DAY 83

Today we wanted to work on the zombie mechanics but decided to give that to Howie since he created a path for the zombies and we have no clue on how to deal with paths. So we actually started on the cut scene so that the vspeed is equal to 2 when the cutscene is started, and the sprite index is set to the player sleeping in the sleeping bag (which we modified to fit the new player model). After that we figured out it would alot easier and would look better if we got Jake to create an animation, and then play that whole animation for the cut-scene as a video or something, it would look a lot more fluid, and it is also what most game developers do. Anyways, we found out that a game mechanic looting system would be extremely cool and useful so we started on that. We started off so that we made the fridge display text saying press e to search, if e is pressed, an apple is spawned on the floor (we want to make it so it spawns in your inventory but that's for later), and the fridge is now empty. The apple displays "Press e to consume" and the apple disappears and 20 health is added to the player. There's no health limit at the moment but it can be easily fixed.
Anyway, this is sadly my last post for this class, though I will working on it in the future, just not in this class. I learned a lot over the course of this class including that we should've switched to Unity instead of Game Maker. The outcome of the game wasn't what I wanted to end up with, but that said I'm not disappointed in it. Jake is going to continue to work on the animations/character models so that we can visually enhance the game even more. Anyways, here's my final .gif:

DAY 82

Today Nick and I wanted to add in all of the stuff we have made over the course of the year since tomorrow is the last real day to work on the game. First off we put in the night cycle and right away I noticed that the glow looked kind of off. I tried to make it so the glow was less intense and so that It would project behind the player but still lighting up the dark. I also adjusted it so that the night time isn't completely pitch black. We did also find a weird game maker error with the sun still appearing in the left top corner of the screen in the house room. We found out that when the player shot, the
"sun" got bigger and bigger. I think a while back I tried to make the "sun" a muzzle flash particle effect from the gun, and left it in there because I thought it didn't work, but it just wasn't appearing on the screen. So we got rid of that and it finally worked. Next class we are going to maybe work on the cut-scene, and I want Jake to give me the title screen thing he made so that I can implement it and make a main menu. I also want to make a pause screen, and options and such, though we won't have that much time to do so.

DAY 81

Today Nick and I continued to work on fixing up the room transportation. Howie fixed up his old house sprite to match the perspective of the new game. So we wanted to make it so the player can go up to the door on the house and click e to enter. Basically we just duplicated the other door and set the door to say "press e to enter". With this we had a depth problem with which took us quite a while to fix. At first, the player would go behind the door, and the text would go behind the house. We tampered with a few things and used a command obj_player.depth-1 = depth which we thought would work but only did for the player, and not his arms. Though this took a while we figured it out. We also had a problem where if the player went near the door, the variable "near" went true, and stayed true for some reason, so after coming in contact with the door, the player could press e anywhere in the room to transport to room1, though we fixed that by saying, if not near the door near =false. Also Jake made a really cool title screen background and animated it this class. I want to put it in my game and maybe add a constant layer of dust slowly moving in front of the screen.

DAY 80

Today I worked with Nick the whole day and we wanted to have some sort of gameplay added to the game. We were talking about a cut scene and how it would play out but Jake had an idea as to what we could start it out with so were not sure if were going to do that or not. He wanted to start out with the player waking up in a basement pooled with blood, but I'm not sure how we would visually create the blood and make it look liquidy and not just solid, other wise it would like odd. Anyways, we needed a way to leave the inside of the house so we took the door off of the house Howie made and made it into an object that switches the player to the main room if touched. But we wanted to make it more advanced than that so it's not so simplistic. I wanted to make it so that it says "press to leave" and when the player presses e, then it switches. So we attempted to do that. After many errors and it not working alot, we finally managed to find a way to make it work. Basically, the code says that if the player is near the door, set off a variable that draws text saying "press e to leave", and when E is pressed, the player is transported to the next room. It's very simplistic, but for some reason we had weird errors like what you can see below. Tomorrow I/we will work on the cut-scene and hopefully Jake is here so we can talk it out with him.

DAY 79

Today I worked on trying to fix the weird problem with Simran's background. I explained the problem to Ty and Jake, and they all of a sudden had many solutions to the problem. All of these solutions they made me try regardless of if I previously did. Once we tried all of these "solutions" All we were left off with is what we started with. So I tried switching to Game Maker Master Collection and opening the file there, but all of a sudden a wild obj_sand appeared out of nowhere (Nick's malware object) which I previously deleted and now reappeared to continue to wreck my game. So I deleted it once again, and ran the game. It came up with many errors in the program itself, saying it cannot find the path for whichever reason. We googled it but only found requests for fixes and not fixes themselves. So at this point we are kind of stumped. One thing I can try is the graphics tab in global game settings and try to mess with that since when the game is launched, it resizes the background. So that is what I will do next class.

DAY 78

Today I was trying to blend Jake's original background and Simran's forest mountain thing. This would mean that the whole thing would be almost 10000 pixels. I tried doing this but it didn't really work out well, so I kind of gave up. I wanted to just then create a separate room, and have a transition block to switch the rooms. I duplicated the first room and put in Simran's background normally and launched the game. For some odd reason it was super blurry and the image was really low quality. I found out that when I was launching the game, it was resizing the image for some reason, and somehow making the image super blurry and crappy. We're not quite sure why, though It probably has something to do with the massive size of the background. I googled it and found out that the max size for a background is only 2000 pixels. So I have no idea how were going to have a big world. I'm not sure if it has something to do with my steam version of the game or not, but next class I'll look into it. We also went out and recorded a few sound effects such as door sounds, footsteps, and dying sounds.

DAY 77

Today I couldn't make it to class so I had to work from home. I wasn't quite sure what I could do from here since I don't have Game Maker studio on my macbook here, and have tried multiple times to try and port it to mac. I'll try again after I'm done this course so I can continue to work on the game. Anyways, I decided to search up a few sound effects and songs and such since that's kind of what I did last class. I found a site called freesound.org or something and it seemed to be quite good for all different kinds of sound effects. I'm not sure if we need any more music in the game since Howie made 2 mind-blowing tracks and we don't even have any gameplay yet, so I decided not to go in that direction. What i did find is a really cool wind sound effect that could probably be looped and played sort of to match the fog effect we have but haven't used for a while. I think if I adjusted it a little bit, I could almost make it feel like wind. What would be cool is a sort of blur when it is windy on the screen, or when it's snowing theres frost around the corners of the screen. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I'm going to save that stuff for after the class is over. I texted Jake and told him to work on the player running animation, but it turns out he was quite sick. Though he did tell me that he would try and do a little bit.