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Retro with a ? (Seeking heavy programming advice)

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Blight

Guest
I' into a project that' been scrapped and restarted 5x already. Let's call it a "clusterphuxivania" of sorts that will involve a character object that is transitioning from side scrolling actionrpgvania to top down/iso/zeldiabloish and possibly some point/clickity.

So far I'e glued together a sort of vania set up, character object, crouch,jump,djump,walk, step on enemies. Collision with parented solids, can do 45° slopes with parented solids. (Scrapped that and went toward tile colisions but will likely merge the two.) No attacks done yet, no hud.
Basic menu, secondary animated menu. Have 5 rooms set up, branching off a main room with several doors/room transitions.

Have top down character object, movement and collision, just a few simple rooms with doors/room transitions.

being lazy, I've stopped doing anything. I'm at a brick wall and even though I could be doing stuff like animating enemies, creating more assets, state machines, etc, .... I've decided there' no point since even if I do all that I still can' apply it till I get this issue fixed. Also, I'm an artist and musician, not a programmer. So what' my issue, and what am I looking for?

I need a progressive character object that will be side scrolling vania but when player presses "up" in front of doors to ....say....a dungeon....the next room transitions to a top diwn/iso/zeldiablo style movement, be able to interact with point/click (hidden object) rooms.

In both instances, the progressive character objects primary controls remain the same but animation will all be slightly different and sone inventory items will behave different.

I have solid intention on making the world maps be random encounter because there are other plans not mentioned and the final game will be painfully diffiult and unforgiving with players forced to carefully use the save feature that will have several random effects happen between save and load.

There are some much more complex things planned but for now, simply transitioning from side scroll to top down and back is on the docket.

I do not want you to give me a block of code. I'm hoping for a decent private discussion about ways to accomplish my goal, with the possibility of some minor tutoring.
 

hogwater

Member
Can't you just make two different player objects? Update the stats for each one when they get tagged in.
 
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Blight

Guest
Can someone point me to a visual example of instance_change in action? New to GM still.
 

JackTurbo

Member
Rather than use instance change, could you not just have your player stats in an array and use different objects for the player in the different gameplay modes and simply have them read all their stats straight from the array?
 
B

Blight

Guest
Rather than use instance change, could you not just have your player stats in an array and use different objects for the player in the different gameplay modes and simply have them read all their stats straight from the array?

All input is greatly apprciated. As mentioned, it' a sort of clusterphuxylvania so exploration, hidden rooms, item aquisition based progression and puzzles with some items obtained in side scroll and hand carried into topdown, as different "doors" are passed. I'l be chewing into your array idea after I digest some of the instance_change method. Thanks a bunch.
 

NightFrost

Member
Yeah, if you store all gameplay-relevant data outside player object, you can switch different player objects in and out as you please when game mode changes. Well, you could cram everything into a single player object but it is probably cleaner code to have a different one for each mode.
 
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