Operation Spitfire Devlog

#21

great news, I caved in and decided to find a way to fix the aspect ratio and pixilation that occurred (I used code from here. I don’t really like doing this because it feels kinda slimy to use other people’s code even if it is publicly available, but this is an exception). Bad news, is that menus are fucked display wise:

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this is why you don’t use static variables for drawing stuff on the screen. But its fine, I’ll just fix all of it via brute force. I’ll edit this post when I get something done, in the meantime im gonna fix this issue.

edit:

scratch all of the stuff above, although it does look really nice, It’s too late to add this in since I already built too much code around how the display works currently, so I’ll have to actually do my own coding in order for the display to look nice and smooth, and for the GUI items to properly fit on the screen.

I tried for a solid 25 minutes to make my persistence object (a little cutie that saves and loads all of your options so you don’t have to set them again) and the new display object to work together, but they don’t. The persistence object will stretch the window and surface to a resolution the display object can’t stretch and it looks awful. disappointed, but its whatever, minor pixilation at this stage is probably fine, probably.

that aside, I don’t have much news to bring up except that I tweaked one of the music tracks I have playing to sound less bad, and I’m setting the stage for separate audio groups so you can lower music and sound effects separately.

And yes, this is becoming another yandere dev situation where I focus on meaningless shit while the important stuff never gets done, but don’t tell me how to make my game, im a “professional” who uses other people’s code but never gives them credit. :angry:

#22

I’m not sure what you’re coding this in, but isn’t there a way to get the width of the window and then to just divide that by two and place the options there?

#23

yes there is in fact, but from what I understand that you have to properly scale the window and display or else you’ll either get black bars or pixilation. In my case the problem is the sprites don’t scale down with the window (dunno why this happens, and I don’t wanna manually downscale the sprites through the editor), the pixilation, and it messes up the view ports, either making the view too large or too small. And I’m completely out of my depth when it comes to fiddling with window resizing while keeping the resolution even to prevent pixilation on different resolutions, so yeah. (also, the code is from the video is kinda specific about what size the window has to be, besides that the window sizes are uneven which leads to the pixilation, so getting the length of the window wouldn’t help).

Like I said before, at this stage I shouldn’t be worry about pixilation as I can fix that way later, and it’s not too noticeable.

quick edit: its not too noticeable when you’re on a smaller window size, on larger sizes it becomes REALLY noticeable

(I’m making this in game maker studio 2 by the by)

#24

Guess whos done nothing the past week? this guy :sunglasses:

on a more serious note, I haven’t done much as of right now, except add dead objects for each of the enemy types, and polish my existing boss enemy’s code. I’m also thinking of adding HUD icons for negative status effects (IE accuracy down, poisoned, etc). I’m gonna put down a poll for where I should put these icons, so here it is, along with a picture:

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  • Top Left
  • Top Right
  • Over Character

0 voters

that’s all I have for now. Ima go do nothing for another 5 years now.

#25

I think generally you wouldnt want to put them top left currently, as there isnt anything there (yet), so it would sorta look wierd needing to look over there for status effects. Similar reasons with top right so far, hence i would suggest (as of now) over the character would make most sense.

Also, out of interest, what are you using to make this?

#26

like I told Orsome, I’m making this in game maker studio 2. Would’ve used unity but I have a lot more experience with game maker than unity, plus unity is a bit more complicated (or im just dumb and lazy) xd

#27

:neutral_face:

#28

fixed it :pensive:

#29

Hello everyone, this thread is not dead (surprisingly)!

after focusing on work and being a little lazy, I’ve made some decent progress that I’d like to share.

  • seperated music and sound effect groups. can now alter audio levels individually.
  • added status effect icons on top of character, only for accuracy up/down currently.
  • fixed speed buff item not adding correct values on use.
  • streamlined music coding so its easier to read and change for future additions.
  • removed redudant code in some areas.

all of this was more code focused, but important. the old code for music was pretty messy and used too many if statements, now its two single switch statements making it a lot easier to read, along with performance benefits (however small they are right now).

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these are the new options within the sound settings, its self explanatory.

