ataXous prime is my take on the arcade classic Asteroids with a few extras. I wanted to make a shoot em up game for a while, so I started a mini project to work out how to use gamepads/controllers in Game Maker Studio. I wanted to do a twin stick shooter, so I had to […]
It gives me great pleasure to say that iDef is now available on the Mac App Store. iDef is also on the App Store for the iPhone & iPad.
Things are settling down with moving in to our new home and getting it how we want it. I have my office looking good and workable. It’s at that point where you are making fine adjustments here and there to make it just right, we are a fussy bunch us coders 😵 or it could […]
We were thinking our house move wasn’t going to happen until next year sometime – probably early March or April – as we’d had no promising viewings for around 6 weeks. Then, almost out of the blue, an offer came in. We played the usual bartering game and came to a price that both parties […]
I have just migrated to Mac-OS High Sierra, so I’ve had the fun task of re-installing all my applications from scratch. Normally I would have opted for a full Time Machine restore and gone back to how things were but I would have missed out on some new, lovely things that I have found. One […]
Most of my time at the moment has been dominated by life. My fiancée and I are planning to move so there has been a lot of upheaval and a change to my current priorities. As a result I’ve not had as much time as I would have liked to code recently. We have been […]
Apologies for the quote from Aliens (warning link has mature language)! So, over the last few weeks, I have been working on rationalizing the data tables in the game. When I started this remake, I made a list of jobs that were (SMART) objectives. This approach comes from my project management roles in a previous […]
Hello World! In this post, I will be talking about the weapons. No shoot em up is complete without them and Paradroid is no exception. For a game back in the eighties, it was not often that you played a game which had multiple weapons – let alone different abilities, sprites, and sound effects. There […]
This is just a quick update to show some of the other screens that I class as console screens; these are the game start, intro, and the pre-transfer game screens. These screens were done in a very similar way to the console screens from the previous post where a Game Maker surface is used to […]
In my previous post, I talked about the Minimap screen and the Lifts screen which are both parts of the console display within the game. The console screen also has a wealth of additional information about the droids, deck plans and the layout of the current dreadnaught. You can access the in-game console by going in […]
This blog will be all about the Console areas of Paradroid, which were accessed within the main game as a kind of sub-computer for information about what you were dealing with. This is quite a big part of the game that I “missed” – as in didn’t really take much notice of – when I […]
With the doors all working, as I explained in the previous post, the next logical step was giving the player the ability to move around the whole of the dreadnaughts area. This involves having the lift screen and the lifts on all the decks linking into the respective areas on the huge map that are the […]
The next major hurdle with Paradroid was implementing one of the most iconic parts of the game which was the opening and closing of the deck doors using simulated proximity checks when any droid approached them. Just like the automatic doors, you find in shops which detect a person coming into the sensor area and […]
Walls Currently, we have all the decks of the dreadnaught in place along with the player droid we can move around but there’s nothing stopping the player from going anywhere they please. While working on this game in Unity I had to basically set up collision areas on the tiles and Unity would mostly do the […]
So now we have the tilesets and we have our droid, its time to put it all together. The major hurdle is putting all the decks into a room within Game Maker. As I had already done this inside Tiled, we were planning to use them in the original Unity project. I managed to get […]
Once all the frames of the droid were put into Game Maker it was very simple to get the droid set up and animating. To do this I used 2 objects – one for the animating part of the droid, and one for the numerals. This is then placed on top of the animating first object […]
Getting the droid graphics into the project was very much a repeat of process used to get the tileset images from my previous two posts. Taking screen shots until I had enough images to build up all of the droid animations and numbers. Within the game there are a total of 24, not including “001” […]
In my last post, I discussed how I got to the TileSet that I used in Waca Waca. In this post, I am going to talk about where I went from there to 3 full sets for our upcoming version of Paradroid. Once I had a complete set of tiles for the game with animations for […]
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had created a Paradroid level just for testing out the wall collisions in a project that ended up being a tribute to PacMan that I called (WacaWaca). Initially, I spent a long time trawling the internet, looking for the whole game ripped out, with all the graphics […]
So a lot has changed since my previous post. Tony decided that Unity was not working for him, so he threw his toys out of his big, big pram =) If I am honest, I spent around six months playing with Unity, occasionally having eureka moments but, more frequently than not, having @#%& moments. Firstly […]