About
I started this project as I wanted to make a game which didn’t centre around a player character, but rather a map. I had made some other games with strategic elements but nothing like this. I used GameMaker Studio 2 again and continued to improve my scripting with GML.
The more I worked on this project, the more I began to treat it as a programming exercise. I learned a lot and greatly increased my confidence with scripting and GMS2. To implement the portal effect I had to do a lot of reading and experimenting with surfaces and surface blending, I’m still quite fuzzy on the whole subject but I got it to work in the end and I had a lot of fun coming up with buildings that interacted with the system in different ways.
I made a random name generator for the realms which although simple was a lot of fun. I also learned how to implement useful features such as drag and drop for the buildings, ‘9slice’ GUI boxes, DS_list data structures for storing stat tables, all of which I have since used in later projects.
As for the game itself, the main loop was fully implemented with portals spawning and the player placing structures to prevent them. After adding few other features such as a Redo Turn button and a debug fast forward, I was happy to finish with it.
Although the game wasn’t quite there, requiring a lot more complexity to make it really work, I’m still really glad that I did this project. I learned a lot more than I set out to and it was overall quite a nice change of pace.