Space Rocks
AceI’ve been wanting to learn GameMaker for awhile now as I’ve always had an interest in 2d game development. For my first project I decided to use one of GameMakers asset packs/tutorial pack, following loosely along the tutorial. For this I want to have a functioning game, with a death state, and menu state.
Tools used
Rocks
The main “enemy” in the game is large slow moving asteroids. When you break one it breaks into two smaller asteroids. When you start the game there will be 6 large rocks that randomly move around. The rocks bounce off of each other when they collide as well as switch speeds on collision as well. When rocks are destroyed they play a orange explosion vfx, and plays a dedicated explosion sfx. Rocks wrap around the screen with a padding of 100 pixels. The rocks when they are created are given a random speed, and direction.
Player
The player has “tank” style controls from a top-down perspective. The player fires a white bullet from the front towards the direction they are facing that moves a standard speed. Shooting has around a half second delay between firing to prevent players from spinning in a circle while shooting. When a player runs into a rock they player plays a large white explosion vfx. and plays its own special longer explosion sfx. The player wraps around the screen without any padding. The player is also represented by a large white triangle making it easy for the player to tell which way they are facing.
Main menu
The game’s main menu consists of 3 buttons, as well as a text label of the game’s name “Space Rocks”. The three buttons are: Play, Toggle Music, and Quit. Their functions are self explanatory.
Basic game-play loop
The games basic game-play loop consists of a player clicking play in the menu, shooting rocks until they eventually die, a screen displays telling them that they died, and displays their current score. I have plans in the future to add power-ups/collectables, as well as other potential types of rocks that can randomly sub in with other rock types in a update.
SFX/VFX
The game has minimal SFX and VFX however the following actions have either a SFX or VFX attached to it.
Player Dying - SFX/VFX
Player Shooting - SFX
Asteroid Destruction SFX/VFX
On top of the standard SFX the game also has a background song: Secret Agent Rock, John Batman. The background song can be toggled on or off in the menu.
Score system
The score system is per-round, meaning it is restarted each time you die or restart the game. Right now the score does not save online or offline. I have plans on making a offline leaderboard with name management in a future update. The current scoring is:
- Standard Asteroids:
Large: 100
Small: 50
Future plans
In the future I plan to update the game adding more asteroid types that would randomly sub in for destroyed asteroids and potentially have higher drop rates, and upgrades/collectables that randomly drop from asteroids. I also plan on adding a offline leaderboard allowing users on the same computer to compare their scores.
Further links
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