shaunjs

Week 25 - Cat scratches

This week in RPG land, Lulu has learned to scratch the heck out of our bouncy slime foes.

Mreow!

The combat works very (very) similarly to the setup used for my Melee attacks video. With the same structure that allows for easily building in chain combos and different kinds of attacks with easy to manage "h...

Week 24 - Slimes & States

We've got some slime critters bouncing around the Action RPG now.

It took me longer than it should have to decide on how exactly I wanted to structure "Enemies" but I'm happy with where I ended up. As I've talked about at length already now: trying to optimize the structure of a game is tall enough of a ...

NGF Build for $20 supporters

All currently paid-up $20 folk should now have received a link to the PokeyPoke build demo'd at NGF. Let me know if you have any problems, and feel free to use this thread to discuss the build or give feedback!

(Or also ask questions about how any of it was done?)

-S

[Progress] Slimes

Is any serious action RPG complete without them? I figure we might do something mechanically similar to Zelda ChuChus, in that different colour slimes 'drop' different item types.

Week 23 - PokeyPoke, NGF, etc

Hello everybody! Last week was... quite a week!

Norwich Games Festival + PokeyPoke

I spent most of last week and the weekend down in Norwich for NGF. I was there for two reasons:

• Firstly to do my regular GameMaker workshop with fellow dev Tommy Thompson (AI in Games on YouTube + Sure Footing on Steam). We take a bunch of screaming kids (and parents) and build a game with them live. Taking suggestions from the audience on the character, mechanics, and s...
  2019-06-03 18:26:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Week 21 - ARPG Updates (Video!)

Decided to wrap together some updates on where I'm at with the ARPG and some decisions I'm making on it going forward into a short video. This way helping to keep the YouTube viewers as up to date as the people here. I'll be putting it out to subscribers on Friday in time with my regular livestream.

In summary: I've been struggling a bit with over-engineering the structure of the ARPG and not g...

Week 19 - Too Many .yyps

So my secret work on Another Perspective is largely done for the time being, but NGF is rapidly approaching and I need to get PokeyPoke back to some sort of demo-able state for the end of the month. I think I've said before that I'd agreed to tackle way too much stuff this month, but previously in kind of a foreboding way?

Now it's kinda hitting. So forgive the uh, I guess turbulence is the best way to put it, in ...

Week 18 - The long haul continues.

Ludum Dare was as fun and exhausting as it always is. I was knocked for six on Monday but ended up with a neat... thing. It's not one of my best entries in my opinion and was pretty poorly scoped for the time. But I still like the ideas behind it, I just wish I'd have saved them for a longer period of time w...

Patron Twitch overlay connection!

Hellooo! I spent most of today pulling my hair out trying to make something work that I've wanted for ages and finally stumbled upon a half-baked but workable solution.

If you access the link posted above it will take you to a patron only post on my website. Once you authenticate, you'll find a link to a google sheet. You can add your twitch name to this sheet and my stream overlay will be able to read it!

This means I can do extra things with patreon supporters on stream. Current...

LD44 this weekend!

Yeah that snuck up on me in a big way! It's been Too Long since I did one of these so this weekend it's stream time!

For the uninformed I'll be making a game solo in 48 hours for ldjam.com along with thousands of others. I encourage you to take part if you haven't before! After the games are done we all play and rate one another games. There's no prize other than having made a Thing.

I'll be streaming it all live at www.twitch.tv/shaunjs. Except when I'm sleeping.

On Friday ...

Week 17 - Carrying Things

Is tougher than it sounds.

There's not many "Clean" ways to handle to carrying of objects. Not the data part, so much as the visual. As you can see from the gif above there's work to be done, the bomb doesn't quite align itself with the walk animation and teleports through the lift animation. The solution will be to align the animations with an array of hard-coded positions. 

Yeah it...

Week 16 - Precision with object IDs

Last Friday we were streaming a bit of work on the action RPG series. In doing so I decided to see how quickly I could throw together a tutorial on something that was asked about in the chat. Ended up with this video. Don't get too used to this. It's not how I select topics but I did find it a quick and useful stopgap! Might throw these out from time to time when working on bigger projects.

About the RPG itse...

Heart "Fractions" - Live Mini-tutorial

I recorded this while streaming today cos someone asked about it and I figured I could do it quickly. Something thrown together while grinding away on the RPG stuff. Only put together lightning fast so sorry for skipping the credits voice over on this one. 

Enjoy!

Week 15 - Grinds and distractions

So towards the end of last week you'll notice I got a bit distracted. I think it's worth me reminding YouTube I'm still alive and creating stuff while working on this RPG and I think the update video was worth doing and came out quite nicely.

The RPG now has room transitions, health UI and some other bits and p...

GML Updates, deep dive with Lazyeye

I put probably more time into this than I needed to and it took way too long to encode. But I think it came out pretty well! Topic timestamps are in the pinned comment on YT.

-S

Mini Update - GML Changes in 2019

Some of you might have already seen this blog post by YoYo Games on some new changes coming to Game Maker Language in 2019. 

