Zonerunners: Cool stuff

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated, I know, but I have too much free time (seriously) now and keep forgetting to update. In today’s post I’m going to give you a rundown of most of the major features and changes since last time.

Smaller Zones: “What? That’s not a feature! That sucks!” Well, there’s no simple way to say this, but GameMaker just can’t handle large Zones. Half of the main zone was completed (comprised of many small testing areas for certain features) before I found out that GM wasn’t going to agree with me. It felt really awesome starting a new level and using the ENTIRE engine on every area and not just scattered around. I had a lot of fun making the first “real” level, it starts just right after the plane crash at the start of the game. Although I need to spice up the crash site a bit, I think it’s pretty hardcore the way it is, but I feel there should be some kind of grassy area between the crash site and the first outpost you have to raid. Right now it’s like, “Crash, now KILL EVERYTHING.” without any pause, but that might be cool if I pull it off right. Maybe I should have a couple of guards come and check it out, starting off the first real battle. I also plan on giving the player several injuries so they get used to typing in codes FAST (I’ll explain this later).

Level Editor (OpenZone): I know you thought, “Hey, isn’t there already one?” Yeah, short story is that it’s stupid to think that a game and level editor will mesh perfectly the first time. I’m on my third rewrite of this thing and I’m thinking about making a level editor that can edit both Zonerunners and Glider Forever (my other game) levels in Python or something. It’ll be a challenge, but they can already read files and make a level out of them, so I just have to make a program that can make those files. Level scripting is pretty cool, basically every object has three events you can script (A “Create” event, for defining variables. “Step” to perform an action every second. “Draw” guess what this does?). I’m also trying to work out easier updating for the game, by storing the code that might change in these “script” files and just having the user download these changed files and replace them with the old.

A.I.: Once again, the A.I. is going to need a some revisions to be brought up to the first major version (1.0). These things include that ugly bug where they spot you though the wall above you and try to go through the wall/suicide. That’s about it, except for jumping when they see a gap in the floor.

More later.