Week 2

Sunday; January 9th, 2011

Fantastic news! The engine has been decided upon and *we will be making the game in Game Maker. The project will be scripted primarily in GML (Game Maker Language), though some other assets will be scripted in other languages and incorporated in via .dll.

*I say "we" because a member of my game studio (Siifour Studios), Jack Yeates, also known as Nekomage, will be assisting in developing the musical assets of Project CAS. Jack is a good friend of mine (though he lives many miles away) and is one of the longest standing members of Siifour. He is primarily a musician/composer but triples as both a game designer/writer and artist. Check him out over at DeviantArt at nekomage.deviantart.com.

This week, a great deal has been done to further the development of Project CAS. Besides deciding on the engine to write and run the game in as Game Maker, a good friend of mine, Jack Yeates has also agreed to write and produce the musical assets of CAS. Examples of his music can be found at the link above. Other than this, I have managed to code and sprite/animate the basics of movement and collision into the engine thus far. This is a major feat as I have no experience with Game Maker and GML and will be learning the code as I go. Right now, Lily can move from left to right, duck, and jump onto platforms with ease! Collisions are working fantastically and the game runs smoothly at a beautiful 30 frames per second (the final speed of the game is however undecided).

I can honestly say that I spent a good 7+ hours debugging and staring blankly at Game Maker's script editor while attempting to fix a collision bug causing my character to get stuck in the corner of the invisible blocks used for collisions. It turned out one of the built-in functions -move_contact(direction)- was rather buggy and the variables -vspeed- and -gravity- ended up having to be redefined so that I could control them completely the way I wanted. Other than that, the vast minority of my time was spent making the art assets (animating one character) and splitting the mock-up picture from last week into a foreground and a background image.

But development is going great and I can confidently say that a playable version (with no story or gameplay, a tech demo really) will be released in a few weeks. :D

Total Time --> 14 hours