Good Luck…

The new timeplan is so far a success- I’ve managed to cross a week off the list, and a little bit of next week too!

This week however has started off a little slow, but I’ve managed to get a lot done. This morning I played through the game from level one to level three for the first time to check that everything worked well in succession, and for the most part it did! One random little bug started to emerge towards the end of the playthrough however, as the framerate started dropping rapidly whenever I passed by a doorway to a building or cave. I managed to solve the problem by tweaking the “teleport” code slightly (I literally moved one line and removed a pair of curly brackets and everything was fine!) In the panic I read through this article on the Game Maker Community forums, which talks about optimizing game performance through various settings and commands, so the rest of the morning was spent tweaking little bits for best optimisation. One of the most vital lines of code I’ve added is this:

These few lines deactivate EVERYTHING that is outside the current view, and activates it when in sight. I had to activate the top corner of each room in the last line of code, as this is where all my control objects are kept including light functions, menu functions, sound functions, HUD functions… By reducing the amount of active instances, the game runs at a very steady 60 FPS constantly, occasionally dropping to about 58. Hopefully this means that even on lower spec machines the game will be very playable.

After this was over, I spent a little time tidying up little bits that I’ve previously started. I’ve replaced my old pink room transition object with an open door sprite, which is drawn onto the screen when the player reaches the right amount of flowers. The door only opens slightly, which is great if you’re nearby when you collect that final flower because it actually looks a bit like the door is opening.

I’ve fixed my save point Furin so that it looks like it is attached by a nail, not just floating next to a rock! I’ve made sure that all my save points are actually within reach of the player, which seems like an obvious task but this really is something I had previously overlooked.

As for the actual saving problems I was having, I’m not sure there’s such a big problem there after all. The problems may be related to the fact that the saves are made in the middle of making a lot of changes to the levels. I’ve also changed the save file to a .ini instead of a .sav, which for some reason saves more of the game information and is the only file extension which will reload sound effects. So until I’ve finished everything in the game, I’m not going to change the way the game saves or loads.

I’ve started to work on the final level of the game, firstly by changing the colours in the tileset and secondly by getting creative with my old tiles again. Up until now, my buildings have been very samey, so I’ve been experimenting with new ways that I can use my existing tiles (again!) I also managed to make a mini bridge from a section of my old bridge tiles.

There are now blossoms to collect in this level, so the HUD displays a total of all the flowers the player has collected throughout the game out of a possible 90. This was simply a case of adding the values of global.itemList1, global.itemList2 and global.itemList3.

Now that I know roughly what I’m going for with the design, I’ll do most of the rest on paper. This building will branch off into rooms, as opposed to having a large open outdoor space to explore. In one of the rooms there will be a door which only opens with an accumulative total of blossoms, so although the player may have made it this far they may still have to backtrack and do some more collecting! The end of the game is through this door, although I’m going to have to go back to the GDD and have a think because I don’t actually know how the game ends yet…

Save/Load Functions

The tricky part of implementing a save/load system is the painful process of working out what Game Maker will and won’t do using its default game_save(); and game_load(); functions.

Based on my original inventory menu, I’ve created two new menus in a similar style which represent the save menu, which is brought up by pressing the menu button at a save point, and a pause menu, which is brought up by pressing return/start and can be used to load up a saved game.

Save Menu

Pause Menu

To activate these menus, I’ve used a similar set of code to that used to activate the inventory menu. In the case of the save menu, when the player is in contact with a save point object and presses “S”, all objects are deactivated and a temporary overlay is created from a still image of the background. The object obj_save is then created, which draws the save menu onto the screen.

I’ve included the object obj_save in my list of instances that are created when the game is started. When initiated by the save point object, it changes the state global.save from 0 (false) to 1 (true), and draws the menu sprite onto the screen as well as the highlight sprite which changes position when the left and right keys are pressed. The options in the save menu are the same size and shape as the menu slots in the inventory menu, so I was able to use the same highlight sprite for this menu. Like the inventory menu, each “slot” (s) is given a value, in this case because there are only two options the values are 0 and 1. If s is 0 when the X button is pressed, the game is saved. If s is 1 when the X button is pressed, the game returns- pauseon and global.save are both reset to 0. Game Maker uses a simple one line of code to save games: game_save(“example.sav”);. However, there are many things that aren’t included in this save file. I already discovered a while ago that temporary datastructures, such as the item lists I use to hold information about collected blossoms, are not saved in save files. To save this information, I’ve had to save each list as a separate text file, so the save code has become quite extensive!

The game here is saved as a file called hanamisav.sav in a designated folder called “save”. I made this empty folder to test if this save function would work, and sure enough the files appeared in the folder straight away.

As a symbol of the game being saved, I’ve made a floppy disc icon which appears at the top of the screen whenever the player opts to save or the game is autosaved. The floppy disc seems to be the universal symbol for “save”, whether used as an icon in software such as Game Maker or as a save point in games such as Cave Story!

On my floppy disc icon, I’ve included the kanji I discovered before for “to save”. This is supposed to look like it written on the standard lined label that you used to get with blank floppies. Like the sushi icon which appears temporarily at the top of the screen, this icon remains for about three seconds before disappearing.

I’ve assigned the pause menu to the return key or start button on the SNES controller. Pressing either of these buttons will do exactly the save as all pause functions I’ve implemented so far, but will draw the pause menu sprite onto the screen. The options are actual strings of text which are drawn over the top of this sprite, according to the array I’ve set up in the object obj_pause.

This list of text acts differently to the slots I’ve used in my previous two menus, so I wasn’t able to use the same highlight sprite to hover over options in this case. Instead, I’ve used two different colours to show whether the text is highlighted or not. The lighter colour shows the option currently selected.

At the moment, both the “continue” and “main menu” options will simply resume the game, as I don’t have anything that acts as a main menu yet! I may later change this option to “quit”, and simply make it close the game. To load the game, I’ve had to make sure that all five files are loaded and properly restored. I’ve written out the code in the opposite way to the save code, so that each text file is loaded then applied to one of my global.itemLists. As for the rest of the game’s properties, I’ve so far relied on the default game_load(“save/hanamisav.sav”); function to restore everything else.

Loading the game shows some….interesting results. Each of the text files are actually restored properly, this was the part that I was mainly worried about! Everything in the GUI returns to exactly how you left it, including level progress, health and collected sushi. However, I’ve noticed a couple of things that the aren’t restored properly due to faults in the default Game Maker save file. The sounds aren’t loaded, possibly because the SuperSound.dll doesn’t exist in the “Save” folder, and weirdly enough the mushroom’s particle system isn’t restored. Another MAJOR issue is that 8 times out of 10, the game will crash after you’ve taken a few steps from the restore point. Of the remaining 2 times out of 10, 1 of those will produce an error message stating that a non-existing background cannot be deleted, which is probably due to a fault in my code for the temporary pause background. Because of these problems, I’m going to look at alternative ways of saving that don’t use the default save functions. I may also make slight tweaks to the menu interfaces, but not too much.