Isometric survival game

[Vxss57]

I have decided to make an isometric survival game, think project zomboid and undeadz. I will try and stay from zombies and come up with something different (or at least try).
the reason i chose isometric over top down is mainly because i feel like i can create a gorgeous believable looking world with some hand painted textures. The game itself would consist of basic crafting, inventory etc.
But rather than try cram all question into one, i will start with an environment.
How big of a room can i have in gamemaker? Being an open world game i would love larger maps but if im forced to seperate the world into different rooms its not too much of a concern.
When it comes to creating a world i would prefer to do it in a program like photoshop, where i can paint in the base layer, grass, roads etc basically anything that doesnt require collisions. I want to give it a much more natural look rather than perfectly straight roads seen in rpg maker games.
I will try and post some images of my assets and so on soon.
Thanks

 

[zircher]

GMS is pretty flexible, you could easily do an HD game in it. The actual kicker might come later down the line when you get things established and you find yourself hitting a frame rate bottleneck. You might then need to consider a view and only have a faction of the world/level visible and active on the screen. But, that's a concern down the road that may or may not appear. So, plan big since it's easier to scale that down than work it in reverse later.

 

[Vxss57]

GMS is pretty flexible, you could easily do an HD game in it. The actual kicker might come later down the line when you get things established and you find yourself hitting a frame rate bottleneck. You might then need to consider a view and only have a faction of the world/level visible and active on the screen. But, that's a concern down the road that may or may not appear. So, plan big since it's easier to scale that down than work it in reverse later.

Thanks, im at work and i do my best thinking while at work ha ha. Not sure whether to have buildings as seperate rooms, if i was to choose this method, what is the maximum rooms allowed per game. On Yoyo site all i could find was "many, many more". Is that 10, 100 or 1000 rooms?

 

[zircher]

I think the most I've ever used was 28, but I would not be surprised if texture group/memory was more of a limitation than room count. I'll hazard 32K room until proven wrong.

 

[Aura]

There are no GMS-side restrictions on how many rooms you can have.

 

[Yal]

I would guess you can have 999,999 rooms... there were a case before when someone started getting issues after reaching an object ID of one million after using the old merge project feature, and GM had no way to tell instance IDs from object IDs, and basically assumes an ID > 1000000 is an instance instead of an object. So don't go above a million of any resource just in case

(Well, it's not going to happen anyway.... one million is an absurdly big number, and even very few commercial AAA games hit the upper five-digit range for assets, even though hundreds of people work on them. So basically, don't worry)

 

[Vxss57]

Ok then it seems i might be better off going with rooms. It might be easier especially for buildings with more than one level. Thanks everyone

 

[Vxss57]

Here is a trial at a post apocalyptic house, although I might go for much more ruined look

 

[Vxss57]

Before i get too far with the design, I have been thinking about the character controller, which will play a large role in the game.
Besides the usual idle,walk, run shoot, is it possible to have extra functions such crouch, crawl etc?
How complicated can the controller be?
Thanks

 

[YanBG]

Awesome house! You can have many animations but think about what will give to your game? If it's more work than gain, just focus on other fields first.

I don't use new rooms for houses, it reminds me too much of RPG maker..., but my areas/towns(rooms) are still kinda small because it starts to lag. Houses are made out of wall tiles, repeating them reduce the sprite size/texture pages, but it looks less detailed.

Baldur's Gate used big hand drawn backgrounds that cover whole areas and then added collisions at the right places, but i'm more in favor of houses made out of pieces, because you can have "random" variations.

 

[Vxss57]

Awesome house! You can have many animations but think about what will give to your game? If it's more work than gain, just focus on other fields first.

I don't use new rooms for houses, it reminds me too much of RPG maker..., but my areas/towns(rooms) are still kinda small because it starts to lag. Houses are made out of wall tiles, repeating them reduce the sprite size/texture pages, but it looks less detailed.

Baldur's Gate used big hand drawn backgrounds that cover whole areas and then added collisions at the right places, but i'm more in favor of houses made out of pieces, because you can have "random" variations.

Thanks, one of the main reasons im going for rooms is because of the amount of detail i wish to have, i fear it will cause lag.
But im intrigued by your Baldurs gate comment, is it possible to create a world in a program like photoshop, and add collision later on in game maker???? Would this save on memory ingame???

 

[Sudo_Radish]

There is nothing stopping you making the background stuff in PS or GIMP then building invisible stuff around it. That is how I did my early work on a platformer game. The drawback is that if you require making edits, especially on big maps, you will probably end up with more work. I don't know how it will effect overall performance.

 

[Yal]

I don't know how it will effect overall performance.

It'll use a LOT more memory this way. It takes a while for that to lead to lag, but if it leads to too many page swaps it will.

The main problem with this approach, though, is that you have a hard limit for how big you can make your levels. Graphics larger than your maximal texture page size will be scaled down to fit, then scaled up to their original size, and it almost always looks terrible. It's very hard to make tilesets that big, but it's very hard to make levels that are smaller than this.

 

[Vxss57]

Im really confused, alot of people are posting on these forums about lag and memory issues. Its a 2d game consisting of mostly textures, why would such issues arise on modern computers, that are capable of easily running 3d games? Is it something to do with game maker itself?

 

[zircher]

It's probably more along the line of learning how to write efficient logic and game loops for many of those cases. Poor resource management can hurt any project. I've personally have never hit a wall while making games with GMS unless I was deliberately stress testing something.

 

[Yal]

A lot of the threads also seem to be for Android and IPhone... smartphones has a lot less powerful processors because they need to be power-efficient (since they're battery-powered) so even though they CAN do most things a computer can, they can't do intensive computations and stuff... but a lot of mobile games have flashy graphics and stuff to attract people.

 

[Sudo_Radish]

Im really confused, alot of people are posting on these forums about lag and memory issues. Its a 2d game consisting of mostly textures, why would such issues arise on modern computers, that are capable of easily running 3d games? Is it something to do with game maker itself?

have a read of this http://www.yoyogames.com/blog/23

Gamemaker is good but you still have to think of optimizations.

 

[Vxss57]

have a read of this http://www.yoyogames.com/blog/23

Gamemaker is good but you still have to think of optimizations.

Thank you so much for this, a very good article. This is the sort of information i needed, now i can start designing the world in the right direction

 

[YanBG]

Thanks for the article, i'm going to nest a lot of IFs

 

[zircher]

Or perhaps a control script and a switch statement? Always more than one way to do things.