3D view of Pavilion City Metro Station in #TotalAnarchy
3D view of the Pigeon Hotel ground floor in #TotalAnarchy
A guide to my early 3D indie games (and some 2D ones) I made with Game Maker 6 when I was a kid in school.
Simulating Interstellar Travel
To make the star field effect, each star is a white ‘ellipsoid’ drawn using the Game Maker d3d functions. The Y dimension of the ellipsoids call the global ‘shipvelocity’ variable, so they essentially stretch along the Y axis depending on how fast we are travelling through space. Very simple, but it already looks convincing.
I want you to be able to walk around the entire ship without restrictions. No doors that refuse to open!
It would be cool to have lots of control panels that do real things that impact the gameplay experience. For instance, I’m thinking about panels where you can trigger ship alerts, fire weapons, traverse to different areas of space… who knows where the limits are?
I was developing this city sim in #gamemaker version 7 around 2008-09. Was never finished but possibly worth another look? #indiedev #gamedevelopment
“Utopia
Unlimited will be a cross between SimCity, City Life and
Nation Sates. Presented by the attractive 3D drawing features in Game Maker 7, the player can
design a sprawling metropolis and manage it. Every city needs basic
utilities including water, power, transportation and emergency
services. Any good city needs a good healthcare system and a
respectable education system. Other buildings that can improve your
city are venues, parks, landmarks and civil buildings.“
Time to work on something new!
Still using GM Studio 1.4, but this time we’re going for a first person game set on an isolated starship. I always really wanted to make something with retro styled science fiction visuals.
I haven’t used any shaders or extensions yet, just plain d3d functions. Everything is a floor, a wall, a block or a cylinder - the usual. It feels a bit like an early Quake map, but it’s fun to move around!
I’ll post further details about the game itself in the next few weeks and months. No name or release date confirmed yet.
Total Anarchy lives on!
Perhaps one day this will get finished.
Large swaths of development on this have been more or less completed in these last six months. The game world is starting to feel like it’s coming together: cars feel nice and solid; guns heavy and dangerous; police hard to evade; parts of the map becoming pretty…
On the other hand, this is only the beginning of a fresh start. Many things to potentially go wrong or be forcefully left out. Finding increasingly strange ways of pushing Game Maker’s limitations. Frame rates could be better, but my machine is a 6 year old laptop with integrated graphics so I don’t know what I should expect.
Fortunately, I hope that in a few more months I can begin posting testing demos - but not until that represents how fun I hope the final game will become.
Improvements over autumn:
- 60fps; motion along busy highways much smoother.
- Game now detects resolution and sets correct aspect ratio.
- 8 directional movement with 360 degree aiming; on foot combat feels more like Hotline Miami than GTA:2.
- Brand new colour palette, all cars and pedestrians HD remastered and 3D models now have a ‘cel’ border.
- Police AI ridiculously chaotic, aggressive and hard to get away from.
- Player can now jump over and on top of obstacles. You can also now hide behind cars to take cover or shoot back at enemies.
- Instant loading between city and interiors.
- NPC generation reconfigured to make a busier and noisier city.
- Implementing a branch dialogue system for deep conversations and dealings with NPCs.
Starting the conversion to Game Maker Studio. I was dreading this, but it’s coming along surprisingly well.
Time to start again!