Games by D W O'Boyle

you should not be a 10x engineer or whatever, you should be focusing on the vision and ideas and emotions that make your project interesting and beautiful and touching. some of the greatest indie games of all time have absolutely nightmarish codebases because the creator was rightly focused on the player experience

I've seen so many (wonderfully helpful) folks on places like the official Game Maker discord that are incredibly knowledge of hyper specific idiosyncrasies of Game Maker that have never (or rarely) released a game because they're too busy learning all the new bits and bobs that get added or altered with each new version.

They are often very helpful and often make helpful tools, but I can't help but be kinda sad for them. They'll post updates to the project and seem to completely rebuild it every few years because Yoyo added some cool new feature and they HAVE to use it.

I'm not saying you have to release something to be a game dev (far from it actually), but I don't think it's productive to constantly be working on the exact same project for years and years without releasing something. But maybe that's fine for them. Maybe they find it incredibly rewarding.

The thing is, Finishing The Damn Thing is a skill and one that needs to learned. It's pretty easy to give or to constantly expand the scope or to constantly rework stuff. I do that all the time!! But I think if you're coming into game dev what you should focus on is just finishing stuff, even if it's kinda janky and might suck. I think that can be a healthier way to engage with your art/work as a creative.

If you saw my post from yesterday than you saw the main attack of the Erupt weapon. Well this is a gif of the alternative attack. It creates a wave of eruptions that travel along the ground. They'll go up and down slopes and even down ledges of a certain height. They're basically working exactly how I want them to.

Except, I don't think they should fling the player as much as the main Erupt attack. I'm trying to figure out a good way to make that not happen, but since they use an object inside a sequence resource I'm not 100% sure how to even access that variable yet.

EDIT:
I got it working! And now you can SURF!!!

Special thanks to the GMS2 help discord for assisting me in figuring out how to access variables of object instances in sequences. It's a bit complicate and I wish there was a better way, but I got it working.

So this was a fun weapon to design. (though I still need to do the alt attack as well). I want all the main weapons in my game to feel very different from one another to really give players a reason to switch to them.

So I thought it would be fun if there was one that created an eruption that flung certain enemies upward. Then I realized, why not have it throw the player upward as well?

This weapon, like most of them, have a limited ammo (that recharges when not selected), so it is not like you can constantly do this forever or anything. Originally I had it be additive. Meaning that the more frames you were touching the eruption the more vertical speed it would give you. This was funny, but not very fun or interesting and made it too fiddly. Instead it is a set speed that is greater than your normal jump power. It is also affected by the character's horizontal movement, meaning that if you're walking or running while you get hit by the eruption you get flung higher! Probably only the vertical launch will be required in spots.

Like many of the other weapons, if you mash it causes the accuracy go all wild. This means you can rain down destruction which is at least fun to watch.

Programming-wise I took advantage of the relatively new resource type to GMS2, Sequences! I have used them before but am pretty in experienced with them to be honest. I knew I use them to create hitboxes. There's a quirk though and that's that you have to scale the hitbox object to 0,0 when you don't want it active since the way objects work on the dope sheet (aka timeline) is more like when an object is visible rather than there or not. It's a bit unintuitive but not a big deal ultimately. So, basically, there is only an active hitbox when the flame is at it's maximum. When it is growing or shrinking, it doesn't interact with anything. This is intentional, but we'll see how it goes in game once I add actual enemies and stuff. Right now it feels good, but I suspect I'll have to adjust it.

If you saw my previous post about a rolly ball attack, this is the same weapon, but it's main attack type. Each weapon in my game has two attacks. The main one here is a Mega Man styled shield weapon that can be fired off in 8 directions, even when not in the air. The projectiles ignore walls while in the shield state meaning they can be used to hit things you wouldn't otherwise be able to (though they're not the only weapon like this). It's one of the few weapons that's active while running. Most of the time you cannot attack if you're running in this game because I want that to be more of a choice.

If you're eagle-eyed you may have noticed it stops all momentum while the orbs are being summoned, including while in the air. This is intentional! I want players to be able to do cool stuff like stall in the air for a moment. A thing you can do is actually use that stall time to "airwalk" a bit, which is kinda cool. Probably won't ever be useful or really exploitable (since there are other ways to do similar things) but no reason to take it out.

Lastly, you can't mash this attack, but what you can do is fire it off early to get a tight cluster of projectiles.
It works by two presses. The first press actives the shield and then secord fires it off. I don't like making players hold the face buttons.