S.T.E.A.L.T.H.: Space Consumption

Well, finally something about S.T.E.A.L.T.H.! I have been making some pretty cool (and challenging) new levels recently, and I figured that I should talk about space consumption.

Now, having way too many objects in a room will definitely not have a huge effect in your Gamemaker games. But it's a very good practice to get used to if you plan on going into professional game development, where you will likely have immense and fully open three dimensional worlds for a player to explore, where every object in the world has a noticeable effect on the filesize. You've really gotta keep in mind that not everyone has a two-million gigabyte hard drive, and if you're wanting to get a ton of sales, you're going to want to make sure that your game is playable by people with lower system specifications than you
.


Now, in this screenshot from the editor for a room in S.T.E.A.L.T.H., you can see that there are some boxes not covered by black wall blocks. This is because the player can never reach that location, thus there is no need for any black wall blocks there. I was in a hurry when I put this screenshot together, so there are still some unnecesarry wall blocks in some areas.

Again, it probably won't make a difference in your Gamemaker games, but if you're making a map for a game like TRON 2.0, Portal, or Team Fortress 2, then that's where this needs to come into play. However, you've really gotta be careful when you try to determine what content in the level is inaccesable to the player. For example, if you're making a Half Life 2 single player mission, and you create an innacessable room that contains no purpose other than to hold 200 Poison Headcrab Zombies and 50 Acid Antlions, then it will do nothing other than give you a huge filesize and make the game lag on lower preformance machines.

In short: Bare Necesities.

New song from Deadly Disks

I know what you're all probably thinking, "Hey, didn't he just post about Deadly Disks?!? What happened to S.T.E.A.L.T.H.?!? IS STEALTH DEAD?!?". Well, no, S.T.E.A.L.T.H. is not dead by any means whatsoever, I am continuously working on it.

Wii owners of Guitar Hero World Tour who check the All Time Best chart everyday (i.e. ME) may have noticed that the song "Banjo Kazooie" has, in fact, been dethroned from it's number 1 position by "Poke-Battle", which I must admit is better than "Banjo Kazooie", as "Poke-Battle" is not that artist's first song, unlike "Banjo Kazooie", which was my first song. I have spent the last couple of hours working on a new song. It's another cover (don't worry, original awesomeness coming soon!), but it's a cover of the insanely awesome credits song from the incredibly exciting movie BLADE RUNNER. The credits song, originally composed by Vangelis, who is most well known for his song "Chariots of Fire", contained a ton of synthesizers and an orchestra, like most of Vangelis' work.

Wii owners of Guitar Hero World Tour who have their system connected to the internet can get the song by following these steps:

1) From the main menu, click Music Studio
2) From the Music Studio menu, click GHTunes
3) Click search and type in Blade Runner
4) If you can't find it by doing that, try clicking All Time Best instead, maybe it'll end up like the Banjo Kazooie song I did, hehe.

And yes, S.T.E.A.L.T.H. is still in development. : - D

UPDATE: Most very unfortunately, Activision removed my Banjo Kazooie song due to copyright violation. I was a bit upset at first, but I got over it. I also removed my Blade Runner theme to prevent another removal.

Timewaster Games presents Deadly Disks

First off, lemme explain that I love the new Guitar Hero game. In fact, I love it so much that I have begun to have dreams about it and it has actually delayed development for S.T.E.A.L.T.H.. In the game, there's a mode called Music Studio, where you make your own songs for play in-game. After making a song, you can upload it to a service called GHtunes for others to download (PS2 version excluded unfortunately).

If you have the Wii version of World Tour, you can enjoy custom songs from "Deadly Disks", the Guitar Hero World Tour portion of Timewaster Games. Our first song, a cover of the theme song from the popular Nintendo 64 game Banjo Kazooie, is number one on the Wii charts, so try it now!

S.T.E.A.L.T.H.: Making a Level

This is my first post in a series of walkthroughs I'm going to do for GameMaker n00bs, or n00bs to game design in general. Today, I'm going to show you how I make my levels in S.T.E.A.L.T.H., as well as give you a few level design pointers.



There are no objects in this room at the time. What you are looking at is the first room in S.T.E.A.L.T.H.. What you see in the room are tiles, which are actually background images. What I do first is I design the room using tiles. Then....



...I cover all of the boxes and level boundaries with my wall object. This object has visibility unchecked, so it's not visible. Essentially, these are invisible walls, but they are covering up the background tiles. Because they are invisible, you cannot see them, therefore, you only see the background tile, and not the ugly Stealth Engine wall block. This also makes the level creation process simpler, as I only have one wall object, as opposed to several wall objects that are exactly the same, except for a different sprite.



The final step is to add the enemy objects and the player object. What I do here, is I move the room I'm working on to the top of the rooms folder (so that it's the first in the list). That way, it'll load up first when running the game, thus making for some really easy playtesting, as opposed to playing through the entire game just to get to this one level. Placement of walls and enemy units is key here. Do it wrong, and you could have a level that is impossible, too easy, or just looks plain ugly. Playtest your level when you make it, and make sure there's no bugs and that it works perfectly. If it doesn't work right, or you find a way for the player to exploit the level (therefore getting through it easier), go back into the room editor and fix it. Then, run the game again to test it. You want to keep doing this until your level is perfect.

