Game X: The Making of an RPG

This is the step-by-step account of the writing of Wulff Hunter's RPG, currently known as Game X.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

WHOA! I'M BACK?!

Well, right now BladeSong is officially bug-free.

I haven’t posted in a long time and with good reason. I’m away this year to grow and learn but that’s not the only way in which this year has been tough. Earlier in the year my rental car was broken into and the thief tossed my bag onto the ground. Thankfully, the police responded in time with thanks in addition to the great citizens who noticed something wrong, but unfortunately my laptop on which I build the game was pretty badly damaged and now the fan is not working. I can only work for short periods of time due to this to prevent overheating and frying my CPU. I even rarely go on the internet anymore. I’m like a hermit.

Anyways, let’s talk a titch about the game.

It’s been a long, long time since I talked about just WHAT IS GOING ON and posted about my logic in building the game. I’ll try to get as much logic as possible down but honestly I’m really tired and don’t know if I have the mental capacity to write it down. But I’ll certainly try.

So, I’m coming along on the story. Honestly, this game has gone through so many changes in name and story these days it seems the only thing consistent is the fact that I plan on naming the series BladeSong.

This story takes place in a land called Faisches (yes, we moved out of Teocra and… Kenda?), a country based on France. I don’t want to say anything more on that, but I’m working hard on flattening out the plot and the environment and it’s all really coming out nicely. I wrote a pantheon and the game is going to be pretty damn expansive and immersive. I hope.

The system itself is going pretty amazingly well. I’ll toss in some pictures here:

The first picture you’ll see is a dark-skinned character randomly generated into the character creation system. Is this significant? YES! Before now, the range of skin colours I was using in the randomizer was, unfortunately, kinda racist and would not allow anything beyond light-skinned to nearly pink. I was always looking to fix this but couldn’t find the right code to mix colours until now.

To get an idea, the broken code:

make_color_rgb(floor(random(255-231))+231,floor(random(216-164))+164,floor(random(165-102))+102);

The fixed code:

col=make_color_rgb(floor(random(255-231))+231,floor(random(216-164))+164,floor(random(165-102))+102);

return merge_color(col,c_black,random(0.9))

The second picture you’ll see is a whole whack of things. You got me being attacked by a Vanguard, who will guard cities from… well, you. You have an Ursa to the side lumbering around, that bear-thing with the tail. The giant lynx is called a Srileo.

You should also notice the person near me. That is a randomly-generated civilian. All of her clothes are randomly generated specifically for her gender, as is her hair and skin colour.

The creatures at the bottom are (checks notes) Timonars, and they are designed as lower-level monsters.

Notice the birds! There are two types of birds right now, the Proigiex (the little pigeon-things, which in gameplay waddle around at random) and the Pratian Garzaks, a species of Garzak bird (we had another species of Garzak birds as enemies in the original Game X). Both fly away when you approach them. They ask what the distance is to the player and to all monsters in the room and if any of those variables are less than 30, a sprite of a flying bird is sent up in a random direction (e.g. x+=0.5 or x-=0.5) and when the sprite reaches the top of the screen the object itself deletes itself.

You may also notice weird things, like the blue circle beneath all monsters and the black square on the left of the screen. The blue dots are markers for bug-testing the monster identification list, which I mention below that I will discuss in detail later, and the black square is actually four base monsters (as in, the parent from which all other monsters are built on). These should all be gone by the next time I post an update!

Things you cannot see here are the combat mechanisms and the monster ID list. Both are HUGELY important and I put a HUGE amount of work into them so I think it’s best if I wait until I am less exhausted to post about them.

Bows work really, really well, except for the fact that they don’t tilt when they aim (yet) and honestly, swords work even better. Playing around with these and kicking monster butt is quite fun!

Anyways, there you go. A quick little update on the game with pictures. There are more features to be seen like going through doorways into rooms and a brand-new text box system I wrote myself that I will post about later. And maybe, who knows? I can showcase some of the new armours?

Anyways, I'm pooped and I'm out. Tell me what you think of the pretty pictures and the crazy new work I've put into the game. Suggestions? Anything you want to hear about? I'll be (pretty) happy to oblige!

