shaunjs

Patreon Resources Post

Hello! This post contains links to all of the various resources you can access as a Patreon supporter of the relevant tier.

The majority of source code is limited to the $5+ tier. Itch io resources can alternatively be purchased permanently for a one off payment.

For $20 supporters interested in 1:1 assistance message me your discord details (or we can also simply interact via patreon mes...

Laziness isn't real.

I was struggling to decide if I wanted to talk about my ADHD on the channel, but there was something niggling at my brain I couldn't get away from and I knew I had to make this piece. Things I've said in the past on videos and in streams about motivation and "discipline" I now have a very different perspective on and I really wanted to put something out to correct that.

It's a personal piece th...

Important reminder: Charge-upfront billing

This is just a reminder post about an upcoming change that I announced recently 

I'm going to be moving my Patreon to Charge-upfront billings soon. What this means is new patrons will be charged immediately on their first pledge, and then ...

Menus Tutorial Progress

There's an infinity that can go into a menu tutorial, so eventually I have settled on doing something similar to the inventory, where I create something fairly universal but quite barebones that does what you'd expect a basic menu to be capable of while being easily expandable.

Here comes the Wiji Waji - Feedback Stream Highlight

Still a-working on the next tutorial, but enjoy some good feedback stream footage in the meanwhile!

-S

Important Updates - ADHD & Charge-upfront pledges

Hello everyone.

ADHD

A somewhat difficult post to write. Last week I was diagnosed officially at the age of 32 with inattentive ADHD. This has been impacting my ability to perform open ended problem solving, perform executive function and sustain concentration and focus throughout my entire life, without my knowledge. It explains an enormous amount about my childhood, school + higher education, and professional career. 

Without wanting to get too much...

Quick Tip - Ternary Operators

A tiny thing that a lot of people don't know exists! A handy way to write conditional assignments.

It Came from the Forest - Feedback Stream Highlight

Experimenting with working some of this content back into my rotation! I was never too happy with just uploading hours of raw vods to the channel as much as I would like to keep an archive. So my idea here is to pick games that I thought were particularly interesting to talk about and try to cut out some of the fat in the footage leaving behind the core experience I had as well as my feedback if I thought it was in some way pertinent, interesting or useful. I loved this game from zooperdan an...

Release Roundup 2022.3

GameMaker is GameMaker again!

Some neat stuff, including video playback! Might try and do a simple tutorial on setting this up soon. For now I posted a quick example to twitter: https://twitter.com/shaunspalding/status/1514261049423409159/video/1

What went wrong with the Platformer

A few people asked here or there what exactly went wrong with the Platformer tutorial that I've had to remake recently. I've not really been able to give the full picture in short text explanations so I figured I'd make a video to discuss it, along with the original method, what you can do to fix it and how it compares to the new method.

Will release sometime next week after the new platformer tutorial releases.

It's Groundhog Day! Also, Platformer tutorial v2022+!

Here is the revised Platformer tutorial. I ultimately decided to abandon the very new collision method as after a lot of reflection I felt that its goals were flawed and even though it brings some very real advantages, needed some ugly and unintuitive fixes to make it work elegantly for most and especially newer developers, rendering it a poor option for a tutorial like this one.

So instead I have worked to refine my original approach to platformer collision, while not going quite as fa...

2022.2 Release Roundup

A round up of the biggest changes in version 2022.2!

Mistake with recent Tutorial

Hello everyone! Today I published the new Platformer tutorial but minutes into having made it public I discovered a pretty dangerous bug in the code I had written. This is despite my best efforts and research (and makes me very sad.) For the time being I have made the video unlisted and I will have to try to solve the issue before remaking the video.

Sorry about that. I worked hard on this video and did my best to test and consider edge cases but an issue with floating point rounding at...

Platformer Tutorial v2022+

Took a while to get there but here it is, I've refined my basic platformer code into a new tutorial that is fully compatible with 2022+ and the bounding box changes therein. 

I mention source code in the video but I'm still a little on the fence about whether or not this will be a "series" and how I want to present it so there will be a slight delay on that.

This video will release on Friday to the public. I know "early access" hasn't been as early as it used to be. The chang...

YoYo Launches $33000 prize pool game jam

Felt I had to make something quick to go over this, a huge opportunity for the GameMaker community!

What I'm working on

Hello everyone!

With the new collision changes that have come to GM I've decided now is a good time to revisit some of my platformer content for 2022!

