It's time for another episodic game dev series, this time aiming for something a little more ambitious than the last two! Let's make a game about wizards using magic spells to explore the world.
The video playlist can be found here:
I try to post about a video a week. If I miss a week for one reason or another, I may try to catch up later as to not delay the thing longer than it has to be.
I'm using a project management system called Codecks; you can view the board here.
If you're following the series, I'm creating a release each week so that the state of the project at the end of a video can be marked. Each release has two numbers - a major and a minor version number - with each week being the minor version number. This means that the Week 1 project will be 0.1, Week 5 will be 0.5, Week 12 will be 0.12, etc.
The game receives a "1.0" release upon completion.
This project was built using GameMaker Studio 2. Currently I'm using whatever monthly version is most recent as of my recording a video, and sometimes a beta if there's a feature or bug fix that I need. As the project nears completion it's likely that I'll pick a stable version and stick with it, most likely a future LTS edition.
I'm using a few more external extensions than usual this time around.
- Luminous Chickens - a lighting shader collection that I assembled based on past tutorials (with some fancy bells and whistles)
- Input is an input manager written by Juju Adams and Alynne Keith
- Scribble by Juju for text effects
- Chatterbox by Juju as a way to deal with narrative and cutscenes
- SnowState is a very nice finite state machine system written by Sohom Sahaun
- spart by TheSnidr
- Penguin is a program I wrote to convert 3D model files into vertex buffers; I'm using it to load models into the game and do a few other things like setting their collision information.