It includes a vast number of highly requested features many coders are very, very excited about. Methods, Chained Accessors, Lightweight Objects and more. 

The blog post isn't particularly beginner friendly, which makes some degree of sense as these aren'...

Week 14 - Work In, Work Out

So I've recently cleared up a bit of the ever growing to do list. The BenQ review is done (and I think it came out pretty well!). Me and Emma have signed a whole bunch of solicitor paperwork for our house purchase and our mortgage application is underway (all the fingers crossed on that one.). I used a bit of last week to add a few things to PokeyPoke, not least of which is the lighting engine I recently ran a tutorial on. I cleaned the hell out of my desk (for the monitor review) which has m...

It's that Monitor I was talking about!

This ticks one thing off my mad march/april to do list. Going to be livestreaming on twitch in a little bit and we'll do a proper weekly update on Monday. 

Week 12 - An announcement!

First of all, I'm sorry  this update comes late in the week. I try always to write these on Mondays and that hasn't changed. 

What has changed though, is that after an emotional whirlwind of a week me and my partner are now buying a house together. There's a lot to be sorted out still and nothing is yet final but so far everything is looking good. Sick of paying someone else's mortgage we thought it time we tried to pay our own. 

The new house also comes with a bett...

Action RPG YouTube "Announcement"

This is all just stuff you guys already know, nothing too exciting here sorry! It's mostly for the YouTube audience to keep them up to date but I figured I should still post most if not alll videos here for completeness reasons.  =)

Week 11 - RPG Update: Text boxes

Text boxes have been a bit of looming elephant in the room of the action RPG series. It's a topic that's very necessary to cover for the genre, it's one that takes up a lot of time even at a basic level, but also it's something that you can spend close to infinite time working on to make as modular as possible. It's honestly addictive to do so. It's one of those systems that's fun and also really easy to keep adding little tweaks to the foundation of.

It was very tempting to ju...

Week 10 - Sub pixels, Corners, Source Code

The Action RPG & Sub pixel positions.

In RPG land I've finally settled on a collision system I'm happy with. This time moving away from my usual strategy of only moving in integers and risking some time in the wild with sub-pixel positions (cue gasps). If you don't know what this means, don't worry about it. The TL;DR is that we're doing something that isn't necessarily my personal favourite method but that should prove more "Beginner safe" when it comes to you expa...

Week 9 - RPG Progress & New goals

Moving arooound

The RPG stuff is off to a solid start. Things are progressing slowly but I've been taking my time to write & rewrite code that's Good™.

We're going to leaning pretty heavily on tile based collisions for this series. If I can I want to show how much you can get away with just using a collision tile map. I'm trying some other options with respect to ba...

New Patreon Goals (Input requested!)

Heyo!

I've been thinking recently about making a change to my Patreon milestone goals. Currently my only out of reach goal is removing ads from my videos and all of my goals have always centered around the sustained existence and support of this work. (I mean, at the time that itself seemed a pretty lofty goal!) But recently it's occurring to me how much more value I could add to this work using further contribution.

For example, I've been working on the art for this action RPG tu...

Week 8 - Humble beginnings of a Zelda Like Thing

So I've begun putting together the art assets for our RPG series. There's a whole lot to make, but here's a sneaky peek:

It's early days. Working out how I want to approach this whole thing is a challenge and there's been some pretty serious 'pre-production' as you might have gathered from my last update. 

Last week I released a video of some of the 2019-02-18 18:51:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Viewer game highlights

Here's some highlights from viewer games played on stream the last couple of weeks! We'll be streaming live shortly after this goes public in a few moments. <3

twitch.tv/shaunjs

Week 7 - Best laid plans

So here's a look at the high level Plan™ for the Action RPG tutorial. Or what's going into it. For the uninitiated this might seem very simple, but there's a huge amount here that easily out scopes our previous 27 part Platformer series. You all really wanted this subject so we ought to do it justice!

As I said before, this is going to be a while coming. Not only do I have to code all of the above, but the image above doesn't account for all of the art assets...

Lighting System 2d Tutorial

(If you're here super early the video might still be processing. Hot out the oven! Let it cool <3)

I suppose I didn't really need to let you know this was coming because here it is now!

This is only live for you guys at the moment, public release on Friday either before or after the livestream.

From my description before:

Jobo has created a super cool open source, free to use 2019-02-06 20:53:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Lighting Engine Tutorial incoming!

No not making your own, much better than that, using someone elses!

Jobo has created a super cool open source, free to use lighting system for GMS2 that I wish had existed in this kind of form when I was making Another Perspective.

He asked me if I could do a quick tutorial on how to set up and use it and I was happy to oblige. I'm finis...

Week 6 - Top down Action RPG it is.

Guess that's that.

Technically the poll is still running but I think I'm gonna call it there. The first thing to do with this is iron out the scope of this new series. And then well, build the final game itself.

So that means knowing what's important to see. Moving, talking/interacting and fighting are givens.  I'm thinking that shops, 'items' (hookshot? bow? we'll p...