Author Topic: Life's Swell  (Read 9523 times)

SquareWheel

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Life's Swell
« on: July 29, 2018, 05:13:20 PM »
That's right, someone other than chu or hubs can also make a game.

I had an idea for a puzzle game the other day and wanted to prototype it.  Decided to dust off the old GameMaker and try it out.

Turns out, my GM6 pro key doesn't work in GMStudio 2.  So I made this in the trial version instead.

https://github.com/WesCook/LifesSwell
You can download as a zip.

They limit you to five rooms in the GM trial so it's not overly long.  Also, apparently you can't generate an exe without Pro now so here's the source instead.

Bon appetit.

aimaina

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2018, 05:44:16 PM »
that was cute.... i would like to see more its really too bad the free trial version of gm sucks now. you could maybe get around the room limit by having one room and making it load text files or something

i attached an exe of it for people who dont have gms2
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SquareWheel

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2018, 06:06:36 PM »
Thanks!  I appreciate the feedback and upload.

Yeah, I thought about the level loading idea too.  It's probably possible to write an importer for the GMS room format, so I'd just have to juggle my room usage a bit.  Or use a third party level editor and go with xml or something.  But it's a bit more than I'd like to bite off right now.

It feels good to make something from scratch again though.  Been a real long time.

aimaina

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2018, 06:23:00 PM »
you probably wouldnt need to do anything that complicated, just have a "play room" and an "edit room". make your levels in the edit room and have some code that exports the level data to a simple text file format (like three lines per object with x position, y position, type of object) and then read that format in the play room. thats assuming the file handling functions are available in the trial which they might not be

the trial doesnt allow included files though so you would have to store the levels in code or something. for example you could have a script thats like
Code: [Select]
level[0] = "paste the entire contents of your level data file here";
level[1] = "paste the next level here";
level[2] = "etc."
and then read level data from that array variable

idk maybe thats still a fair bit of work but it seems less hard than figuring out the gms room format or writing an xml parser in gml
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SquareWheel

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2018, 07:17:28 AM »
That's a good idea.  I didn't know about the included files limitation, so you're probably right that it'd be best to store serialized in code.

I think if I did decide to flesh the idea out further, I'd likely start hitting other Trial limitations before too long.  So I might just wait for the inevitable GMS2 sale on Humble Bundle, or consider porting to another engine like Godot (which I haven't used but looks pretty neat).  For now though I probably won't do anything else with the concept.

Thanks again for playing + feedback!

aimaina

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #5 on: July 30, 2018, 04:04:08 PM »
im kinda curious about godot because i did not like unity when i used it..... ive been wonder if its just like an open source unity clone or if its different andmaybe less annoying than unity
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hubol

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #6 on: July 31, 2018, 12:26:44 AM »
this game was cute. the stupidest solution is to just stuff a bunch of rooms in the five rooms and use the view to switch to em

juner

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #7 on: July 31, 2018, 07:47:20 AM »
this is cute! have you got an ideas for how you'd wanna expand on the mechanic?

SquareWheel

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #8 on: July 31, 2018, 08:59:12 AM »
Thanks for playing hubs and juner.   :banana:

I think my approach would have been to see how many interesting puzzles I could squeeze out of the existing mechanic.  I really like games that can distill down to one idea and explore it fully.  My go-to examples of this are Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV and Super Hexagon.

I was pretty hesitant to even add the "hole" block.  But I realized that only being able to do size<x checks made the problem space too small, and there couldn't be many interesting puzzles.  Holes allow for size>=x checks, which opens things up a lot.

At least that was the plan.  Knowing me, I'd probably keep getting wacky ideas and be unable to restrain myself.

dcco

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #9 on: August 04, 2018, 06:15:14 PM »
rip i dont have game makankosoppo,,,,, ill try to maybe get the demo version setup when i have a chance

SquareWheel

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #10 on: August 04, 2018, 06:40:45 PM »
chu uploaded a zip of the game in the second post.  You can run that without GameMaker.

dcco

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #11 on: August 05, 2018, 06:23:27 AM »
im bad at reading n i c e

dcco

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #12 on: August 05, 2018, 06:35:12 AM »
interesting concept..... also the character design is charming2me. i like the googly eyes

and tbh i feel like in terms of adding more stuff you could still push in one or two more mechanics and explore the problem space pretty thoroughly depending on how many levels you have.

also - this feels like one of those things that might have a reduction from something np-complete. kind of wonder

SquareWheel

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #13 on: August 05, 2018, 01:39:59 PM »
Thanks for playing!  I like the googly eyes too.  They ended up being 90% of the drawing code.

https://github.com/WesCook/LifesSwell/blob/master/objects/objPlayer/Draw_0.gml

It's nice that source files are split into multiple files now.  Makes VCS a lot cleaner.

aimaina

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Re: Life's Swell
« Reply #14 on: August 05, 2018, 06:13:31 PM »

also - this feels like one of those things that might have a reduction from something np-complete. kind of wonder
iirc games with "switches" and "doors" that are opened/closed by the switches are pspace complete. i dont think you can simulate that in this game though - holes could act as doors and fruits as switches or something, but then you could only trigger each switch once and that might make it computationally easier..... i dont remember what np complete constructions for games look like so maybe you can do one of those
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