Saturday, August 4, 2018

Dammit, I love GameMaker Studio

So, the other day, I was working on a "point-defense" system for the player missile rig. This is a feature where after some powerups, the player ship will automatically fire at incoming projectiles.

Projectiles only. It's not supposed to be an offensive weapon. The missile ship fires slow and wasting missiles to get bullets out of the way is kind of a waste. So, point defense.

Well, as of yet, I had not had to find out which objects of a certain type are near the player. Most of the combat logic is based purely on collisions which have object data built in. So, I did a quick search to see how you find nearby objects in GameMaker Studio.

instance_nearest()

Well, shit. That was easy. Five minutes later, my point defense system was done.

Well, done-ish. It still needs some balancing, but it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

This happens pretty much every time I wonder "how do I do this thing?".

Dammit, I love this engine.