Windows Particle Lab - A Particle Designer for GameMaker

Dragonite

Member

Do you like particles? I like particles. I also like making game dev tools, for some reason. Yesterday I thought it sounded like a fun idea to create a particle maker tool. The idea is simple: you design particle effects in a visual interface, and then generate code that you can add to any old GameMaker project.

Almost all particle type and emitter functionality is supported, such as emitter regions and particle color, motion, size, secondary emission, etc. The only thing that's missing is sprite particles, which I'll add later if people want.

Screenshots and Video



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It can be found over here on Itch.io. It's free! The code's also there in various forms. It's officially finished, although I'll inevitably be fixing bugs and adding stuff later.

I've wanted to do something like this for a while, but yesterday someone made an offhand comment about it in the Discord and I decided to see how quickly I could hammer something out. This is all in GMS2, plus a utility DLL that I made to yank in some extra Windows features like re-routing the Close button. It was officially made within the span of Saturday, although that sounds a bit less epic if I mention I've been working on the UI stuff for almost a year and a half.

A few months ago I did something similar for Scribble (it's actually 99% of the same code), and I might do something similar for other things in the future, especially the 3D version of the particle system that Snidr made.

You should totally use Additive Blending for everything by the way, it makes everything look way more ethereal.
 
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