So while working on my game, Paper Flight, I discovered something today.  I had completed 4 of the 18 tracks used in the game when I stumbled upon another way of creating the different parts of the tracks; it would cut the time needed down to barely a fraction.  Instead of seeing a few more weeks of work on the race tracks alone in front of me I should have the tracks done by, say, tomorrow (leaving mini-games, trophies, high scores and unlockable features left).  Of course I'm happy.  Overjoyed even.  I'm also incredibly mad at myself for being so stupid as to not have seen the method a couple of weeks back when I started the track initially.  Oh well, I guess it's a lesson learned.

I wonder if professional game developers go through this...

Just thought I would provide a service announcement to people eagerly awaiting the new Duke Nukem Forever game....

There will be no game, ever!  Duke Nukem Forever is not coming out!  Not today, not tomorrow, not ever!  In ten years...ten years of development they have produced one teaser trailer at one minute and ten seconds long, of which exactly one minute was CG, not rendered, graphics. In other words, they have produced one second of rendered graphics for every year in development.  The game does not exist, and it never will.


Now, go play Portal already.

I decided to gripe more about the fact that simple additions that make the experience much more enjoyable are left out of most games.  It doesn't take much to add them and not only with they aid people greatly, they'll make the game much more professional looking.

The Menu

Easily the most overlooked part of a Game Maker game.  People will generally have three buttons: play, help, and quit, and that will be it, which is a shame.  The menu is the first thing the player will see and will colour his / her impression for the whole game.  All information about the game and any sub-rooms should be available from the main menu or sub-menus...

• New game
• Load game
• Options
• Help
• High-scores
• Quit

Options Menu

The Options menu should contain controls that allow the player to change every aspect of the game; music, graphics, speed and such.  And it's not that difficult either.  These are the options that should be available in the Options menu of any game....

• Music
• Display
• Colour Depth
• Display Frequency
• Game Priority
• Frame Rate

Music
Not everyone will enjoy your taste in music.  Give them the option to turn it off.

Display
Never start a game in full-screen mode; you take away the control of a persons computer and it really does nothing more then annoy them.  Allow them to switch back and forth.

Colour Depth
Changing colour depth from 32 to 16 will sometimes increase the speed of the game.  And by keeping the colour scheme simple and avoiding the use of gradients, the play may not even notice the change expect in speed.

Display Frequency
There's no guarantee that the player has the refresh rate of his/her computer set to the same as the game, and matching them will allow the game to run more smoothly.  Allow the player to switch between the set refresh rate of their monitor and the rate of the game; don't just set the refresh rate automatically as that again is taking control away from the player.

Game Priority
This is a little used option that I rarely see in any games which is too bad since it's the easiest to add.  Game Maker allows you to set the priority of the game and allocate more computer recourses to it to add speed to the game.  As Game Maker games get more complicated and laden with effects it's almost necessary. The priority setting has several levels from -3 to +3.  Below 0 will allocate more resources to other programs while a positive number will give more to the game.  Note: never set to +3 as that's real time meaning other programs that are running will falter.

Frame Rate
This can be an 'optional' option as it doesn't work well with 'Display Frequency'  but you can allow the user to change room speed and just put a global variable in all speeds of the game to adjust to it.  This will you can change the game from 30 fps to 60 fps and back again.


This may seem like a lot, but not really.  Once you get an effective menu system set up, use it in all your games.  And you'll show the user that you actually care about their input in the gaming experience.

I have one little pet peeve when it comes to playing other people's games; it's minor but I can't help it; it irritates me.

People spend so much time on the spit and polish to make their game look just right, I play it through and then, bam!  Generic high score list.  It's not much, but the features in Game Maker make it so easy to build a custom high score list that to use the built-in one seems almost lazy.  highscore_value(place), highscore_name(place), and highscore_add(str,numb) make it incredibly easy to create your own high score list using the draw function.  This is a very simple script that will draw the text for a high score list, more or less centered on a 640 X 480 screen...

var a,b;
draw_set_font(font_title);
draw_set_color(c_white);
draw_set_halign(fa_center);
draw_set_valign(fa_top);
draw_text(320,40,'HIGHSCORES');
draw_text(200,80,'NAME');
draw_text(440,80,'SCORE');
draw_set_font(font_highscores);
b=120;
for(a=1; a<=10; a+=1){
    draw_text(200,b,highscore_name(a));
    draw_text(440,b,highscore_value(a));
    b+=30;
}
draw_set_valign(fa_bottom);
draw_text(320,470,'Hit any key to continue...');
screen_refresh();
keyboard_wait();

font_title is a larger sized font the font_highscores.  I use the basis of this script for pretty much everyone of my high score lists, just changing the x and y locations of the drawing functions in order to place it properly on the screen.  Just draw a nice background before you draw anything else and you're done.  You can even include the title headings in the background image so that all you have to do is draw the values themselves.

Like I said, it's not much, but why not personalize every part of your game?  It will look that much better.

Here's some examples of what I mean...

So I guess I should start using this Blog for something.  Well, it's a Gaming Community so how about talking about games.

I'm currently working on two Games.  The probably already forgotten Perceptia II, that's been torn down and rebuilt so many times in the last two years it's probably starting to feel like Russia.  It's gone back to complete rewrite into an RPG puzzle type game and, unfortunately, is in the paper stage as far as that goes.  The graphics are mostly done except for the NPC's; I just have to work out the story line.

Currently though I'm working on another game called Paper Flight.  I got the inspiration from watching a paper airplane contest on TV.  It started out just as a build your own, then test fly; little more than a mini game really, but it's built up since then.  In it you'll be able to composite custom paper airplanes out of different parts, with hopefully about 6,000 combinations when done.  How you construct your plane will affect everything about it; how fast to flies, how fast it falls, how well it turns. Then you fly them through races with AI controlled planes, obstacle courses or mini games.  Here's a screen shot of the plane heading down a track...



This is my first really attempt at making a full 3-D game so I'm learning as I go.  No idea as to how long it'll take but it should be fun.  Here's another screen shot of the build centre.