Night, all!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Heyo Tumbling Peoples,

Been a while since I last posted and there's good reason for that, so let me tell you what I've been up to and why it took me so long to post.

So, way back when a few months ago, I took to the process of building swords.

Simple enough, right?

I suppose it was. As I may have posted before, what I did was put the swords into a partial orbit around the player which cuts off at a certain point. The result was beautiful, fast, and strong.

So how do you do an orbit?

Orbits are done using a function called lengthdir, and one has to be used for the x-component of the orbiting point and the y-component.

Remember, everything is just a point with a sprite on top of it, so we need to orbit the specific point.

lengthdir works by adding the function to a point on the map (like the x of the object your point is to orbit), and then within the function defining the radius and then the angle at which the point is, such as:

rotatingpoint.x=Object.x+lengthdir_x(radius,angle)

(note: the same radius must be used for the y-component if one is using a circular and not elliptical orbit)

The angle circle begins towards the right and goes counter-clockwise, so a radius at 90 degrees is pointing straight up.

The speed of the orbit is determined by putting the following in the step event:

angle+=5

That means that every tick of the game, the angle will move by 5 points counter-clockwise.

In my game, I use 'strength' to determine the speed of the sword. As you level up, your strength increases.

I also added a gravity effect to the blade by adding a small amount of weight (really just a variable added to the angle) which increases with each step. The result is the blade falls faster as more time builds.

Now, here's where I got REALLY lost.

Enter the bow. Like, bow and arrow. Simple enough, right?

I wanted to add as much variability to bows as I could. By this I mean I wanted the bow to be as damn easy as possible to enter into the game, making things easier for the artist(s) (the only one being me). All that needs to be done is the bow needs to be drawn and the engine will string it at its two endpoints.

Now the string is really a line defined by three points (it's really two which share a common point being the centre point of the bow, but we can ignore that, right?) Once a point is put in the line is the distance between the two points.

If the bow itself was constantly pointing forward even as it was raised above the player's head, that would be easy enough to string.

Easy is not my strong suit.

Instead, the bow has to rotate, no? That would look more professional and realistic, no?

Little did I know that that would be a huge pain in the ass.

The shaft rotates using image_angle, which, as is implied by the name of the variable, is the angle of the image. Increase that and you're golden.

But there is no image_angle for defined points! You can't just do some kind of line_angle function!

So I sit and think for a while. Image angling. Sounds familiar. I need to put the points... at an angle...

The angle of a circle.

Orbit.

Use lengthdir.

Easier thought than done, I soon found out. I couldn't simply rotate these points.

For months upon months I tried to, though. What I imagined was that the centre of the bowstring was a centre point, and the top and bottom are fixed points that rotate based on the rotation of the bow. It kind of makes no sense, though, and I have trouble explaining it. Here's my attempt at a diagram:

Here you see the top point marked in purple. I thought that it was supposed to be at a fixed point and that circle around it is the rotation it does as the bow rotates.

I knew that it was wrong. I could see that it was wrong! The evidence was right in front of me as the game simulated my thought process for me, creating all kinds of non-Euclidean-style Eldritch abominations of rotating lines. It was hideous and not at all what I was looking for.

However, I couldn't get the thought process right. I had no clue what I was supposed to do, even though the answer was lurking in the back of my mind. There was nothing to do so I put the game on hiatus...

FOR ABOUT THREE MONTHS.

It wasn't until I found myself telling a friend about the game that I realized I had forgotten about it, abandoning it due to the perplexing problem. So I returned to it, determined again to beat the issue to a red-tinged pixelated pulp.

The only thing now was to create a separate simulation.

I ran a small simulation of a rectangle orbiting another rectangle. Simple enough, worked perfectly. One rectangle orbited another.

My next step was to create a line that was about 3 pixels in length and would always point towards the inside.

What I found surprised me.

I had been thinking for so long of the bowstring as lines that I didn't realized they were not that at all. All a bowstring is is a RADIUS, not a line.

When I first ran the simulation, it was funky, until I fixed my thinking and began to think of the top of the line as a point along the radius. Sure enough, it worked and I was ready to fix my abomination.

