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[BitShift]

This game looks great.  Post a build!

[Dom2D]

Not only is the spritework great, but it's a sweet idea too, to take a Conan story and build a single level out of it, instead of you know, going for a full blown Metroidvania right away! I can't wait to play this.

[sandcrab]

Not a whole lot to show because I already showed the gist of most of my sprites, when I say "now the wolf is in" or "now the ice maiden is in" it's like great, I showed them in my first post!  So I've been quiet, but also a little discouraged because neither of them is working out exactly the way I wanted.

I also wanted to make use of a different level editor.  I don't think I'll meet much argument from anyone when I say that Game Maker's level editor is pretty awful.  A friend of mine has made a much, much better 2D editor, which we used for our recent team-up, Astroman (I didn't do any programming on that one!), and he had an old GameMaker experiment laying around that could import levels from it.  I tried implementing it into TinyB, but it didn't work--I don't know if I'm doing it wrong or if he changed the level format since then, so this too was discouraging.

I mean seriously, the GM editor is a joke, and its support for tile masks is non-existent, so at least for that I built my own because I was sick of manually putting the masks over everything.  It was less straight-forward than I would think, because I figured tiles would have an ID that says which tile it is.  It turns out the tileID is assigned in the order it was placed in the level, which means every tile, even ones of the same type, have different IDs.  So what I had to do was look at every 16th x/y position (because my tiles are 16x16), get the ID of the tile that was on it (if there was a tile), and then ask the tile what its left side and top side coordinates in the original tile image I ripped them from was, and base it on that.  Talk about annoying!  Admittedly a unique ID could be very handy, but a "TypeID" would be very handy, too!

Anyway, getting that at least to work was immensely satisfying and then with my new-found tile knowledge I set about making certain tiles destroyable, and you'll be able to find gold or other treats (see third image above) inside them.  With the new tile destruction in I'm a lot more excited about the project again and I'm really looking forward to getting it all together.

[thedaemon]

Sorry you've been frustrated. I'm not familiar with GM or I'd help, just another lowly artist here.

[JasonPickering]

Alright so a few things.

A. I fully support this project as a huge fan of Robert E. Howard and Conan.
B. I to know some of the sadness of using GM. I tried looking at your code, but I have switched to using Flashpunk and my brain dumped everything that had to do with GM and I was very lost.
C. I always thought about making a conan game myself (tower of the elephant) one idea I had was to make a short game like this. then make another level based on a different conan story. basically I planned to make maybe 5 or 6 "levels" and each one was a different story, and the player could choose which one to play. I would love to see this get fleshed out to other stories and levels.
D. can you post any video of it in motion?

[Bood_War]

I just jizzed in my pants.

[sandcrab]

Thanks for the comments, everybody!

@Jason, your multi-chapter idea is pretty much what I was thinking, if I decided to keep going with it.  Tower of the Elephant would be a great one to include! :>  I haven't done any video yet because I feel like that would really show everything at once.  I'll probably do a video when I have more level to show.



I've started in on the boss encounter, as well as scripting some special events for the start of the level.  The boss is the exciting thing, of course!  Besides being bigger and having a sequence of attacks, there's two Frost Giants at once (you can't have just one!), so I created an extra control object to set their behavior.  It's still pretty simple behavior, but I can control what attack each one does in the sequence, how long he waits between attacks, etc.  It's pretty cool!

It's also got a great visual glitch that you can read about here, if you like. 

[Derek]

Nice! I love barbarian games.

[sandcrab]

Hey, Derek!   I (probably) wouldn't have even gotten started without your tutorials!

[RotateMe]

All those sprites look amazing! Too bad it's the programming and especially the platform you're using what's keeping you back! Hope you'll come up with some workarounds, can't really help since I never used GameMaker...

[sandcrab]

I've started in earnest on level design.  Really, all the cool enemies in the world won't do much good without it!  In order to better take advantage of Game Maker's editor's strengths (or at least minimize its weaknesses) I opted to build the level out of several smaller levels instead.  I like the cohesiveness of a single, big level, (I think this is Sonic the Hedgehog influence) but this way it's much more manageable, and breaking it up into smaller chunks has made it much easier to focus on those chunks.  Even the smaller ones that don't even scroll have a pleasant sort of progression as you move through them that might not be felt with a larger, single environment.



So obviously a lot of my frustration with the Game Maker level editor has to do with wanting it to be more like editors I have experience with, but it turned out it was capable of some pretty good stuff as well that I had ignored because, in addition to wanting to work with the features I was used to, I was also limiting myself to limitations that don't exist here.  In our home-grown editor, if I have a large "doodad"-type background detail, I put the tiles that make it up down once, and then copy-paste it as many times as needed.  But Game Maker doesn't need to restrict its tiles to all being the same size, and not even on the same layer!  So all I had to do was create additional tilesets that had my large objects fit on them, and putting them down was a piece of cake.  I'm still not wild about it, but I wasn't being fair either.

Of course, there still had to be trouble!  Because of my automated mask-adding, it turned out that the tiles I added from new tilesets onto the same tile layer were being read by the mask script, and random tiles that should have been distant background items were coming up solid, so after I excitedly placed all those big tiles onto my main layer in several rooms, I had to redo the whole thing and put them on a different layer to keep them out of the mask script.   

[mokesmoe]

Personally I think it's easier to add the tiles and masks separately by hand. It can take some more time, but once you get used to it you can do it pretty fast. Because "delete underlying" doesn't apply between tiles and objects, you can have a wall object the size of your grid and just hold shift while painting them under the tiles. You can then make the tiles invisible with just a click or two to check if you missed anything.

[sandcrab]

You are right, but it's that way because I was kind of dumb and stubborn about a lot of things.   (Probably because I was anticipating using a different editor) All background elements that can be interacted with (spikes, ladders, etc) are still "tiles" so those also needed to have things generated over them too.  There's absolutely no reason that they couldn't have been objects in the first place, and then I could just build the whole game out of oWall and make it pretty with tiles later, but I just wasn't in the right mindset when I started.

[Valyou]

*drooool*
Those have to be the best sprites evar.
Good luck, you'll need it!

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

I want ten days worth of progress!! Don't you dare say 'I've been celebrating xmas' or anything wimpy like this. Barbarians don't care about christmas!!