#my phone. as for how: i actually traced the original sprite

[miharuhebinata]

nuggeto

+ original sprite for comparison

#wondering how &/or why i made this? well because i needed to keep myself awake today and also wanted to practice using the sketchbook app on #my phone. as for how: i actually traced the original sprite #then colored in the hair by hand. in the middle of that though the quality suddenly got annihilated and i hadn't saved in a while #so i just decided screw it. i finished the pink highlights by hand then used the color picker/paint bucket tools to fill in the rest of the #coloring (which i was originally planning to do also by hand). then i opened a new sketch & drew the symbol on his shirt and layered that #on top (idk why but i thought that would be easier than trying to trace it and i...think i was right? either way i like how it turned out!) #then i just cleaned it up a bit- retraced some of the lines and such. and *then* right before i went to finally post it i realized i forgot #the red squares on the right side of his jacket. so i just spent the last hour or so adding those #i was also gonna add a bit of shading too but i'm fucking burnt out at this point so screw that lmao #honestly it doesn't really matter i'm very VERY happy with how this turned out :) #nagito komaeda #danganronpa #sdr2 #🖌 tag #🍄 tag #send tweet

[sbcafe]

When I was starting out and tinkering with Game Maker, I also realized that I had to make some sprites.

Technically, I could have gone the whole Thomas Was Alone design and made them all squares, and typically that’s what most people do when they first create!  They want to get the gameplay working first so as to not waste time on graphics that might not be used.  (I have a whole slew of graphics that never made it to the final game, I’ll share those at some point.)

I have been using Piskel all this time for all my graphics as it’s basic, simple to work with and has an easy-to-use animation tool.  There was only one time that I used GIMP for some quick editing, and that was for the final boss’s mask gradient. 

One of the very first sprites I drew up was the player’s Ship, of course.  It became my flagship icon for everything (icons, branding, etc) so I never really changed its design after creating it.  I’m silly-proud of the little red flashing lights that remind me of radio antennae at night.

When I first was tinkering with the Game Maker engine, I actually didn’t even have scrolling or an end-level boss!  It was a one-screen shooter (many people compared it to Galaga when I showed it off) and I had nothing but the Green Enemies in random waves and that big grey ship.  I’m really proud of the 3D sprite effect I made on that, but I never really used that effect that often.  It has a charging-laser effect that actually took me a long time to figure out correctly, as I hadn’t figured out “Parents” yet.  That will be another article.

The little red enemy was the first time that I started working on rotation with the enemies. I wanted him to trace my path and fire directly at me.  He had to be slow-moving but still difficult, so he had higher hitpoints than the rest of the enemies on the first stage.  Its programming is actually very simple.  It moves towards the player’s ship with a slow speed, but its direction (and the rotation of its sprite are literally pointing from its origin point to the player’s Ship.  No matter what you do, that little red ship has a bead on you.

However, I continually found out new things along the way with the game.  Destroying the red enemy was fine, but I forgot to check what would happen if the player’s ship got destroyed instead!  Halfway through my testing, I came across this and I got confused, and I had to start learning how to read the error log.  As the red enemy looks for the player’s ship every frame, the very moment that the player is destroyed, the game crashes, as the red enemy no longer knew what angle to point itself.  (In previous iterations of Game Maker, if the game made a call like that and didn’t have an answer, it used to return “0”, which if you think about it, is good to prevent crashes, but horrible for debugging and poor practice in programming in general.)

So what do you do when the game can’t find something?  Lucky, Game Maker has a simple “if object exists” check.  So I have the red enemy check for the player’s ship, and if it exists, it angles itself towards it.  If the ship does not exist, the red enemy gently hovers backwards and holds its angle.

Something I look at when I’m programming is efficiency.  I can only imagine that Level 1 of my game is not very optimized as it was the first stage when I was just starting out, 2 years ago.  Levels 4 and 5 are much more streamlined in their programming.  Considering that I’m programming, I’m always concerned that I’m putting too many “if-then” statements into the game, as the game has to constantly check for these conditions and act upon them.  However, we are dealing with mobile phones that can handle thousands, if not millions, of checks every second.  That doesn’t mean that I can literally run “if then” all the time, but, just like my code, I can work on learning better techniques to optimize how the game is run.

This might be a little premature to say, but I called Space Shooty with the “2016″ moniker with the thought that maybe down the line, I’ll remake it to see how far I’ve come.  Maybe I’ll release “Space Shooty 2024″ and that one will only take me 2 months to make instead of 2 years.  However, I already have a lot of ideas in my head and Id love to share them all with you, so we’ll just have to see what comes up next!

#Space Shooty 2016 #Game Maker Studio #SBCafe