Returning to the game I found myself with a mess of incomprehensible code that reading would require me to travel back in time 3 months. There was nothing to do about my tangled spaghetti mess of rubbish code, so I SCRAPPED EVERYTHING I HAD AND STARTED OVER.

Firstly, I created the centre of the bowstring.

Each time I made that damned bowstring, the centre always went funky once the image angle started changing. I had theorized for months now that the requirement to fix this was to put the centre point into a small orbit, beginning at the centre of the bow image, the radius being half the width of the bow. Once fixing the angle so that it rotated clockwise (you just multiply the angle by -1), I found that the centre worked perfectly (I found this by first only drawing a singular point: Wulff Hunter, meet the draw_point function). After this, it was time to work on the rest of the bowstring.

All that was required was me adding an orbit with radius of length of half the bow (as I could only string half the bow at a time, to allow a centre point that can move back as the bow is drawn). To string the other half, I used the same codes for the upper half of the bow, only adding 180 degrees to the angle so it was mirrored. And voila! I had stringed my bow to perfection! 3 months of lazing around solved in 2 nights! (That's usually the way things work around here.)

The leap to the drawing back of a bow was easy. All I needed to do was add a variable to the radius of the centre point, so as the bow is drawn back more, the radius increases, pulling the centre point back but still keeping it in orbit. This did not affect the other points (remember, I mentioned they moved in relation to the centre?) because I made sure to copy the original central points without the drawback variable, and the top and bottom of the bowstring move in relation to this.

As a finishing touch, the amount the radius can be drawn back to is determined by the strength of the character (see the beginning half of this friggin' novella).

Make any sense? If it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Just take in faith that I solved the mystery, I won, and I am awesome.

Wulff Hunter out! (Out to practice some archery, that is!)

[wulffhuntersgamex]

New Icon is Up!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

System Test video!

Brand new system test is up! Read all the annotations! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZRRek-KZME

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Back for a little update

Boy! It's been a while and with good reason! The past few months have been crazy crazy crazy intense but I have made some SERIOUS headway into the game: BladeSong: Tales of Teocra!

Firstly, I just want to put out there that there is a character creation system and it's pretty much done:

and it all begins by showcasing the customizability of my codes by starting the player off with a random look. If you'll notice, there is a randomize button to make the character random (and it includes a special code for the skin colour to keep it within the range of a human).

The "Sword on Back" code is actually one of my favourites. It uses trigonometry (cosine, namely) to determine the angle at which the sword has to be so that it is always parallel to the ground but never goes through. I followed all this up with a special code that negates me needing to create .gifs for the sword slashing: instead, the code sets an image of the sword on a partial orbit around the character which ends short enough to make it look like the player is slashing.

Finally, I'm working really hard on the GUI. I've already finished Notoriety (which is displayed through the character panel thinking changing from blue to red) system, the health system, and the levelling system (there are only as many levels as your computer can handle):

Here we can see both the levels display and the experience bar (purple). I'm also working on the armours inventory, accessed through that tiny circular button seen beneath the player.

The outfit she is wearing and displayed in the circle are the customizable civilian clothes, which are the default outfits and will always be the outfits displayed in your GUI. They can be changed in-game.

Depth works, we have a house, and everything is running smoothly. A video will be posted sometime to give you a feel of exactly what I am doing.

Until next time!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Lesson: For Loops

Okay, I promised this yesterday/today so let's do this.

Today I'm going to tell you about a for loop. A for loop is a piece of code that runs through a set of numbers within a parameter, increasing by a set amount. Let's take a look at one in GML, shall we?

for(i=0;i<=5;i+=1)

What? What? What?

What does this code mean? Let's translate this into english:

i is going to be equal to all of these: (i will begin as zero;i will be less than or equal to five, but never more;i will increase by one each run-through of the code)

this means that i is equal to 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

That's pretty much it. All we need now is a pair of brackets after this: {} to denote that whatever is going on in there, i is equal to all of these. This comes in handy when setting up variables in an array, for example (an array is basically a chart: one-dimensional arrays are just a bunch of slots in a variable and a two-dimensional array is like an Excel document.)

e.g.:

for(i=0;i<=5;i+=1)

{array[i]=0}

This means array[0], array[1], array[2], array[3], array[4], and array[5] are now all equal to zero.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

BIGBIGBIG NEWS

Hey Tumblr followers!