I'm not seeking to completely replace the "Complete Platformer Series" but instead make a supplementary shorter series with a different style. I'm not really sure what to call it. "Intermediate platformer" sounds more accurate but honestly not super SEO friendly. Maybe it will just be Platformer 2022 or something? Robust Platformer...

Release Overview - v2022.1

Forgot to post this one here! Sorry about that. I'm sure most of you have seen anyway but here's my overview of the big changes in version 2022.1.

-S

Collision changes in v2022.1

I'll be following this up with a more holistic look at v2022.1 (yeah that's the new naming convention for their monthly releases.) but I thought it was important to cover this quickly as it affects some of my prior tutorials and changes how something pretty fundamental to GameMaker works.

Fortunately the compatibility mode fixes most problems you'll run into with any projects or tutorials.

Hope this was helpful!

-S

Bounding box change in GameMaker Studio 2 version 2022.1

Hello everyone, big changes in the latest version of GameMaker! Video(s) coming soon, but here's some info regarding an important change to bounding boxes:  

Previously, bounding boxes were always rounded to integer positions that were "exclusive" at the far sides. That is to say a 16 pixel square mask placed at an x/y of 0,0 will have the following bounding box coordinates: 

As...

LD49 Timelapse Talkthrough

Had to produce something a bit quick this week due to some RL busywork but I hope its interesting and useful nonetheless!

-S

Release Overview - 2.3.7

Wanted to start going over recent releases and patches for GameMaker as they come out (since they have faster pace of releases these days) and provide some context to important changes. Let me know if you think this type of thing is helpful! 

-S

End of Year Update

Well that year happened.

After finally finishing the ARPG series I think that 2021 saw some of my best pieces of content to date. Here are some of my personal highlights:

• State machines! Revisted, polished and boiled down to a 4 minute guide
• A highly-generic and adaptable Inventory tu...
  2022-01-04 15:02:31 +0000 UTC View Post

Minimap Tutorial [Early access + Source code]

As it says on the tin! Have fun.

Source code here: https://shaunjs.itch.io/shauns-minimap-example (follow link labelled "Patron Access")

-S

[Progress] Minimap Tutorial

This was pretty resoundingly selected as the topic for the next tutorial so it's on the way! Probably going to involve a lot of what-ifs for different kinds of games but I'll try and point out what I can about how to work this into your specific game projects.

-S

Dynamic Lights & Shadows - Devlog

Hello all! Here's the video I've been working on about the lighting system in PokeyPoke! It's extremely performance friendly and lightweight. I'm a little light on some of the details in this video and mostly focus on the overall logic (a direct step-by-step video would have been enormously heavy, and also the way I've written it isn't super optimized so I didn't feel confident making it into a capital T Tutorial.) but with some work the more intermediate coders among you should be able to re...

Structs Tutorial

It's only a short primer as I didn't want to stray too much into specific example and wanted to make sure as many people digested the key takeaways as possible. Also there are longer videos out there by other people on the subject that I didn't want to just replicate and instead I'm offering something more bite sized.

If there's specifics about structs you'd like to hear more about or that you think would make a good future video topic be sure to let me know!

This video goes live ...

Filter & Effects layers in v2.3.6 + An explanation for delays

2.3.6 was recently released. 

With it came a few changes to the start screen and some other bits (I recommend reading the blog post) and I wanted to put out a quick video about this feature in particular!

"Quick" maybe didn't work out as getting the ball rolling on videos and pokeypoke has been a bit rough. Following my week off I was incredibly ill for about five days and skipped ...

LD49 Timelapse

This went live last night, and I am officially Back To Work. Still need to get entirely back on my feet and uh, recover from my recovery but my week off did do me a whole lot of good. 

Source code for LD49 coming to $5 patrons shortly after this post.

-S

Taking a week off!

As I mentioned in my last post, and also on YouTube in a community post / pinned comment I'm going to be taking next week off.

It's weird in some ways that I feel the need to "announce" this but you guys do literally fund my work and are effectively my distributed-employers, and also my work has been *slow* lately not fast, so I worry it might seem strange that I'm taking a break when it might not appear that I've been working particularly hard.

I've been really slow with content ...

Quick Tip - Default Arguments

Hey it's the quick video I said I'd make like a week ago!

I'm not going to lie I've been struggling a bit. It's not normal for it to feel like this much effort to create such a small video and getting the ball rolling has become increasingly difficult recently and doing Ludum Dare this weekend probably didn't help. It's occurring to me that it's been a long time since I've taken intentional time off. I'll probably write a more detailed post soon but I'm planning to take next week off, r...