Your Own Challenge

My new challenge: Build a fighter jet with working bombs, missiles and retractable landing gear.
To do this there needs to be a balance between all of the thrusters, and certain key bindings are required to drop the bombs. (No, they dont have to explode for them to count, but it would be cool.)

More progress on this to come.

Jankyard Wars: Complete

The junkyard wars challenge; a level in which you are instructed to build a vehicle that resembles a honda ridgeline out of a specific pile of parts. I made the general body of the the vehicle using all of the rectangular shaped objects, and some parts with circles. 

The wheels at this point were positioned too close to the bottom of the truck, and thus it was hard to move. So I got creative, and added some small circles to the body and attached the wheels onto them, leading my vehicle to the finish line. 

In order to put everything together I just used the geometry action of gluing them together, and adding center axles on the wheels.

I also added the crate in the back, and strapped it down with a chain, and added some lights to the front and back, just for fun. 

In order for the truck to work, it needed about 170 rpm on the wheels, and 50000nm of torque in order to get over all of the obstacles.

Algodoo, Day 2

I redesigned my vehicle, the whole tank thing wasn't working out. I decided to go with an actual car; a Mercedes Benz C63 AMG Black Series, except the suspension is wildly lifted to allow for off-road travel. It is much easier to use, and just needs a bit more tweaking before it will work.

What have I learned? Well, this kid needs to move closer to the school. Although, they do get some pretty sweet cars to ride in.

Algodoo

Yeah. Im doing algodoo for a bit. Deal with it.
But all jokes aside, I have started work on this program. I decided to do the "take the kids to school" challenge first. I have done the tutorial in the past, so it seems pointless to do it again. Here's my total progress.

Animation

The firing animation for my player tank is now complete, so now I am going to get a working health system in place, and even a proper map layout.

FIRE

Half of the animation is mostly laid out. Shading is to be done on these parts, and I still have 3 frames left to design.

Firing Animation

I have made the outlines of the tiger tank much less harsh, so now they appear more smooth with the rest of the tank. I finished the aiming sprite, and now I have a basic outline for the firing animation. I set up the speed and timings of the animation properly, so now all I need to do is update the texture.

Tanks are done. (Finally)

Turret for the enemy tank is complete. Now I need to finish the aiming sprite, and make a new bullet. (Which shouldn't take long at all.)

Then I can work on the health system, and making kill-able enemies.

Problem Solved

I took the screenshot from last day's work, threw it in to photoshop, cropped it and voila; back to where I was before. I managed to finish the hull sprite from that, and I also edited the aiming sprite, still have some shading to do on that. Next, is the enemy tank turret...

Work... Sort of.

*Screenshots progress*

Game Maker:  "Would you like to save the image?"

*Clicks OK*

Doesn't save my work....

At least I have this for reference.

Now THAT is a Tank

Beautiful, isn't it? It still works too, all of the collision mechanics are fine, speed is ok, (could be tweaked) and the turret rotation is fine as well. Now I need a new enemy sprite, and maybe a new wall and floor.

MASTERPIECE

This piece of work belongs in a museum... too bad it its all digital. The picture explains itself; I have finished the hull of my player tank, the PzKpfw VI Tiger.

DRAWING YEAAHHH

8-bit style graphics are fun for a while... but they tend to get boring. So I decided to start work on updating the textures.

This Is a Blog Post

Although the picture above does not depict it, I have made the fire rate of the tank alot slower, so that you can't rapid fire your shots, raining destruction upon your enemies, and making the battlefield your own. Now with a more reasonable (yet still unrealistic) rate of fire, the player can calm down, and focus on not crashing the game with so many collisions being calculated at once.

I also need to make the enemy movements specific to each instance, because when one object makes a collision, all of the "obj_enemyTurrets" are reacting, when only one should. I have also fixed the collision reactions so they are smooth and stay together.

Some Progress

I have redone the floor texture, because the old one was getting boring. I also have simplified the turret movement, and have given it a set rotation speed so it can't just snap to the cursor's direction. Now I am trying to apply movement to the enemy tanks, but as shown above, I haven't quite managed to work that out yet.

Rotation Is a Thing

I have finally found (after a lot of trial and error) a working set of code that allows for my enemy characters to turn smoothly towards my character. So I decided to edit the object and also create a separately rotating turret, that has a higher traverse speed than the hull of the tank. Now all I need is to implement some smooth movement speeds and make sure that they don't crash into each other too often, and then I can get to work on a health system.

[Insert Title Here]

Yesterday's misalignment problems have been fixed quite easily. Now I am just looking for a way to get my enemies to gradually turn towards the player. Once that is done I can implement movement speeds, firing mechanics, health and health bars, and I can begin to actually create a level.

A chemist ate a PB&J sandwich for lunch, and died moments later. Why is this so?

              He mistook peanut butter for Pb.

Collisions Are Fun

Just kidding. They are a pain in the @$$. I am trying to make the tank bounce off of the wall when it hits it, but that throws off the turret alignment. I tried making the collision boxes identical, but the "image_angle" rotation oddly affects the rotation of the collision.

PORGRESS

While editing the movement over the past few days, I had overlooked one form of movement, much more simple to handle. This is pertaining to the turret movement specifically. In order for it to follow the hull's movement, I tried making it jump/move towards a certain position. I didn't realize I could apply the same movement speeds and directions as the tank was using, just applying an image angle for the rotation that follows the mouse (which now has a new texture in game.)

Now I need to work in the enemies, health and a proper shooting mechanic, with actual reload times and health reducing physics.

So much to do...

Doin' Werk

I have updated the hull movement to work alot better, now all I need is to correct this code to make the turret teleport to the exact position on the tank's hull that I desire. Once these are done, I can work on enemies, make higher quality sprites, and even start building the level itself.