Another year of school.

Neato

GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 3

- What difficulties did you have? 

      During the process of making my game, the only real difficulty was creating the power-up and all the aspects of it. I had some difficulties creating the charge for the power-up and creating the effect of multiple bullets at a time.

- How did you solve them?

      I solved the charge problem with multiple sprites for a battery of some sort, making it change depending on a global value (global.charge) which would increase for each red asteroid destroyed, up to a total value of 9. As for the multiple bullets, I searched online on how to do it and found code that enabled the player to shoot 3 bullets at once during the power-up.

- What did you change in your game to make it unique? How do these changes affect gameplay?

      I made a custom model for the player along with making the asteroids more unique by adding a random rotation to them as they're created so that even if there is two of the same asteroid, the rotation will be different making them seem unique.

      A big part of the game that I made unique was making a power-up that requires you to destroy 9 small red asteroids which spawn upon destroying the large asteroids. As you destroy them, the "battery" in the top right will slowly charge up and once fully charged it grants you the ability to shoot 3 bullets for a total of ten seconds. During the power-up the player is also invincible so they won't die during the power-up.

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GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 2

- What difficulties did you have? 

At one point I somehow made the game unable to launch due to an error in the code.

- How did you solve them?

I looked through my code quickly to discover a few extra brackets, removed them and then the game launched fine.

Extra Stuff

-Made my own custom player sprite, and made the asteroids rotate randomly upon creation so they would look more unique.

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GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 1

What difficulties did you have? How did you solve them?

I didn't have difficulties with anything while I made this.

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GameMaker - Catch The Clown

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Blender - Character Modeling - Part 1

Blender File Link

PS. Started on Part 2 before uploading this.

Indie Game: The Movie

1. What are some of the differences between "big games" and "independent games"?

- Big games could have hundreds of people working on a single game, while independent games very often have less than 50 people working together on a single project.

- Many big games are made by big companies, already giving them some fame and people find out about them easily. Meanwhile it's harder for an independent developer and their game to gain recognition fast since not too many people have heard of them before.


2. What are some of the difficulties the developers in the film have to overcome?

- Some difficulties the developers had to overcome were due dates. For the developer of "Fez" he had to delay the game multiple times because he couldn't finish it in time, or he wanted to redo / add things. Similar to the "Fez" developer the "Super Meat Boy" devs had to work extra hard in order to make a playable version of their game for a gaming event.

- The "Fez" developer had to deal with his one co-worker leaving him, and then having to go into legal stuff that if went wrong could mean that "Fez" couldn't ever be released.


3. What do you think is attractive about developing an indie game? What do you think you would like about working on an indie game? What do you think you might not like?

- The thing that's attractive about developing an indie game is that it's your game. You put your ideas and imagination in to it, so it's a game not only for the people but just as much for the developer too. By creating your own game, it becomes a part of you.


4. What is some advice you might have for someone trying to create their own game based on what you learned in the film?

- Some advice I have would be to try not and set a due date for your game, it seems that if you set a due date you become stressed over that day. What if your not finished? What if you find more things you need to fix up and polish? If you delay the game multiple times people will begin to lose interest or lose hope in the game. But if you just relax and work as hard as you can until the game is finished you won't have to stress over that upcoming due date for your game that you've been working on.



5. What is the best part of completing the creation of a game for the developers?

- The best part is just a feeling of accomplishment, a developer could have spent 3-5 years making this one game with maybe two others, and for that project to be finally finished and be able to release it as a full game to the public would be amazing.