shaunjs

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Week 5 - Reviews & Polls

Sorry for skipping out on last week's update. I really didn't have a whole lot to say which is an issue I ran into a few times last year. It's a problem you often have with *weekly* updates when not much has changed in a given week so I decided to just put the time straight back into the work.I thought for a while about doing monthly updates instead, but I think I still prefer these granular updates. I think I'll just try and worry less about not doing them when there's nothing much to say!Last week we put out a video review...

Tweenline 2 Review Sneakpeak

Here's a quick look at the script from an upcoming video regarding Tweenline and whether or not it IS GOOD™!The developer offered me a key (no payment, etc) and I decided to take a look, just as with PixelFX Designer.Spoilers: It's good! Bit script heavy, bit unnecessary for some, but good!

Week 3 - Subtitle goal?

The Maths FloooorSo last week I released part 2 of the isometric tutorial, including a fun section on basic algebra and how we were able to derive a screen to tile formula from our tile to screen formula. Did you enjoy this? Was it worth covering? Let me know.Video SubtitlesSubtitling videos takes forever. While I write a 'script' when making a tutorial, it is not a transcript. It is usually just a sequence of actions, reminders and code snippets.So having to go through a video transcribing it and timing it is... a lot of work. When you...

Isometric Tutorial Part 2

Working out how to go from a screen position back to a grid position by doing some fun algebra on the floor!Source code (free to $5 patrons) https://shaunjs.itch.io/shauns-isometric

Streaming soon!

Hello! Just to let those of you interested know I'll be streaming soon. I wanted to do a day stream but I've had issues rendering this video so we're going evening!Submit a game to be played here: https://goo.gl/forms/3ATLE1ZYtELcpMBA2 and then bring it up in the chat during the stream!Will probably only do a handful today.-S

Week 2 - Secrets

Hello!Secrets secrets secretsThis post comes quite late in the british, GMT evening. I've been very busy as of the end of last week discussing and planning something incredibly secret but very exciting that also might just not happen at all.So this isn't so much announcing an announcement, but announcing the possibility of a future announcement about Something.So I'd say look forward to that, but maybe don't. I'm not sure what emotion I'm asking you to feel. But either way I'm excited.PokeyPoke and the weirdest bug t...

Week 1 - 2019

Happy new year everybody!2018 was quite a wild ride. We more than doubled my Patreon income, I published roughly just over 60 videos, published a ton of source code on itch.io, took part in two Ludum Dare's and a GM48 jam, worked on some fun collaborations and my latest project PokeyPoke, all while staying alive and keeping a roof semi-firmly over my head. Given how brutal of a year this was for so many people - and let's face it, the world at large in many respects - I'd say I rolled good numbers.Thank you all so much for 2018. For...

Week 50 - The big Five O.

The isometric video ran into some issues last week and I've decided to redo big swathes of it. Even though I'm known for thorough explanations I went in way too deep with explaining things about isometric games and isometric perspectives that while interesting for developers, would not at all be the reason someone was looking for this video. It's a tutorial first and foremost. So I've redone the script for this first part almost entirely cutting out a lot of totally unnecessary fat.It's not all a waste though, I'm hangin...

[Progress] Splitting up this topic.

I've decided to split up the isometric video into a couple of parts. There's two key elements in getting a game like this to work.One is rendering the world, more specifically it's translating from an x/y position on a grid, to an isometric x/y position in the room.That's part 1. It's fairly straightforward and establishes how we're looking after the data and shows a neat way of using the room editor to create isometric maps.The second is being able to take an arbitrary position in the room, and determine which tile of t...

Week 49 - Closing in!

What was and what will beAs the year starts to near a close, I realise first of all that week 52 by my count is only one day long. I think the more standardized approach would put us currently on week 50, but whatever. As with GM naming conventions, the key is to remain consistent!The tutorial around isometric games is still in the works, and is likely the last proper video tutorial of the year. So I'm trying to make it a good one!I've also been trying to work out what to do with livestreams. Someone recently pointed out that I've b...

Week 48 - Combo breaker

The topic of "Isometic Games" won the topic poll by a single vote! So that's what we'll be covering next.The video is going to be based on what made FIREBALL work. What isometric means, what it means for your game and how to convert coordinates properly.This last weekend was actually Ludum Dare 43 and I sadly missed it. Ending a 13 long streak of Ludum Dare's in a row. I'd made all kinds of plans without realising and it just wasn't worth backing out of all of them to make yet another jam game. I might still do a liv...