Boy, it has been a VERY long time since I last posted! I stopped Friday updates, I stopped writing about codes, I just stopped talking in general... so I think it's time I told you what's going on.

I've been doing a lot more research into coding. I've been putting a lot of back into developing new techniques and codes for myself, understanding exactly what I've been doing, and making really really cool new innovations. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'm doing and what I want to learn next.

So here are some things that have gone on while I've been absent:

I created an auto-tiling system which automatically tiles the room entirely. It does slow down the game quite a bit depending on what is in the room but it's useful for the original Game X application which is just a showcase of my abilities and a platform for me to expand on to the point where i'm good enough to turn it into a video game. The system actually works using a thing called a for loop, which is a mini timer thing. It checks through a list of numbers which you make for it until you run past the set limit (it's hard to write about in a confined bullet-point space like this.) It goes through certain points in the room and plops a tile object in until it's run through the length and height of the entire room.

I learnt how to code changeable colours. The application I made where you click a smiley face and you choose its colour showcased the code I made which calls upon the computer's built in colour picker to make a Red/Green/Blue colour (RGB is a type of colour creation for those who never took sciences). Basically, when you click the object it asks you to either pick a colour or it resets to the last colour. If you do pick a colour it stores it so that when you say no again it can recall your last colour and use that again.

I learnt how to fix the depth issue. I make an entire program, copied directly off the creator of Game Maker's own (it was for educational purposes and I did it by hand, typed it myself). I figured out the issue was that the Player's object was creating something called the collision mask (a little shadow used for telling if the Player is hitting something and whether the player is actually in front of or behind another object). This was going to be a massive issue and I almost had to write a whoopingly large code to fix this until I realized I could manually change the depth to where I wanted it instead of creating an entirely new creation point for the collision mask. I know this made no sense but take heart in the fact that in the end I won.

I fixed base monsters. I found bizarre oversights on my part that had the monster running to the edge of the room when the Player got near instead of running at the Player. In the end I was successful in creating a highly improved Artificial Intelligence (AI) base monster which would run around rooms at its own volition until it came to a near Player who it would then attack. I went on to create several more monster bases such as the boss base (stand still until the Player approaches and then chase the Player down and attack) and the Fluvis Flower base (a massive flower that stares at you and hits you when you approach).

I made a zone for Melissa Agerstone's birthday. It worked nicely and it was long so I added a code that automatically adjusts the view of the room.

I added the ability to customize your personal follower.

I totally fixed the citizens. Well, not totally... (I want to fix the fact that they stay away from the Player in a circle and make it into an ellipse (oval) instead, if that even is possible or plausible...)

I added more armours. Including an update of my own.

I made my first house which turned out to not work so I made my second which also turned out to not work. Don't bother asking me what I'm talking about, it just didn't work and that's that.

I learned how to display variables within text. What the hell does that mean? It means the game can now ask for your name and then the people will call you it. It works like this: say a name is variable name_name. The system says: "Hmm... name_name is now equal to whatever the Player just put into that box!" And then when you talk to people they say "Well howdy doodee name_name" but they replace name_name with whatever you put in and they would never say howdy doodee.

I made a random name generator (it has a bunch of letters which automatically tun into different letters). I also had a friend of mine construct a language for the game (he's a linguist) and had him build a tree on how a name would be made in his language. I translated the tree into code and now we have names based on the language.

As you can see, I've been doing off innovative stuff. The trains have been moving so fast I made a huge huge HUGE decision this Friday:

I'm restarting Game X. From the beginning.

With some changes, though. Only this Saturday did I start the game and you can already choose between being a male or a female and choose your skin colour. You can change direction and I slaved away at making some beautiful new gilded buttons:

So the new game is in development officially. It doesn't have an official name but it will be:

BladeSong: Tales of [insert name of land which begins with T]

It's gonna be really cool because the story will be generated by the game itself, meaning you can have potentially infinite different storylines. I'll post how I'm going to do that later. For now... cheerio!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Happy New Year!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Been a while!

