GameMaker Top down 2D engine for GMS2 ?

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Antera

Guest
I spent 10 hours/day for 1 week to learn GMS2 and GML, I spend frustrating nights on collisions, paths .. it's working, but far from perfect, and I guess other people did the same before me and did awesome job

Now that I have an understanding of those concepts, I'd like to spend more time on level editing and enemies creation

Is there a pre-made "game engine in the engine" that I could use for the foundations of my game ?

A script or extension that manages player movement, enemies movement, collisions of player with enemies, walls, bullets, melee attack, all the things that I thought were already integrated in GMS2 ?

Top down 2D shooter / hack n slash

I can buy it

Many thanks for your advice
 

woods

Member
there are sooo many ways to handle each of these events you are talking about.. you can have them interact in so many ways.. it would be very hard to find a "cookie cutter" extension that behaves exactly how you want to build your game.

it almost sounds as if you want to simply swap sprites into a game that is already made.
thats not what i am saying, but to make your game how you want it, you need to make the rules ;o)

the tools are there already, we just need to learn how to use them properly.

you could find a sciprt that handles player movement... sure. then you need to adjust it to your game objects, your speeds, your directions, your attacks... its much faster to learn HOW to move your player, then adjust and tweek it until you are happy.

the same goes for enemies... how far away do you want to act on/at your player? how far do you want them to move? how fast? when they shoot, does the bullet use the form of a lazer/bullet/whip/dogbone/sword? how much damage is applied? how fast can they attack again?

there is sooo many variables that you need to create/adjust to make your game YOURS.

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when i find i donno how to do something, i go digging for things that operate similar.. then monkey with it until i get it how i want.. also i spend alot of time asking alot of basic questions here in the forums.. alot of time and patience and trial and error..

but i end up with a decent, if not amateur, game... or demo of a game, or whatever i am making at the time.. but it is MINE and original

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it looks like youve scratched the surface.. and are ready to dive in.. DIVE IN and make your game ;o)
 
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Antera

Guest
Yes an already made game would do it too, now that I know how to program and change things. I'm a web dev in real life and I know how to manage priorities and expectations : it will take me months or years just to get the physics of the game.

In the last 15 years I already started to make 2 games and had to give up when real life catched up (3 years on one, 6 months on the other one).

I'm good at level editing and twitching existing mechanics, but bad at engine creation, so an existing engine or ready made game suits more my situation, that's why I ask if there is an engine / script / extension / game foundations that I could use.

For example RPG Maker has built-in mechanics features that enable us to focus on creating levels, enemies, weapons, skills, and I'm sure there is the same kind of extension of GMS2.

It's like using Bootstrap or WordPress for a web project instead of coding everything from scratch for years requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars
 
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A

Antera

Guest
I think the main problem is that the awesome tutorials that we can find here and there do not work together. It's good to do 50 hours of them to begin, but after this, something more organized is needed.

So it can be a already made game with all mechanisms working together
Or an engine with consistent mechanisms
Or a full course that go further than the Yoyo Arena Game tutorial

I can pay for it, looking at courses on Udemy and others right now

Sad that most people do platformers games or pixel design
 
A

Antera

Guest
all im saying is that there are a bunch of different ways to handle a bunch of different things... its all according to what you want to make

there are lots of resources here...
https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/

hope this can help ;o)
Yes the question is : is there an engine on this marketplace or on another one, that is famous, well made, and used by a lot of game creators ?
Because I obviously browsed the marketplace and dozens of other websites for hours before asking.

It's like for javascript for websites, the answer to my questions would be : jQuery. Not a marketplace with 400 javascript libraries
For e-commerce the answer to my question would be : woocommerce, shopify, magento. Not a list of 1200 commerce software
 

woods

Member
i think the main purpose of these awesome tutorials is to show us the basic concepts... its up to us to expand them and adjust to our needs... and i agree totally that most of them dont flow together.. but i guess thats what we get when we mix and match 20-30 different people showing how to do a thing...


btw
what kinda of a 2d hack and slash shooter are you looking to create? i mean thats a pretty broad topic ;o)
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
think the main problem is that the awesome tutorials that we can find here and there do not work together.
If they where good tutorials, they would teach skills and concepts that can be applied to any code base.
If the tutorial just teaches you how to copy down their code because that's how you make a feature.. then it's not a great tutorial.
 