GameMaker Devlog: Water Shader & Physics

Hey look it's another experimental new type of video!I mentioned something short this week, still ended up 20 minutes but hey that's me. Decided to do a quick-ish run over of how I implemented water in PokeyPoke. It doesn't go into extreme detail like a tutorial would. This kind of video:1. Allows me to cover cool things I've done or can do where my methods and expertise isn't really "tutorial ready".2. Allows me to cover complex things for a more intermediate and advanced audience who don't need line by line exp...

Patron Topic Poll (also add your suggestions!)

Here are some topics! These are things I'm able and prepared to cover next week. But I'm also after suggestions for future topics directly from you guys. I get waves of suggestions from the internet at large and youtube comments but I always want to know what you lot want to see more of.Comment below with topics you're interested in, big or small. But if big, be specific! What do you think people will get out of it? Does it involve concepts that aren't currently covered well? Etc.-S

Week 47 - What next?

What happened last week: I publicly released part 2 of the Melee tutorial I finished & privately released the Ghost Recording tutorial for $5+ supporters (And also worked with @Cyangmou to involve some cool sprites in that video!) I did some work on PokeyPoke, currently aiming to complete the opening scenes of the game.What did not happen last week: I didn't run a poll for a new video topic.Whoops. So that'll be coming today alongside this update. While the $5+ Patron Council deliberate on a topic, I'm going to work on something sma...

[Early Access] Ghost Recording! (& some cool sprites!)

Source CodeHere's the video tutorial on Ghosts! This episode I worked together with Cyangmou to bring you a cool offer on his character sprite template. A few of the sprites are featured in the video and freely available in the source code, and the complete pack is 55% off for 10 days from now!It takes a lot of work and expertise to set up a flesh out template like this. It's a great resource for artists and developers alike and I highly recommend grabbing it.In addition though, Cyangmou has made the sprites in the video and some cool o...

Week 46 - PokeyGhosts

It's #ThankYouPatrons day! Apparently! It's a thing Patreon made up as another excuse if for some reason we needed one to once again thank you all for your support in making what creators do possible. Patreon as a company might have made some questionable missteps in the past but I still believe wholeheartedly in the idea behind this platform and the existence of this model for creators is so important not just for my entire career and livelihood but also that of so many others who give endlessly to a culture and economy that is otherwi...

Week 45 - Swords & Ghosts

Both parts of the highly-requested-and-subsequently-voted-for Melee tutorial are now live for $5 Patrons. Part 1 will be publicly released on YouTube this Friday (at around 7:30pm GMT) and Part 2 on the following Friday.Next up, as you might be able to tell from the poll above, I'm going to be working on a video about recording a player ghost as seen in my game PokeyPoke.Using some JSON magic we can manually record a player's position, animation, etc and play it back in our game however we like. The footprint for this method is surprisi...

[Early Access] Melee Attacks Part 2

Annnd here's part 2! Much shorter than part 1 as it only takes a bit of code re-arrangement to extend the functionality of this state machine to allow for as many different combo chains and attack type as you can imagine.Live to the world not this coming Friday, but next Friday.In all this excitement I haven't actually done a proper weekly update this week, I'll get to that tomorrow where we'll talk about what's coming next!-S

[Early(ish) Access] Melee Attacks (part 1 of 2)

Source code here.Although this is part 1, this video is in itself a standalone, detailed tutorial on setting up a melee attack in the most accessible, flexible and scaling way I could come up with.Huge thanks to members of the GameMaker subreddit discord who helped a lot with various elements of this tutorial.Live to the public on Friday!

[Progress] Done! ..mostly!

The video is fully edited and the first full size render is finished. Sadly the re-encoding, upload and source code will have to wait until Monday. It came out longer than I expected so I spent a lot of time trimming fat where I could. While I recognize my thorough style as important and unique I'm trying to be more aggressive about cutting unnecessary or repeated explanations.I've had a lot of audio issues with this one too due to some bad mic management on my part and had to re-record a few sections during editing. Leading to a bit of...