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here’s the accuracy up/down icons in all their uneven(?) glory. with this looking a little more neater than having the status icons in the top right I’ll move those there as well. it should hopefully be a easy process of learning how to do that for half an hour and getting it right the first time.

The rest were just mistakes I found while testing icons and the music manager.

That’s all the news I have for now, its been rather slow lately but once I’m done fine tuning the main features that are currently working I’ll work on level creation again :smiley:

#30

very short update but its an important one :slight_smile:

After a few hours of straight work on everything weapon related (and I do mean everything) I was finally able to have the primary slot work fully. What this means is that the starting pistol can be dropped (and picked up again) and now all weapons that could be equipped in the secondary slot can also be picked up and put into the primary slot, as seen below.

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This was a major pain to do, but I am ultimately very happy that I was able to implement this. This also allowed me to fix some of the more annoying bugs and issues with weapons, the player UI, and the weapon manager as a whole.

As for performance, it doesn’t seem to have much effect on the CPU usage or memory, but I’ll be keeping a closer eye on these as I continue development.

#31

Back with another Good Update on progress, this time on the Camera, resolution and viewports (because im a psycho).

fantastic news with 1024x768 is that its pixel perfect now

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(wook how cwean it is owo)

but this brings on the bad news, as much as I would’ve liked to fiddle on forever with the resolution of the game and viewports, I’m at my wits end. Like I said a couple posts ago, this really isn’t my strong suit (this is my first game after all) and it’s increasingly becoming tiring to tests solutions that then break everything, so I’ve decided to not support any other sizes other than the current one (1024x768) and fullscreen. I’ll allow for manual window resizing, but other than that I don’t think I’ll touch this again.

Its not the solution I wanted, but that’s life.

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on a more positive note, I’m happy with how the view looks now, shown above. The compactness still allows for you to dodge bullets fairly well, and actually doesn’t overwhelm you or make the overall game feel washed out, which was another issue I had in general.

I also tweaked the camera’s speed, so it doesn’t feel like its a slow pile of trash.

expect a few more changes in the coming days

(and yes yes I know I said the “minor” pixilation was fine at this stage, but it’s a problem that affected the game now as a whole. So there wasn’t much of an option to put it off for later when that could and would cause future problems for me).

#32

Updating this thread made me remember it. Was it http://nightpoint.io/ ?

Is the white blob default as the player or a placeholder?

#33

probably, at this point I can barely remember.

the white blob (or onion as I like to call it) is the default for the player. I’m still making tweaks though, as before I started this thread, he, and the rest of the enemies literally had no clothes or legs :flushed:

#34

Wow i just spend 2h playing it xD
Thanks for that time waste =D

#35

Hello everyone, I’m back, along with a short list of changes/fixes for the enemies in the game!

  • Streamlined enemy coding for easier access and readability.
  • Removed scrapped sound alert concept (more on this after).
  • Reworked “Spectre” enemy’s chasing behavior.
  • Changed Boss UI code to not be a rigid mess.
  • Fixed issue with the Weapon manager where two instances of the player weapon would be created (caused from old code spawning in the incorrect weapon) as shown below.

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The sound alert code was when I wanted this to be a half and half mix of bullet hell and tactical. IE everytime you’d shoot your gun, you would create a giant circle around you, which would alert enemies if they were close enough. Same would go for bullets that hit walls or other objects. But this idea did not work well with the bullet hell aspects of the game, so I removed it from the weapons and bullets a long time ago, and now the enemies.

As or the Spectre enemy, the chase code with that object was really primitive. it would follow you and then stop completely once it got to the max distance it could follow you, but would get stuck and only move if it was outside that distance. With the new changes, it can do what it could before but now move away when inside that max distance, and stay stationary if its within shooting range.

Everything else is really code heavy, which is why I don’t have many screenshots this time around, but I will have a few when I’m ready to show off the boss of the first “area” of the game.

Don’t worry though, I’m very close to continuing level creation. There’s one or two more things I want to revisit before I continue however.

#36

Bonjor everyone.

