Ashley Etchell » Game Development

Far Trader download

Ash — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:17:45 +0000

Ive decided to upload the last working version of Far Trader. Feel free to download and take a look at what can be achieved with Game Maker in about 2 weeks with no prior experience of game development.

Note that what you download is far from what you would call a game, its just a collection of graphics and a ship you can zoom around the play area. My development version allows you to change the ship you fly and the weapons it has with a couple of variables, this demo does not allow for that, instead you are stuck with a small fast ship armed with a couple of shotgun type weapons. I do have working machine guns and missile salvo’s that follow the mouse and detonate after a preset period or when an object is hit.

I have decided to re-assess where I want to go with this game and how to get back into development. Its been some time since I did anything due to time constraints and lack of energy. I have been rethinking how I would like this game to work. As soon as I get my mojo back I will get back into development.

Download it here.

Share on Facebook

More 3D ship renders

Ash — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:24:25 +0000

Its all quite exciting..

Top down view

Cant wait to see this when its finished

Share on Facebook

3D ship Render

Ash — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:25:28 +0000

The start of the Far Trader mkII ship

A Friend of mine who has a talent for 3D work is doing a model of one of the ships in Far Trader. I can’t wait to see the finished thing.

Share on Facebook

Far Trader – Docking and HUD

Ash — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:48:28 +0000

This week has been all about getting docking working. As trading will be the focus of the game, a system for docking at places to trade is pretty much essential. Along side the docking process comes the HUD. For now, the HUD shows some basic information such as ship hull damage, fuel level, throttle indicator, speed, grid reference etc. I have also created a radar system that centres around the player object. This radar gives a nice accurate system for showing where you are in relation to other objects in the room (hat tip to 3030 Deathwar for that idea).

Additionally, I have created a test system for changing the players ship. Object inheritance and changing is possible in Game Maker, but not something that I have found easy (until I finally started to read the GM Manual!), so now you can switch between 2 different ships that have different stats on the fly.

Docking has been a complicated affair as im still learning GML, but It has forced me to restructure a lot of the code in the process, producing a more organised application structure.

Wont say any more at the moment, but heres some screen grabs:

the HUD display with docking ring active

More ship sprites

Share on Facebook

Far Trader, finally some action

Ash — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:04:37 +0000

Finally, some in game action

Collision detection in place,as this image proves. I also has to rewrite a lot of the scripts and methods I was using. I had gone down a path of objectiveness that was counter productive to how Game Maker works so had to start from scratch. I made a lot of progress this evening.

I now have the basics for:

Ship movement
Inertia on movement
Particles to represent the ships engines
Collision between objects
Working projectiles
A very basic object health variable
object damage based on damage value in projectile object

Share on Facebook

Far Trader Game Maker project

Ash — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:54:34 +0000

Ive decided to put up some of the ship designs I am working on before going into details of the game. enjoy my poor attempt at sprite design.

A selection of ships from far trader

Share on Facebook

Game Maker – First attempt at game design

Ash — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:30:43 +0000

I’ve always fancied designing and writting a PC game but I dont really have the required skills. Sure, I can develop in PHP with my eyes closed – same with MySQL and other related languages, but games development is a totally different dicipline.

Game Maker
That’s where Game Maker 7 comes in, I discovered this little gem while trying to find good XNA 3 tutorials and after only 2 – 3 days of light reading and playing around with it I already have some decent results. Game Maker takes a WYSIWYG approach, anyone who has spent some time using Flash and action scripting will feel right at home with the Game Maker interface. Developing a game centres around a number of Objects and other items such as sprites, backgrounds, fonts, sounds effects etc and rooms. A room is a playing field for your game to play out on. You place objects in the rooms and set actions and events on each object, these events can be predefined items or you can simply script them using whats known as GML (Game Maker Language).

Far Trader – my game in progress
The games ive always fancied putting together always seem to centre around space and sci-fi. As a kid I used to play a lot of pen and paper RPG’s like Megatraveller, Space Master and other sci-fi games. Megatraveller always appealed to me due to its hard fiction approach rather than the space opera of star wars. So there it is, I now have something to base my game on, Megatraveller the game of intergalactic trading and warfare. I do not wish to infringe on any copyright’s with this game so it wont be directly based on Megatraveller, just loosly influenced by its setting and attitude to sci-fi.

A lot of planning has and will go into this game and I plan to document it here, but for now I will show some images from the planning of the game and a couple of mini screen grabs from what I have so far, but before the images here is a VERY brief overview of the game:

Far Trader will be a top down 2D space trading and combat game, with an emphasis on the trading. As the player you will be able to trade goods by travelling from one system to another. Trading goods will net you profit, with this profit you will be able to purchase different ships, some ships will be more combat oriented, some more biased towards trading. The initial aim of the game will be to make xxx money in yyy time frame, more of a sandbox challenge initially, but over time i would like to add other ways of making money; pirate bounties, people courier tasks etc, then finally I would like to add some kind of over-arching storyline which would bring you to end game.

A small selection of the ship design templates

Some sample in game shots of the first ship moving

I will give more details in another post.

Share on Facebook