Developer Diary 34 - Coding Hell (Patreon)

Sorry about the lack of a dev diary last week, I’ve been sick for a while and it kept getting worse and worse.

Last time I talked with you about an event system I wanted to put in place. After spending a lot of time thinking about how to approach this, I realized how difficult this truly is to make. It became pretty obvious this is beyond what I can currently do. (Remember I never had any proper coding practice so often things are very new).

I also realized how badly I set up certain things in my game, and how I would seriously need to break a lot of stuff down in order to rebuild it correctly. Again. This is becoming quite a frustrating task. I am trying to get you a new build, but every week I find something that makes me need to completely redo parts of the code.

One major issues I’ve been struggling with is how GameMaker uses what it calls a ‘room’. This is the space where your objects live. You can think of it as a level. I only have 7 levels, or rooms, in my game. First, is the intro screen, which immediately is followed by the menu. Next you have the room where your character is positioned, and then we have the event room, and the store room. The event room is where events and scenes are played, and the store room is where NPC’s are that you can buy from/work for.

Finally there is the map and the switch room, which you briefly see at the end of each day/night cycle swap (not implemented in build 2). These rooms are levels, and objects can either be in them or be persistent, meaning they go from room to room as the player goes through them (for example, the mouse object). The problem with these rooms is that you cannot execute code from one room into the other. To give an example:

[execute code]

room_goto(room_example);

[execute more code]

The code executed after you go to a different room isn’t actually executed within that room, so triggering a cutscene is damn near impossible to do. It’s been an issue that I’ve been able to work around, but now it is becoming more and more of a problem. Being able to trigger a scene when you enter a new room is crucial for my story to work, and I currently have no idea how to solve it.

My only hint right now is to have a persistent object continually track the state of the game and to dictate exactly what should be shown and when, but I would have no concrete idea on how to build it. It would work as a sort of ‘director’, making sure the correct piece shows up in the correct place.

Sadly I am in coding hell right now. I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could make some new, actual content for the game, but sadly I need to tackle this beast first. For now, I have a very simple intro to the game, but it is not even close to what I really want to achieve with the event system.

Thank you for your continued support, and hopefully next week I have better news!

Albatross