Top down view

Cant wait to see this when its finished

Share on Facebook

The start of the Far Trader mkII ship

Share on Facebook

 The premise goes something like this:

1. The player object in Far Trader creates a background image that is attached to the player object itself which gives an illusion of a rad projection.
2. Each AI ship instance spawns a radar contact object in its Create Event with the x and y value of the player. This will make a radar contact sprite for each and every spaceship object in the room appear at the players location.

Example of radar system

The code looks like:

Each AI ship instance has in its Create Event

scannerRange=2000; // distance in pixels that objects can be detected
radarContact=instance_create(obj_player.x,obj_player.y,obj_ship_contact);


Then in the AI ship instances’s End Step Event add:

dist = point_distance(x,y,obj_player.x,obj_player.y);
if(dist > scannerRange) {
// hide the sprite
radarContact.image_alpha = 0.0;
} else {
// set sprite alpha as a % of dist from scannerRange
alpha = 100 - ((dist / scannerRange) * 100) ;
radarContact.image_alpha=alpha / 100 ;
}
if(dist < scannerRange) {
if(dist < 390) {
radarBlip=dist;
} else {
radarBlip=390;
}
pDirection=point_direction(x,y,obj_player.x,obj_player.y);
radarContact.x = obj_player.x - lengthdir_x(radarBlip , pDirection);
radarContact.y = obj_player.y - lengthdir_y(radarBlip , pDirection);
}

The above code will pull the radar contact instance away from the player object back to its creator instance, up to a maximum of 390 pixels. The 390 pixel limit is to match the background image attached to the player object, it can be any distance you desire, as long as its visible on the screen! All radar contacts that are greater than scannerRange pixels away have there alpha set to 0.0, which means they are not visible. Once the contact is in scannerRange, the code will set its alpha value to a % of the distance, to give an impression of range, the further away the contact, the more transparent the contact object.

The above is just an example of how I implemented the radar, code. In my game I actually have the code in a script, so that its easy to apply do a number of different object types. I hope someone finds it of use.

Share on Facebook

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

Finally, some in game action

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

A selection of ships from far trader

Share on Facebook

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