As long as you keep the drawarc constant set to 1, you’ll still be able to easily observe the intended effect inside this example; though you can set that constant to 0 to have a more “realistic” view. Best keep it to 1, though, while you’re still learning what’s going on in each part of the code.

So in case you haven’t even seen this on the GMC, it’s a tutorial in which you will learn how to make an object test for another object inside an “arc of sight”. The first thing that probably comes to your mind is the similarity to “line of sight”. A line of sight is a line usually drawn from one object to another object to make sure nothing is in the way. For example, an enemy must shoot towards the player, but only if a wall is not between them.

There’s collision_line() for that, and collision_* for other types of shapes (rectangle, circle, etc.). But we want to use more of a circle sector shape. Essentially, an arc of sight.

The SoulScroll Lives!

Yes, I’m back in the world of blogging! However, there are a few conditions. I’ve got a number of things I’d like to go over in this post, so here we go.

First of all, further posts will be focused more towards music and general game design, rather than Game Maker itself. Since I’ve moved on from programming to music design, that’s what I’m going to be talking about for the majority of my posts. Remember, though, I said “majority”; I’ll still be writing quite a lot about stuff on the GMC, yoyogames, Game Maker in general, etc. so if you like to come here to read about that kind of thing you don’t have to worry. I’ll also probably put up a new tutorial every so often. However, music is a large part of my life, so most of the discussion will be about that; a lot of it will be about music in video games since that’s what I intend to do, so at least there’s that.

Agalag Wins Honorable Mention

The yoyogames cooperation competition results came out today. Agalag got an honorable mention, which although was marginally disappointing, was more than I’ve ever gotten in any game before. =D

So the game has been staff picked, and listed under “runners up” on the competition glog entry.
Congrats to the winners! (jumper 3 especially)

In case you forgot where to find Agalag, it’s here:

Agalag
Added: 20 August 2008
By: SoulRed12

Pre-GMC Quick Answers

Got a question?  Going to go to the GMC about it?  Well hold off for just a second.

I’ll outline what I mean here.  The reason I decided to write this article, is because I have recently been seeing many questions in the GMC novice and intermediate Q&A forums that all have a similar or exactly the same answer.

For the list of common question-answer pairs, read on.

SoulHow to make a more successful fangame

Skill Level: N/A

What do you think is the most frequently made fangame?  Mario?  Sonic?  Megaman?  Nope, you’re wrong.  The most frequently made fangames, are bad ones.  And sadly, these poorly-made fangames’ reputations tend to rub off onto other fangames and shoot their chances as well.

I really don’t care about original vs. fangame; all I care about is whether a game is good, and I’m sure most of you will agree with me if you truly think about it.  Seriously, who out there has played, for example, Hard Hat 3 by Damaged, and disliked it because it was unoriginal?  The real deal breaker is (should be) the game’s quality.  If you find yourself disliking a fangame only because it’s unoriginal, you should think be thinking a little harder.

And with that said, I will now write something more like what you were expecting in a SoulHow article: how to get your fangame more successful.  This doesn’t mean matching the original game to the T, but making different levels and bosses.  Actually, it involves a number of things.

Agalag

Yes, Agalag. As in, my yoyogames competition03 entry. As an alien overlord, you must naturally go head to head with the most horrible foe of all time – the Player. If you’re going to keep him at bay, you’ll have to command your ships to work together smoothly. Collect trophies, earn new models, and unlock two new game modes. How long can your fleet survive?

Now that I’ve finished typing that out for a fifth time, here’s a link:

Agalag
Added: 20 August 2008
By: SoulRed12

It was a great day for me, until I ran into the bug and online highscore security holes. I rushed out an update (V5), which sadly rendered old save files incompatible, and also rendered old versions of the game to be unable to submit highscores. However, everything should be dandy with the new version.

EDIT: And of course, it wasn’t.  Found another bug which most of you probably would have never run into, but still, I removed it and released a new version.

The game’s currently rated 2.3/6 stars. Considering, though, that the average for the best games in the competition is 2.5, I’m not very depressed.

Here is the GMC Topic.

Note that the game can now only be downloaded by going to yoyo and downloading it from there.  As I released inevitable small updates it began to become a nuisance to modify the links in every thread in every forum I posted this game on.

So check it out, and report back if you happen to find any bugs, holes, etc. Thanks.

Vacation

I apologize for my lack of activity.  I certainly haven’t quit writing; rather, I’ve been on a vacation up the west side of the country.  It really was quite adventurous, considering there were three days with 10 hours of driving each (and the same each day coming back).  I’m not quite home yet (I will be in two days).

Anyways, along the way I’ve been thinking about Game Maker quite a bit and I’ve been very excited about my current project.  I feel I’ve behaved well enough to deserve a plug in my own blog, don’t you?

It is being developed for the third YoyoGames competition, and I have working on it for a while.  Through the trip I’ve been compiling various additions, fixes, etc. on a Word file and I fully intend to add every one of them to the final product.  I’ve released a beta demo to an undisclosed location due to the fact that I do not want to release it to the general public yet; if you happen to find it, then great, glad you care enough.  But sadly, until the final release you won’t find it here.

Heh.  I’m one of those people who is always apprehensive about people stealing my idea and developing it before I get a chance to finish my own project.  Therefore I don’t want to give out any details just yet, but know that it should be finished a bit before the comp deadline.  If you check back here frequently, you could be one of the first to play.

The last comp I entered was the winter comp (with Snow Turrets), and unfortunately that game was a tad rushed, so the quality wasn’t the highest.  I made a sequel (cyberTurrets) which did moderately well but wasn’t in any competition.  I hope that this new project will be my strongest one yet; but I guess that’s for you to decide, right?

Intentionally Imperfect A.I.

NOTE: Comments are locked. I no longer answer questions about the Game Maker tutorials on this blog; I suggest you take any questions to the Game Maker Community. For more info, view the FAQ page.

Skill Level: Advanced user (7)

I’ve decided to write about something a little more advanced than I usually do.  It is now posted in the GMC Experts forum, if you would rather reply there.

Anyways, many of us who create video games can write Artificial Intelligence to instruct the computer to play a game perfectly and unbeatably. This isn’t really a good thing, though, as it essentially ruins the game experience; after all, the player has to be able to win. But if one programs it so, the computer mind can be theoretically perfect; it won’t make spur of the moment mistakes, it won’t misjudge anything, and it won’t have accidents.

Imagine a computer playing pacman. It knows where the ghosts are and (if so programmed) it can likely calculate a perfect plan of escape every time. What if, however, we want the computer to emulate a real person? Most people probably won’t know for sure which direction to go to retain victory every time; they will occasionally make mistakes leading Pacman to his ghostly doom. The human mind doesn’t always work that quickly or that accurately.