Hey, guys! Sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been a crazy few weeks, and in that time I've gotten almost no work done on the game. I'll just tell you what I have been working on:

A NEW GAME.

I don't know if I will be dropping Game X (probably won't be), but I am going to begin work on a new game at some upcoming point. This new game will have better graphics and characters (with arms), but in order to do it i'm going to need to first write an animation program to deal with the animations that would be required.

This game would take much longer than Game X, but would have a better, faster, smarter engine allowing complete character customizability, such as armors, gauntlets, helmets, and selectable weapons and possibly classes. In order to do this, though, i'm going to need additions to my creative design team.

As well, this game would include color customizability. It's a code I'm working on for Game X, but COLOR CUSTOM WILL BE COMING!

I have other stuff to do now, though, so peace out, home skillets.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

I missed the Friday update, didn't I?

That's okay. Not much happened this week anyways. Talk later. e_e

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Sunday Update

Hey guys! Sorry I missed your Friday update! I just KNOW you're ALL pining DESPERATELY for this, aren't you? (I'm being sarcastic, if you can't tell from my face.)

So here's what's gone down this week:

1) Finished the Death Menu:

Okay, this one is cool.

The Death Menu is something that appears when you click on the dead body of a civilian. In case of an accident, the Dead Menu gives you options of what to do with the body:

-Bury: Standard. Removes some notoriety. Creates a grave which makes the body disappear.

-Heal Back: Good. Will cost lots of money or potions (or both), but heals the person back to life, and removes all notoriety (or almost all) gotten from killing the civilian in the first place.

-Steal: Steals all the money the civilian has, which won't be much. Increases notoriety.

-Deface: Pretty horrible. Actually removes the face and adds it to your inventory. Pretty horrible, I know, but I wanted to give the player lots of options. I think this makes me crazy. Oh, and skyrockets your notoriety.

I'll be posting a post one of these days about how I did all this.

2) Shops:

Shops are coming! This week, I worked some more on the codes to allow a very nice shop to spring up, and I'll also be working on a system which exits them. This will require lots of time and hard work, so forgive me for my tardiness.

Oh, and this will get a big post too.

3) Vegitarianism:

No, just kidding.

4) Flip Code:

Actually, just now I put in the final piece to the flip system I've been talking so much about. Should have fixed my bug by now (by making the object constantly jumping to the place it should be). Speaking of which...

5) BugSquasher:

The armor is in! It's got a cool, animated hammer! Here it is:

and without the face covered:

Look back at my old post to find the code! #BugSquasher

6) Package:

If you have a Mac, you'd know that games arrive in a special distributive file called a Package (usually a .pkg file), which comes with a fancy installation guide. I have downloaded and installed a PackageMaker application on my computer, and have now created an installer for the game. As well, I made a Disk Image file which stores the package (a Disk Image is a container file, labeled .dmg). This may now mean much to you, but it means to me that I'll be able to distribute my game!

~

Aaaaaaaand that's it. All I've got. I'll be working on more this week. Have a great week, y'all!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Found, solved, and fixed the 'random weapon spawn' issue!

Turns out, there was a delay in the weapon realizing where it should be. That was it!

Gonna work on making a BugSquasher and BugSquasher Prime class. BugSquasher will be obtainable through a code at the end of the other long post. BugSquasher Prime will be a more exclusive class obtained through a code one finds by answering a question on the post earlier.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Okay, so, here's a really old video of what Game X looks like. This was back at the time, like, in July or something.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Pre-Friday Update (read to receive an armor!)

To quote Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development: "Wow, gang. What an adventure!"

As you all know, I talked a while ago about the fact that I had input a 'flip' system, which allowed the Player to turn to face the direction he or she is going in.

But when I put the code in, i discovered I had a problem: all the weapons were being created at the wrong distance from the Player!

