Final Class Blog

So doing the independent program for me has been a lot of fun. I would highly recommend it over the normal course of you like to do programming and have the motivation to do it. Doing it requires a lot of patience because you need to actually learn how to code before you can do anything. I finished learning the basics just before the class ended but, I realized that I love to code and doing makes me happy. When you take the computers course and decide to go independent, you are going to get frustrated, you are going to have to spend lots of time and probably time outside of school to get anywhere with it. Actually working on something in the independent course it highly fulfilling, it makes you feel like you can actually do something cool and have fun with it. You should not do the independent course if helplessness and being frustrated make you very angry. Also you should be interested in coding before you do it or you wont't have a good time. All in all I would highly reccomend the course because I have had a lot of fun working on our game and working with the people in the course.

Day 14 - Last Day

Today it was my last day of doing gamemaker and I worked with Justin for the last time in class. We are all going to be continuing working on it outside of school, I plan on working on the inventory system after school if I can get gamemaker working. This class I helped Justin again, we did some work setting up the cutscene but we wanted to do a bit more work on gameplay so we did other stuff. We wanted to fix the zombie AI but since it was Howie's code, we let him play with it.

The thing we spent most of the class was setting up the looting system. We did it all from scratch will only a general idea of what we wanted to do but, after messing with it a bit we started to actually do it. We tested it by making the fridge spawn an apple when you press "E" on it. The apple is an object too so you can interact with it. When you press "E" on it it says "Press E to consume" letting you "eat" the apple and destroy it. When you "eat" it you gain 20 health. We need to put a cap on how much health you can get because right now the health you gain isn't limited so when we reset the room to keep testing the apple, the players health kept going up by 20. I am going to continue working on the game with Jake, Justin and Howie but, I also hope to try and make my own game soon because working on this game has been a lot of fun. It has been so much fun I think that I am going to look into a career in programming, it's super interesting and I enjoy every aspect of it.

Day 13 - Glitches

Today me and Justin worked together again. We did were going to do the cutscene today but Jake told us that we have 2 days left of class so we should be getting rid of the little errors in the game. The light glitch in the corner of the house was back so I figured it was in the code for the bullet and got rid of it there by completely removing the particle creator in the bullet code ; it was useless.

After that me and Justin worked to make it so that the day/night cycle was implemented and the player had a glow around him so that at night it wasn't just pitch black. The glow was a little to dark so we messed around with the opaqueness making it look bright enough to see, but dark enough to make it seem like night. Today I am researching how to make a mini-map in for the game, and I will try to set that up tomorrow so when the environment is added it will look nice. We will also try and fix the floating zombie glitch which I think will be simple

                                                   

Day 12 - Help

So today me and Justin worked together again. We were trying again to get a little thing done so we could work on the cutscene, it did not go well. The thing we were trying to do was make it so that when you entered the house a message popped up and you could go through the door. We ran into many, many errors. At first we had it so that the player was standing behind the door, so we had to mess with the depths of the objects and then we got confused and had the depths on everything messed up. We figured it out by simply putting the depth in the {    } with the letters code. We also had the problem of going invisible when you went into the room. I thought that it was deleting the sprite when you went into the room but, Justin figured out that it was just teleporting the player to a weird x,y coordinate. The last thing that we found trouble with was that the player could go into the house fine but as soon as he walked into the door he could decide not go through it then press e to leave anywhere. We fixed this problem by making it so that else near = false, so that if he wasn't on the coords of the door, he couldn't do it anymore. We are using the rest of class to work on the cutscene and decide where we want it in the game.

Day 11 - Partner

Today me and Justin worked together on the game. We talked and worked together on things like making a way of getting out of rm_house and getting rid of a horrible sun like thing in the corner of rm_house. We also talked about making a cutscene tomorrow to start the game off. Justin said something about Jake having an idea so that project might be on hold until he's here. For the exit of rm_house it was quite difficult. We thought it would be a quick little thing and we could get onto the cutscene but it took a long time. The parts that stumped us were ; when you went near the door it would be solid, when you pressed any button near the door you were teleported to rm_1 and if you walked into the room you got huge amounts of lag and the game became unplayable. I helped to fix theses problems by talking them through with Justin. They one that teleported us with any button was fixed simply by having keyboard_check (ord('E')) instead of keyboard_check ("E"). The lag one was when we were trying to fix it too. I thought that having it so that when you don't press E nothing happens would fix it. Justin tried to make it so that when you don't press E it Teleports you to rm_house again, which kept teleporting the player and making insane amounts of lag. Justin had a weird shape in the corner of the rm_house and had no idea what it was, and from one glance at the code I got rid of it, he had had a fire particle in the corner randomly creating.

SketchUp Part 7 - Cabinet

SketchUp Part 6 - Fence

SketchUp Part 5 - Pool

Day 10 - Sound!