[Progress] Melee Tutorial

Still planning this as a two parter but as you can see above, we've got everything we need! Attacks, hitting multiple enemies and chain combos. I didn't have it together as fast as I liked but as a feature that revolves so much around animations I felt that I needed some decent artwork to go with this one. I think these goofy skeletons came out pretty well!The code is all ready to go. I've just got write my tutorial script, record it, edit it, render it, thumbnail it, upload it and make an itch page for the source code......all befo...

Week 44 - Melee, Ghosts & Existential Terror

Turns out we've been a week behind! I did TWO, week 32 updates and nobody noticed! Gosh what am I paying you guys fo- oh... wait.The Melee Video is coming along well! I expect 'Part 1' to be done this week. In the meantime I'm also handling a few requests from $20 patrons but nothing that should get massively in the way. Following that as you know, will be a video on player GhooOooOosts.I've also been talking to a few more people interested in tool reviews after seeing my PixelFXDesigner video. I'm being cautious with th...

[Progress] Melee Combat Tutorial 1/2

So I've done my research (which largely these days involves some consultation and idea bouncing with other strong developers in r/GameMaker's discord) and finally decided on my approach for this video. It's been a toughy as there's lots of different approaches, but I don't want to be coming back and doing this video again in a year so I wanted the most comprehensive thing I could come up with.I'm going to use a platformer just so that this is based around code most of you will recognize, and I'm going to split the vi...

Making Games is for Everyone

50 GameMaker games by you!I think for all the work it took, this was really worthwhile. I ended up deciding to just include anything and everything, only cutting off at 50 cos I had to stop somewhere or the video would just be way too long.Thank you everyone who submitted something!

Week 42 - Fresh, Delicious Content™

I think I've said enough about how long this thing took to put together, you get the picture. I included ~50 games in the showcase which is rendering as we speak. I'm going to put this one straight out to you & the public to satisfy my internal need to end the 3 week video drought.3 Weeks. An eternity in YouTube time. In real time, actually not as long as it felt.Thanks for all of your game submissions! I think I've got a really cool video out of it that shows off a huge variety of simple and not-so-simple projects that paints a bro...

[Progress] A whole lotta games

So I did a bit of a bonus stream the other day to get some moooore game footage and since then I've been assembling it! I don't even know the total number of games I recorded at this point. I'm somewhat hopeful to have this thing squared away on Friday!I'm hoping to get 90% of games that were submitted into the video. Not every game worked, had a working link and some were very very early in development which I was happy to play on stream and happy just to play and see in general (I have played every single game I was able to!) ...

Week 41 - The gears still grind even when nobody is there to hear them.

Last week I got through most of the games left to be played, and also got round to doing some work on PokeyPoke which now finally has a start-to-finish Plan for getting shipped. For $20+ supporters I'm hoping to start releasing semi-regular builds and other behind-the-scenes stuff about this game in the near future. I took Thursday & Friday off to spend some time with my partner. (who had the whole week off, her job is, well... suffice to say a fair sight more stressful than my own!)This showcase has taken waaay too long and is a classic mi...

Week 40 - GamesGamesGames

So uh, it turns out it takes quite a while to play hundreds of user submitted video games that have arrived in various different formats across itch, steam, google drive, dropbox, mediafire, gamejolt via executeable, installer and raw project files from 1.x or 2.x.Who would have thought? I'm going to handle the rest of these offline, not over livestream. As otherwise it's just not going fast enough to get through them all.I've said in a couple of places but to re-affirm, in future I think the best way include user projects would be ...

Week 39 - I'm struggling to reach the keyboard because the cat is sat on me awkwardly.

The video review of PixelFX Designer released last week, it's fun to do editing for a short, high quality video again as opposed to the long, continuous shot walkthroughs I do a lot of.This week I'm planning to do a whole bunch of livestreams, getting through the games you all submitted recently. The first livestream didn't get through very many for how long it was, and there's a lot to get through. So I think I'm going to time limit each entry in our next run.A reminder that the livestreams are not the end product here, I w...

Pixel FX Designer Review

Enjoy! I feel like this video is a good way to re-kick off the series that never was. A long time ago I made a video about AutoTileGen, which was to be the start of a new series covering development tools. I never made another video like it until this one!Hopefully, this time marks the start of something I can do more of, more often!Check out the tool for yourself here: https://codemanu.itch.io/particle-fx-designer