A

Antera

Guest
what kinda of a 2d hack and slash shooter are you looking to create? i mean thats a pretty broad topic ;o)
Yes :) Thanks for asking. This 2D top down shooter game that I work on is a mix between the Yoyo Arena Shooter tutorial, Archero :
and ideas that will put on top of that.

Solo game. Player has to clear rooms full of monsters. Player and enemies have HP.
Player shoot automatically when he doesnt move : only 1 control = move right left up down.
Player can shoot bullets. Enemies can shoot bullets, or do melee attack.
Player becomes gradually stronger : HP, damage, attack speed, different kind of attacks/bullets.
And enemies become gradually stronger, with various skills/attacks.
Almost no story and no dialogues.

I'm pretty far advanced with all of this, but now code begins to become a mess when I have more than 2-3 kind of ennemies and bullets, and I'd like to see how a proper organization of code and data can be done, so I can easily add levels with enemies and skills.
Collisions is a nightmare too, and now I spent nights on collisions, I would not refuse an engine, already made game, or full course about it.

This is what I made for now :)
 

woods

Member
looks pretty good so far... im definitely not knocking it ;o)

but as with anything that grows, it gets more advanced over time.. project organization if very key function.. ive found that tackling one thing at a time is very helpful in that it makes it not so overwhelming.. things like get one enemy working correctly before adding 3 more ;o)

one thing in your list above that i would have trouble with... player shoots automatically when not moving.
that in itself is very easy to pull of.. but my problem would be targeting ;o) i could muck thru it and finally come up with something with target_nearest... but it'd take me a while

And enemies become gradually stronger, theres a billion ways to make that happen.. its hard to balance game progression thats where more painstaking time sink comes into play..


i DO know one thing tho... there is a plethora of help here in these forums... i definitely make use of almost on a daily basis.
 
T

Timothy

Guest
Sounds like you might look into forming a dev team. Take in a programmer while you handle game design.
 
Honestly OP, we all struggled to begin with, you have a step up on at least half of the people trying to learn to program seeing as you have web dev experience. To put it bluntly, very few people go to the hassle of making a functional and expandable engine for a specific game genre that caters to newbies because GMS itself is already an engine for any game type, why reinvent the wheel? You CAN find some engines on the Marketplace, so spend a few hours having a look through it and you might find something that suits you, but the better option is actually buckling down and learning to program games. Depending on how extensive the web dev experience you're talking about is, it shouldn't be too hard to learn the syntax and the "flow" of turning game design into game actuality is something you will -have- to learn regardless of whether you use an engine or not. There's definitely an art to it that only comes from practice and time. If it were easy to pick up a premade asset and use it to create a full game with you only having to come up with a few ideas, there'd be -way- less questions on this sub.
 
A

Antera

Guest
Honestly OP, we all struggled to begin with, you have a step up on at least half of the people trying to learn to program seeing as you have web dev experience. To put it bluntly, very few people go to the hassle of making a functional and expandable engine for a specific game genre that caters to newbies because GMS itself is already an engine for any game type, why reinvent the wheel? You CAN find some engines on the Marketplace, so spend a few hours having a look through it and you might find something that suits you, but the better option is actually buckling down and learning to program games. Depending on how extensive the web dev experience you're talking about is, it shouldn't be too hard to learn the syntax and the "flow" of turning game design into game actuality is something you will -have- to learn regardless of whether you use an engine or not. There's definitely an art to it that only comes from practice and time. If it were easy to pick up a premade asset and use it to create a full game with you only having to come up with a few ideas, there'd be -way- less questions on this sub.
This would be perfect for example if it wasnt a platformer :
https://store.steampowered.com/app/792710/Levelhead/

Thanks for all your input, according to your answers I see that there is not really famous game engine or scripts in GMS2 that people use as foundations of their game
I'll continue the slow way then :)
 
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Obj_Neil

Guest
It sounds like you are looking for Contra maker or something similar to Mario Maker but for a shooter. Not sure if twin stick, vertical, or horizontal shooter, though. That isn't game design. That is level creation. You could always work with a programmer. He can make the engine and level editor, and you can build levels and test them.
 
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