I literally have a carpal tunnel flare-up from doing so many tweaks to the GUI and the major game variables the last two days. And looking at the Game Maker load screen for 30 seconds each time I want to test a change I made isn't so fun either.
The big game companies pay guys to play their games while in alpha and beta. They explore every weird corner and combination of game events to see what happens. I saw a guy interviewed once that did that full time. He said it ruined his gaming life because when he came home from work, he didn't even want to SEE a video game.No wonder 'tweaking' has a whole other meaning to guys that don't know how to program…
Nicely written.
Although I suggest you made your next front page blog longer.Maybe more detail on the game itself.All and all, yea.Short, sweet, to the point; A very good blog. I'll be watching you.
Playtesting is much more fun!
Ugh, just when you think you are having the most fun coding. BANG CARPAL TUNNEL
well I've decided that making an in game load system would solve that problem or at least make it start faster.
um it's just an idea I had though of. I'd probably just load images that would be needed for a particular level and have scripts loaded from text files. encoding would be more difficult but if you would only make a final exe for a community you could just replace them and run it once. If you could how ever encode the pics and text documents you would be able to preserve the fast start up speed.
for pics I'm going to create some kind of algorithm that would scramble the pixels in different yet distinct patterns and then have the game load it and unscramble the picture when needed. As for text I'll probably keep the scripts in the editor until I find a way to encode text myself.Maybe I'll release an example of this later, that would be nice wouldn't it. :DTo scramble/unscramble the images would more than likely take too much time compared to just having the images load/unload on GameMaker when needed. Scrambling of text is easy though, good for save files.
Or better still, just use one of the Encryption DLLs.The main appeal in external resources is that it makes the game easily alterable without having to change the exe. Or you can compress larger files such as .MP3s by placing them in a .zip.Yeah, way too much of a reply. If you're interested in External Resources though, I made an example which should still be on my account. But you might wanna check out the DLL on the GMC, don't know what it's like but it might make it a lot easier :)And looking forward to playing this game!object_event_add and file_text_* are your friends…
But yeah, no easy way to set it up unless you have it ready from the beginning :(If I come across any DLLs/extensions that could pull it off I'll let you know though.