flickering colours

Game Maker Day 6: Not Forgotten

It has been a ridiculously long time between posts here, but I've had some pretty compelling reasons. For one, most of my non-academic writing has found a home on more public and higher-paying sites than this one. Another reason was that I was in the final throes of submitting my PhD thesis for examination, which is now officially on its way to my examiners. Finally, some job trouble for my wife did not allow me much time for fiddling with recreational game design. However, things have really turned around in the last few weeks, and so I'm back!

The first thing I had to do here was transfer all my assets and code to a new computer. I'm not terribly happy with how Game Maker has installed itself on this machine; the asset library is buried hideously deep in the invisible Roaming App Data folders in my user profile. Not ideal when you want to import a pre-existing sprite into a project. But so far its working.

The second thing I had to do was go over my design notes, which I'm thankful I kept. I still had to poke around quite a bit remembering how certain mechanics were written, where variables were set, that sort of thing. But surprisingly it didn't take me very long to get back into the swing.

So today I made a fair bit of progress on the first of the temples. I have implemented a number of mechanical obstacles, some of which you will probably be able to guess at by the screenshot I have included here.

I have the idea sketched out for the end of this little temple, but I'm just out of design and coding steam for the day. I might be able to crank out a bit more tomorrow, we'll see. For now, enjoy this little sneak peak.