So, I am trying to give you guys a weekly update from now on, as things ramp up a bit more, and we are getting more into the meat of the actual game instead of just coding systems.
I thought it might be nice to let people know what we get up to on a weekly basis, instead of just when I get around to make a post about a bigger feature, which is often months of silence – and that’s no good now is it.
So let’s get into it!
Adventures In GameMaker
This week I have been learning GameMaker – a 2D game engine.
And no no, we are not suddenly switching to a 2D game, we are sticking to Unreal for the actual game with all of its 3 dimenstions 😄.
(although it would make things so much simpler xD)
But What and Why?
The main reason for this detour from the main game was that my old machine at my boyfriends place can no longer run my game until I give it an optimsation pass, since it currently runs out of memory 🥲.
But my partner came to the rescue with the brilliant idea to plan the map layout (and maybe even some simple quests/dialogues) in 2D instead.
Not only does this allow me to carry on working on my 15year old PC but also quickly iterate on changes – since it is much quicker to move some tiles around than sculpting a whole landscape – and have a nicely condensed overview over the whole area.
But more on that further down, lets focus on GameMaker for now.
GameMaker is, as I said above, a 2D game engine that comes with a ton of bells and whistles, making it extremely easy to get a game up and running quickly.
You can either decide to script your game with their own scripting language – which is very reminiscent of Python – or set up your logic via visual script.
It is also extremely fast and light, which honestly was a nice change of pace from Unreal, which, as everyone who has used it before probably knows, can be very resource-intensive and has slow turnaround times, especially on older machines.
The extensive tutorial library also helps immensely to get up and running and start making your own game.
In my opinion, if you want to make a 2D game or you are just starting out your game dev journey, I can only whole-heartedly recommend GameMaker as your first port of call.
‘Little Town’ Tutorial
For my intended purpose, the ‘Little Town’ Adventure Game tutorial seemed to be the most fitting, so I got started with that.
I took about 3 days to work my way through the tutorial, and I really enjoyed it. This tutorial uses their own scripting language to set up the game logic, which I preferred.
Everything is explained in very understandable terms and introduced bit by bit, definitely easy enough for people with no background knowledge in scripting or game dev to follow along easily.
The only niggly bit was some of the instructions werea bit outdated for the version of engine I used, but with some googling it could be easily fixed.
One bug I had took a bit longer to figure out, for some reason audio clips in sequences were insanely loud – loud enough to sound corrupted when played – so I had to turn down their volume quite a bit.
It it worth mentioning that I did the tutorial based on their provided pdf instead the videos, since I prefer to second-screen things while game-deving. So things might be updated or addressed there.
By the of it you have a neat little game, with a simple game loop and win condition. Pretty Neat!
Planning my Game Map
Now to the reason why we did the GameMaker stuff in the first place – let’s plan out game map!
As some of you might recall, I originally had planned to just grab the landscape data from a place in Austria and use that.
However, after some loooong evenings and nights looking for the perfect place, I decided there are just too many facets of Austria I want to show off in my game, and sadly, they are not within reasonable running distance from each other.
So let’s use some game dev magic 🪄 and mix and match my favorite places together 🏔️, add some creativity 🎨and you (hopefully) get a fun but sensibly sized map for a game 🗺️.
So are you now going to spend ages making sprites now? Oh heck, no. I don’t need to learn yet another thing 😄 (well I would if I had the time, but alas…).
Thankfully, many talented artists provide demo or free tilesets on itch.io, and I recommend anyone looking for sprites to check it out. There is a ton of talent out there, just waiting to be discovered!
Since this post is getting quite long already, I won’t drag it out much more, but basically after quite a few hours of resource gathering and even more hours of planning, we got a map for our game. How exciting!
And while the map is all labelled for me, I’ll just show you a little non labelled sneak peek – gotta have to keep some secrets to myself 😉.
And honestly, doing this has paid off so much! The sheer amount of storyline and game mechanic ideas that brewed together in my head while laying out the map is insane.
My head was buzzing for days with ideas! (Which might have kept me from sleeping, but hey one suffers for their art I guess 😄😴).
In the end though, I have a much clearer idea of what exactly will be in the game: NPCs and their storylines, different areas, as well as game mechanics for the player. Time well spent!
All these buzzing ideas, of course, had to be written down. I am not the youngest cup in the closet anymore, and memory is a finite resource… Come to think of it, I guess I am becoming more and more like my old PC with each passing day 😂.
But this brings us to our last point.
Story Documentation
Since I am already using Jira from Atlassian for my project planning, it just made sense to use Confluence for any documentation needs.
I also used it in previous jobs so I am already familiar with it.
But I must say, this was another bit of software that surprised me positively this week (what an unusual experience!).
Since I had only used a self-hosted version of Confluence before, I hadn’t seen the more up-to-date version, and I am loving it!
It makes writing documentation so much easier and it even comes with a mobile app – sitting on the sofa, sipping coffee, and being productive writing up NPC storylines at the same time? A dream ☕✨!
So I spent a good chunk of this week also writing down:
Fact sheets, Concepts, and Story Lines for NPCs
Documenting all important places in the game and their player activities
A List of all Animals (wild and farm based)
I will keep this to myself for now 🤫. But I am excited to share more about this soon.
A List of all Seasonal Events
Again, something to be a bit shush about for now.
I cant let you know everything already, where would the fun be in that 😉.
But did you know that we have a turnip festival in Austria?! It includes a 30m long turnip sandwich and the crowning of a Turnip Princess.
Aaaaand that’s that for this week. Well done if you managed it all the way down here and thank you very much 👏.
For your efforts, have this cute bunny 🐇.
Hopefully see you for the next weekly update! Pfiat Eich! 👋
SneakySeahorseGames 
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