Game Maker RPG – Day 2
LOOK OUT, SKELETON!!
Much progress was made today! I am fairly pleased.
I had many more hours to work today, so I got to really get stuck into the Game Maker scripting language, as I had hoped to do. As it turns out, I’m coming up to speed with it pretty fast, so let’s look over at what I did today.
Firstly, I got the health system working. As it turns out, the built-in system seems to be focused mainly on one of your objects. It took me close to an hour to figure out that the variable ‘health’ is a reserved word, and tracks a value from 1-100. I was very annoyed at my skeletons who just wouldn’t die, because their health was 100, and then eventually they all died, because the global health variable was zero. So anyway, skeletons have ‘stam’ now, not health.
Bit of a detour: A corollary to the health system was learning to write text to the screen. That took quite some time too because I, at some point, had made the object responsible for writing invisible, so nothing I tried worked. Obviously. But after sorting that out, I quickly came up with a total health display. Ok, back on the skeletons. I wanted them to be dangerous, so any time the player is standing next to a skelly, they will do some damage at intervals and within a range randomly selected. So if the player just stands next to the immobile skeleton, the player-character’s health runs down. (Come to think of it, I haven’t actually programmed anything to happen with the player’s health reaches zero. Hmmm.)