Marbles 🦆 and Checkers 🐢 were swept away by a storm and they need your help finding their way home! In this 90s platforming adventure there's a ton of stuff to do and even more to collect.
Howdy gamers, it's that time of the month where I talk about gamer things and y'all smile, nod & clap.
[i]🍦 Updates, so good! 👏[/i]
As of this update I still have 2 months of my arbitrary deadline remaining and at a glance from my previous update there's still a lot of stuff to cover -- Laamp's Bulb, The Jukebox, Minigame 4 & 5, Laamp's Stand, The Scoreboard.
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[h1]Smoke & Mirrors[/h1]
There are heaps of game dev tricks out there designed to trick you or elude your focus, sometimes the tricks are just there to save time. What the player doesn't know won't hurt them, right? The Fallout 3 Train Hat is a classic example of where I'm headed with this.
[b]If you wanna keep the magic and mystery of game dev alive scroll to the next heading[/b] - I'm gonna briefly touch on some lazy dev shortcuts I'm taking and why they'll lead to a better play experience in the end.
[spoiler][h2]Laamp's Bulb (Coin Finder)[/h2] - Functionally this would be a vertical menu listing a bunch of stages, if you've played our demo just imagine the pause menu but ~60 lines long. Upon selecting each line you would be able to select a coin you haven't collected yet and Laamp will show you where it is.
That's yucky - nobody wants to navigate a menu that long, and it's boring! But you know what this menu has a lot in common with? The overworld.
The sidescrolling overworld you saw in the demo won't be in the final game, that was just something quick I threw together because I needed something - I used it as a placeholder to format & position the stage names, clear times and coins collected.
The actual overworld will have a top-down format like all the platforming classics - it also presents the opportunity be leveraged as the menu for this service. Instead of the player appearing in the overworld you'll get to control Laamp the moth and guide them to the stage your missing coin is located. The overworld menu already shows you what's missing so adding extra functionality on top of it is a chill afternoon's worth of work.
We do absolutely nothing, save time/resources AND offer a more interactive form of menu navigation - [i]Shoutout to Funky's Flights for serving as the inspiration[/i].
[b]The Jukebox, Laamp's Stand, The Scoreboard[/b] - A menu here is unavoidable, HOWEVER I can just make one menu that fits all three. The Jukebox will be a paginated grid menu where you can select music to play. Laamp's Stand is where you buy/view action figures, that too will be a paginated grid. And lastly The Scoreboard will -- you get the idea...
By making a simple shell menu that has 4dir + confirm + cancel functionality it doesn't matter what I populate it with or the coat of paint I put on top. We get three menus for the price of one!
[b]Minigames[/b] - There was a reason I wanted all of the minigames to be different takes on the platforming genre. It lets me completely leverage Windswept's core systems - collisions, enemies, player control, pause menu, etc. The hard truth is these minigames are just standalone stages with no key items. The player's character and control scheme gets swapped out and a progress + score counter gets slapped over the top.
With that being said, I'm super proud of them all and even more proud that putting them all together was super easy with minimal dev time required.[/spoiler]
[h1]SO ANYWAY, NOW THAT THE LIES ARE BEHIND US...[/h1]
Here's how Laamp's Shade is looking right now... No sounds because sound is always last.
[previewyoutube=aNbu_N_qAbI;full][/previewyoutube]
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[h1]Slicko, My Beloved[/h1]
Y'all need to know this entire minigame came about because one of our community members and buddy of mine [url=https://x.com/jorbs13/status/1587420869353037824?s=46&t=riaJnnOBmnvS9lG04C6yhQ][b]Jorbs13[/b][/url] dropped this meme format on us one day.
[img]https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/042/751/618/4f36dbfa01aa067dcea509b7c4e8ce55_original.gif?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&w=700&fit=max&v=1697716774&gif-q=50&q=92&s=4882c93b17738bc1a4801d0d68542f59[/img]
Considering how many other memes I've worked into the game so far; one more couldn't hurt.
Slicko, My Beloved is a bit of an oddball amidst the minigames because it's technically still a platformer, but you're stuck climbing up and down a heavily nerfed version of the gate climbing found in Super Mario World. Nonetheless, you play as a Slicko trying to climb to the top to reach your beloved (wow).
By holding [up] you'll begin your ascent - after some distance you will start flashing to indicate you'll slide down a short distance after letting go. This is a super awkward and slow paced minigame that will test your timing and patience, it's also the complete Slicko experience and I hope you gain a new appreciation for their struggles the next time you decide to use them as a stepping stone.
The other minigames offer ways of gaining lives but this one is a bit too slow-paced and doesn't offer consecutive jumps - for the sake of balancing you'll start with 3 lives! Make the most of them!
Presenting... Slicko, My Beloved
[previewyoutube=qy87w1Dhc5c;full][/previewyoutube]
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[h1]Performance Progress[/h1]
Seeing as I shouted out [b]Jorbs13[/b] earlier I'm gonna do it again because my game dev white whale so far has been trying to reach 60fps on his laptop and I finally did it! I've never shied away from admitting I'm a first-time dev with a lot of transferrable experience from other fields, and that I started this project to learn Game Maker.
Laptops with integrated graphics are very easy to bottleneck and a lot of that can be attributed to performing calculations of any kind during a draw call. I have read a lot of dev resources over the years and one of the most common bits of starter advice is always [b]keep code out of draw calls[/b] and [b]limit the number of draw calls you make[/b].
For the most part I was okay about doing that, but I got into a bad habit of performing calculations like coordinate rounding which adds a lot of useless noise to the already-limited onboard GPU. The toughest part of learning about it is not knowing how big the impact from small calculations can truly be.
The GOOD NEWS is my lack of knowledge about the CPU/GPU split resulted in me spending a week or two back in June refactoring big chunks of Windswept's code. The game as a whole has seen a massive performance increase that wasn't carrying over to laptops until now. Hooray!
I'm certain things can still be better though so every now and then I dedicate a day to see what could be improved.
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[b]And with that[/b] we're at the end of this month's update.
Let me know your thoughts! Is there anything you like/don't like/wanna know more about? Just ask!