When I release S.T.E.A.L.T.H., I'm going to do four releases: "S.T.E.A.L.T.H.", "S.T.E.A.L.T.H. with .gmk", "S.T.E.A.L.T.H. with .gmk and Stealth Engine .gmk", and "Stealth Engine with .gmk". That way, players will be able to make their own levels. To ensure compatibility with GameMaker7 "Lite", the introductory sequence for S.T.E.A.L.T.H. will not be included in the .gmk. The purpose of these guides is to help improve your skills at level design if you decide to do custom levels for S.T.E.A.L.T.H..

Stealth Engine integrated into S.T.E.A.L.T.H.!

I have integrated the Stealth Engine into S.T.E.A.L.T.H.. The only work that has to be done now is just sprite creation and animation. After that it's all smooth sailing as the Stealth Engine will make level creation in S.T.E.A.L.T.H. incredibly easy. The Stealth Engine is integrated into a GameMaker project by choosing "Merge Game" while the desired game file is open, and then choosing the Stealth Engine. Essentially, this gives you a large collection of enemies to choose from as well as a player object. The materials provided allow for one to make a game with S.T.E.A.L.T.H.'s gameplay very simply.

Also, when I release S.T.E.A.L.T.H., I will simultaneously release the Stealth Engine .gmk file. Also, when I release the game, I will celebrate by starting the Timewaster Games Steam Group. Next time I post here, I'll provide some screenshots of the game so far, and provide a further in depth explanation on how I utilize Stealth Engine in the game while making it, for you GameMaker7 n00bs, hehe.

Stealth Engine Public Testing

I am no longer going to distribute the Stealth Engine over the internet. I'm going to do some public testing in my hometown, so if you're walking along the street and get pulled into a dark room to test a game engine.... lol

I'll post another update when I'm done doing testing.

Stealth Engine V1.0.0. complete; Looking for playtesters

Sweet, I've got a stable early version of the Stealth engine. I need some playtesters now. Here's the requirements:

-Must have GameMaker7 Pro (registered)*.
-Must know how to use GameMaker7.
-Cannot distribute to others.

Drop me a private message at one of these sites if you're interested:

http://www.tron-sector.com/ - TRON.dll
http://www.ldso.net/tronforum/ - TRON.dll
http://community.guitarhero.com/ - TronForever
http://www.youtube.com/ - LightcycleChampion

I'll need your email to send you the file. If you do give me your email, I will send a confirmation letter just to make sure that it is the correct address and/or to make sure I spelled it right.

*Note: I made the engine with a registered version of GameMaker 7. If you have an unregistered version of GM7, then there's no promises saying it'll work. You can try though.

UPDATE: One of my playtesters, "death_program", confirmed that the game engine does work with the unregistered version of GM7. "death_program" is my only playtester as of right now. I'd like to have at least 3 playtesters before I continue work on the game. If you would like to playtest, send me a message or contact me somehow.

S.T.E.A.L.T.H. is in development!

I got GameMaker fixed up on my new PC, and I've confirmed that my .gmk file for S.T.E.A.L.T.H. made the move okay, so I'm currently working on it. Here's a screenshot from the intro movie:




What you see here is a soviet truck pulling up to a secret communist factory in Antarctica during the Cold War. Our protaganist, Agent 487 of the "S.T.E.A.L.T.H." organization, is sneaking into the compound by riding on the bottom of the truck. You will have to make your way through all of the rooms of the facility to get to the reactor core in the heart of the facility, deep underground. You have to be extremely careful, though, as you only have ONE LIFE.

New computer, new blog, new game!

If you are reading this then you either (A) have waaaaaaay too much time on your hands, (B) found a link to this blog on some random website, or (C) personally know me because I've probably told you about this site! I am TRON.dll (also known as LightcycleChampion on Youtube and TronForever at the Guitar Hero community and YoYoGames), and I make games and release them under the name Timewaster Games, which, according to a Google search I made a few months ago, is not a name being used by anyone! I was working on a game called "STEALTH", but then my computer died. I backed up all of my important files and put them onto my new computer. If the files do not work correctly, I'm going to have to start a new project. However, if they do work, I'll be able to continue my work on "STEALTH" and make some posts about it.

When I finish my games, I put them on http://www.yoyogames.com so that people can easily play them using the "Instant Play" feature. Now, I can understand if some people have trouble getting the feature to work. When you go to a page for one of my games, you will *likely* get an ActiveX Control download request. It is only required to download the ActiveX Control if you want to use the "Play Now" feature. If you don't feel comfortable downloading the control, then you can click a button near the bottom of the screen that will allow you to directly download the game.

Whenever I need playtesters, post a game, or have some info to share about what I'm currently playing, I'll post here!