The activity was this week was one of remediation.
For this I had decided to make a version of Space Invaders where the player plays as the invaders, rather than the spaceship at the bottom of the screen.
Having a full set of built wrapper functions written in Game Maker Studio 2 (GMS2) I decided that for rapid prototyping I would use this, as the “engine” is a fully-contained empty game.
It contains, but is not limited to:
- Game state manager
- Custom sprite rendering lists (background, normal, sorted and overlay)
- Custom channel-based audio engine
- Custom font handling/printing functions (texts are printed as sprites)
- Custom zone management for printed text (for mouse or touch screen control)
- Alpha controlled fade transitions, with sprite overrides
Having this in place allowed me to rapidly develop the prototype so a semi-playable stage, including front-end and menus, inside 10 hours, which included re-familiarisation with the code as I had not used it for 3+ years.
On a personal note I have to say that game development again after such a long while was hugely enjoyable, but was made easier by using prior technology.
For a more detailed description please see this blog link for the activity phase.