This update doesn’t have as much as the other three, but its for semi good reasons. I haven’t been feeling very Gucci lately and that’s affected development and me in general. Wont go into detail however as I would like to keep personal stuff to a minimal.

Another reason is that the Spectre code I had worked on apparently imploded on itself and was erased from existence, so it was “fun” coding that, again. As for any other updates I fixed an issue with the enemy entities’ sprites spazzing out when they followed you vertically, that was an issue that bugged me since the first enemy was ever created for the game so I’m happy about that. And I tweaked the player bullets to be smaller, so they look more appealing, atleast to me.

That’s about it though, I tried to fix an odd issue with being able to reload any time you wanted, which would reset the reload timer while reloading but that didn’t work, not like its a game breaking issue, just annoying. Was gonna work on music and sound effects as well but I don’t have the motivation to right now.

With all of that out of the way, I think I’m ready to work on level design again, so stay tuned for that.

#37

Henlo Everyone.

I’ve got some decent progress to report with the second stage!

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(this is the current finished portion of the stage, the cars are just placeholders for obstacles I’ll make sprites for)

I’ve also tweaked both enemy and their weapon’s aggro range to compensate for the smaller view size. From my testing this change has been pretty positive and made the likelihood of most enemies sniping offscreen much less likely, the sniper enemy had its ranged cut down as well since it was ridiculous even before I made the view smaller.

I’ve also added invulnerability frames to collisions with bullets. It only used to be for collisions with enemies and fire (I’ll show that off in the future), But after testing with enemies and finding the Realm-esque style of being dealt massive damage from multiple shots I found both annoying and a general annoyance that made gameplay challenging in a bad way (who would’ve guessed). So now each collision from a bullet will give the player a 1/2 second state of invulnerability from bullets, while a collision with enemies or hazards will give 1 second state of invulnerability from enemies and hazards.

Some future stuff I’m gonna tackle as I finish the 2nd level would be revising the loot dropping script and possibly adding a VERY primitive save and load system for progress saving as currently you can only start a new game (and level select but that’s for testing reasons only for now).

So stay tuned for all that fun stuff!

*Also heres a list of stuff that was changed, added, and planned to be added/changed for people who don’t want to read my word salad:

  • Finished first half of 2nd level
  • Shortened enemy and weapon aggro range for smaller view
  • Added invulnerability frames (1/2 second for bullet collisions, 1 second for enemy/hazard collisions)
  • Planned change to loot drop script
  • Planned addition of simple save and loading progress script
#38

Heyo, back with a nice update that didn’t take over two weeks to make :smiley:

I made the wreckage sprite as shown below. It’s not how I thought it would turn out, but I’m happy with it. my perspective drawing is still terrible however.

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yes, the other two are recolors.

While I was at it with being productive, I rewrote and reorganized the drop script. So what happens now once you reach 100 dropchance or more is that instead of all enemies dropping whatever, each enemy has a specific “drop table” unique to them, and will select what to drop based on a random number generator ranging from 1 to the max number of items I want the enemy to potentially drop. (The base enemy’s “drop table” consists of an HP kit, an armor kit, and a stack of 3 grenades, this is all manually added in the script mind you so that’s fun for me to sift through.)

I also added a dropping effect to all pickups to make them look nicer when spawning from the ether.

Last change I want to mention is power ups no longer being in any of the enemy “drop tables”, I will either add them in their own separate loot script, or have them be exclusively found around levels.

#39

Another update, this time on Progress saving/loading.

instead of me being a POOSY and giving up on the idea entirely, I pushed through and it works very well, aside from some issues on my side (nothing affecting gameplay thankfully).

All slots and stats such as HP and Armor will be saved, and pressing continue will of course start you where you left off. Starting a new game will overwrite the previous save.

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(A short Gif demonstrating the drop effect)

#40

Henlo everyone.

I’m happy to say I’ve already finished the 2nd Level, tweaked and play tested stuff to make sure everything works properly, which it does! I’ll begin making level 3 once I get the inspiration to do so, since I rather not have it feel half baked and have to rework it because of that.