Today in gamemaker I worked on the project and I actually helped. I asked Justin for something to do and after some deliberation from him he tasked me with making it so the character had a walk sound. It was my first task after learning a lot more about gamemaker and I like to think I did a good job with it. For the most part it was done with 0 help from anyone else, just a little theorycrafting with Jake. I made it so the sound played when the character moved left and right, and it stopped when the character is not moving. I also joined the group in making sounds for the game. We went throughout the school and made different sounds. I was the one who did the walking sound. Other than the walking sound, we got a sound for a door, two filler death sounds and a sound for walking through a hallway. We are going to need to get a voice actor for the main character, and after hearing me and Howie, the choice would obviously be Howie.

Day 9 - Part 2

 Today I (with some assistance from Howie) figured out how to make the animation of my character work in gamemaker. I new some of it from watching the animation tutorial but it is difficult for me to watch a video then put it into practice. It was actually very simple and I felt dumb for not figuring it out. Stephen was also there because he needed to learn how to animate too.  I also started on the barebones of a graveyard level for Project Z. I have the first part of it done very crudely. The images are WIP but I will ask Jake to do some of them for me seeing as he has a gift for art. The image setup and the level setup took a surprising amount of time along with a discussion with Howie on what I am going to do for the graveyard level. I said I am going to make it so when you walk over the grave an enemy will spawn from it an attack; he has the code to do this so that may help.

Day 9 - Part 1

Jake needs a lot of marks because he has been explaining a lot of the lines of code I'm learning about.
Also Howie.

Day 8 - More learning

So today in gamemaker I did some practical testing on my game and of gamemaker in general. I ran into some troubles while working on it but Jake was extremely helpful in explaining it all to me in a way that I will understand and gave me a lot of his knowledge on gamemaker and even creating sprites. I worked with the physics system in gamemaker to give my game gravity, it was very frustrating but with Jake's assistance I learned how to use it and a lot about it. Next class I will be working on maybe animating some form of the game, I will also try and work on the jumping and moving and giving the game an objective.

Day 7 - Things

Today in gamemake I did a but of work on my game and watched some tutorials. The stuff on my game was little things like making textures and making my character able to move. I watched tutorials on how to do things like animation and sprites, but also one on how to make a basic platformer. I learned a lot about coding from reading up on how to make jump, It isn't as simple as it would seem because you need gravity and things like that while also binding it to keys and putting it on a timer so you can't just fly with it. I played around with the objects and how you use them in a room and I figured stuff out ; you can do things like make an object half in the room so it fully fits or you can actually configure gravity in the room settings. I need to work on learning more bits of code and how to put it together and I also need to talk to Jake about making sprites because, mine are horrible.

Day 6 - Getting Somewhere

Today in gamemaker I did a lot more tutorials and learnt a lot. I did 3 tutorials, one on rotation, one on Enemies and hp and one on views. The enemy one was really cool to do and I was able to understand it and even configure it to something that I preferred. I also did some work on creating the sprites for my tutorial platform game. I only got one done and it is not very good but it is better than the ones I made for my other tutorial game. Project Z is a lot like a platformer so it will help when I work on the actual game. The rotation tutorial helped me better understand how to set up directions and such for things like bullets or enemies. The tutorial on enemies and hp was very interesting and it was super useful. It taught me a lot more on how to think when doing different code. When I had to set the hp I expected it to mostly be in the enemy file with maybe setting something for the bullet to be able to interact with a collision layer in the bullet file. I was wrong because I set most of it in the bullet file, the enemy file was used to just see if the enemies hp = 0, it got deleted.. Everything else like the hp variable setting and how the bullet interacts was in the bullet file.

Day 5 - More Tutorials!

 Today I spent the class doing the final movement tutorial and doing projectile tutorials. I learnt a lot like how to actually make projectiles and fire them, how the direction in gamemaker works and how I can stagger the bullet timing with alarms. I was able to follow along and create a copy of the game he is making, it makes it a lot easier if I can do the tutorial in game maker while I am watching it. My game had a lot of errors while I was doing it but they all added up to human error, little mistakes that I made. My bullets were firing in weird directions and I was very confused until I looked at the bullet code and realized I made to copies of the same bullet so bullet2 was firing in 2 directions. I also had a problem where my bullet was firing in an odd position but I fixed that by changing the x position in the code.

Day 4 - The Learning

Today I was told by Jake to get better at coding so I can help more like Howie. I'm watching tutorials and trying to put them to use. I was being interrupted a lot because of the problems with Justin's computer. I am on the basic game tutorial and doing movement. I have the basics down so it is really just review, which is helpful after the break. There seems to be a lot of tutorials for this specific part so I am going to watch all those. It was my new years resolution to focus more on my coding so I am going to watch them at home while I work on my other projects that I am missing. The code seems to be the better method for doing things in game maker so I am going to skip the parts without it, if I need something I can just look it up.