So let's begin with this. imagine a grid all around the Player sprite (2D). Point (0,0) is at the top-left corner:

In left mode, the object would be created at a certain point relative to the Player's point (0,0) (the top-left corner, remember?)

In right mode, however, I ran into all kinds of problems. First, I used a little mathematical formula to inverse the distance of the point from the Player:

New Point = Player(0,0) - weapon's preset distance from Player.

I later discovered, of course, that this was wrong. Why? Because I did not take into account the fact that the Player's sprite had to turn on the spot, too. Therefore, what appears to the player as the Player's (0,0) is now actually (0+Player's image width,0).

Of course, when I first wrote this and couldn't understand a word of what I was saying, I solved this ugly issue by adding a distance boost from the Player: the object would not be created at:

(0+New point+weapon's image width,0)

Now, this created an ugly mask of what I wanted to do. It was rough and didn't work, but didn't exactly impede on my work.

Until he came.

His name is Kerrigan, and he is a Shield Shaper.

This means that, when you press the space bar, a giant circle is created around him. Kerrigan will appear in my later posts probably as a special character, but while testing him, I discovered that, while facing the right, his circle was away from his body. Rather than behind it, with him in the centre.

And this irritated me.

So what did I do? I began to research the code problems in a special debug mode version of Game X:

The box on the left tells me all the variable's values I want to know.

So, in the original edit, I ended up with a window like this:

global.coney is the intended distance from Player.x=0. global.island is the intended distance from Player.y=0. And global.rhode is the distance from Player.x=0 when global.coney is put through my woodchopper equation.

I did a lot of arithmetic...

(paper is the only way to go)

...only to discover that I had made big errors. I hadn't, as I mentioned earlier, accounted for the fact that the object had to be created from Player.x=0+Player's sprite width, rather than Player.x=0, and when I put this in, I discovered that now I could remove the part from the code where we add the distance of the weapon's sprite width.

Whew. And here I am now, with the fixed result.

Well, almost fixed.

I have a final issue. Before the weapon hops to its proper position, it dilly-dallies at a random point. So now I need to comb through the code, rethink everything, and fix it. But that's for tomorrow. Now? Now I'm going to sleep.

Good night! I'll give anyone who actually read this a present tomorrow: BugSquasher! Answer a question about this post for the code!

~

EDIT: BugSquasher code:

icrushbugs

[wulffhuntersgamex]

FRIDAY UPDATE!

DUDES! We have a LOT going on this week! WOO! BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG STUFF!

1) Working on the brick depth to finish phase 1: Not working. REALLY not working. We need (I need) to review exactly how it works, because testing how it works in the same way official games made with Game Maker has not been fruitful.

2) Special armors: I've written a code that negates mods buying their armors. I won't explain how it works so that nobody ever gets to hack the game, but yeah, just putting that out there.

3) Base Monsters: We already, as you know, have monsters in Game X. The change is that we will make a 'base' monster template upon which further monsters will be using, with different makeup. Gotta fix the code for it, but I have high hopes.

4) Citizens!: WOO! This is BIGGY, MAN! These guys are cool as HECK! They select their own random outfit, and then consistently look like that.

You can kill them, but not without consequences. A notoriety meter will keep track of your notoriety. The higher your notoriety is, the larger the radius of the circle the citizens keep around you is. Of course, if there's an accident, you can redeem yourself by paying a hefty price for a grave. OR you can use some future health potions to return them to life. This is all talked about in my longest blog post. Check it out. I'll also be writing about them some other time.

5) Shops: Working on this in a totally different file. Complicated stuff, using arrays and weird codes like that. I'll need to do a separate blog post about this later... WIP.

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Birthday

YAAAAAY! My birthday! Well, for your present, I'm giving you all a present: 'WulffBirthday2013'! Happy birthday!

Here are the four classes: 

That's your Friday update. I won't be posting until at least Sunday. See you!

[wulffhuntersgamex]

Flash update!

Woo! Fixed the flipping function for boomerang classes (when you turn, the boomerang goes in the direction you're facing!) WOOO!

Also, my birthday present to you is in! After getting it from the code, press W, U, L, or F to access the 4 exclusive armors!