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xot

Administrator

Registered: 2007-08-18

Posts: 1,239

WIP: Manic Diagnosis

I just posted an old work-in-progress on YoYo.

http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/7685 … -diagnosis

It's a Dr. Mario clone. I made it a few years ago and never finished or released it. I got stymied by the net code, and now that Mplay is officially extinct, even more stymied. I also wanted to add AI to it. I have some ideas about how to do it but I haven't tried them out yet. Two player support is more or less finished but it doesn't exist in this demo.

This code has a long history. Before making this Game Maker version, I made a Javascript version which you can find on my horribly out-of-date website. It was pretty tricky. That was 2001 or 2002 and Javascript and the DOM were a lot more primitive back then. Everything is built from tiles and images are switched in an out as needed to produce animation. It could probably be made much more simply today.

Yet, it existed even before that. The first version of this code was written in 1990 or 1991 on an Atari ST in GFA Basic 3. Dr. Mario was a new game at the time, and I didn't have an NES or GameBoy, so I rolled my own. I only got as far as the basic mechanics, but it worked well enough to satisfy me. I enjoyed making it more than playing it.

By the time I started the Game Maker version, I had no idea how the code worked anymore. The current version plays much more like real Dr. Mario. Emulation and the internet make research so much easier now. It also has features that were not practical in Javascript games when it's predecessor was written, such as sound and graphical effects. It still lacks music and menus and prompts. It also doesn't handle finished games/levels very gracefully.

Funny tidbit about the sound. You may recognize some of the effects from the Space Cadet pinball game that comes with many Windows installations. These were actually 100% scratch built. I started with a single-tone square wave and manipulated it with basic pitch shifting, envelopes, oscillations, echo, and reversing to get different effects. Time after time they sounded exactly like the pinball game effects. It turns out those effects are so simply produced that they are practically unavoidable. I've replaced some of them with effects I've created with the sfxr sound effects generator by DrPetter. I highly recommend it. A couple of the effects may have come from free libraries.

As much as I like Dr. Mario, I'm not very good at it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, just to make sure I stay within the rules, this uses draw_surface_center_ext() to draw the wobbling "next" capsule. I had a really hard time getting the two halves of the capsule to rotate, scale, and position themselves correctly. Placing the parts on a surface and manipulating that solved things easily. I wrote the script specifically for that problem.

Last edited by xot (2009-04-07 00:20:44)

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Abusing forum power since 1986.