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.

It's still very very early in development and I haven't worked on it in a while due to BG3 and other hobbies grabbing my attention, but I expect it'll be finished around January-ish probably?

What do I mean by Proto-Metroidvania?

The structure of the game is linear levels, but they're interconnected and some of them have multiple paths or are open within itself. You start with all your abilities (except for one) and can finish the game with that. Each level does have a hidden optional objective that you will need to explore to find.

Look through this page for more information and gifs. There's a lot of nuance to the weapons and movement that I hope folks find enjoyable.

Transcription:
"Otherworld Time Periods
This is a list of time periods that non-REDACTED characters may be from. These periods are loose and can encompass decades/centuries. They can also be FAKE and LIES."

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.