GameMaker: Collision with Background tiles

If you've ever checked out Shaun Spalding's GameMaker tutorial series, you'll see that he has a quick and easy way of resolving collision between the player and the wall objects. This is what I've been using for my current GameMaker projects, but a problem soon become apparent when I wanted to fill in the background with tiles.

The above features a room, with the player character terrain composed entirely of several objects, each one a black square of dimension 16x16(pixels).

This (the above) however, is what I want people to see in the game. This background is done up using a tilesheet with each tile of dimension 16x16(pixels).

Originally, I settled for a rather tedious method of first laying out the collision objects, after which I'll paint the tiles over them. The tedium soon got to me and I wonder if there is a way to automate part of this process.

This is what I eventually ended up with:

During creation of the room, I looped through all of the tiles in the room and created instances of the collision object in place of each tile. Note that the collision object (o_Wall) has been set to be invisible. The logic is about as simple as it gets. For a gml novice like myself, the bigger challenge is in reading through the documentation and finding out just what functionalities are provided.

In hindsight, it probably would have been a better idea to rewrite the collision to work with tiles instead. For now though, I'll stick to this method until performance becomes an issue.

Codename Ikaruman #5: New tiles!

Added new tiles! Used the background tiles feature in GameMaker. I wonder if I should invest some time implementing smart tiling.

Codename Ikaruman #4: Wall jump

Wall jump

Minor fixes to Spacejacked (v1.0.3)

Fixed Focus Laser Turret (before and after comparison)

Added Quick Start functionality

Codename Ikaruman #3

Improved landing animation!

Codename Ikaruman #2

Got variable jump height working. Should probably work on the landing animation more.

Codename: Ikaruman

Basic movement test. Gotta work in the variable jump height later.

Also, I came across a graphical bug that happened occasionally when I flip the object’s xscale to -1. Some odd texture UV issue where the entire texture is shifted one pixel to the right. I figure it was just an issue with floating point imprecision - the fact that the game is running in a small 320x180 resolution resized to 960x540 amplifies the bug.

Anyway the problem is fixed once I rounded off the x and y position of the object in the draw event before draw_self(). 

It's getting harder to be the optimistic one.

Yes, it sure is.

Codename: Combat Zelda

We took a 2-week break from working on content in Spacejacked and spent some time learning GameMaker by working on a Zelda-ripoff thingy pictured above.

So it's been a week

It's been a week since the launch of Spacejacked on Steam. It was a rather disastrous launch =___= (by that I mean, very few people know about the game). I'll go into detail a tad later.