#GameMaker

[stepf0rd]

Hello, Tumblr!!! 🐈

My name is Stepford! I’m a Melbourne-based, genderfluid, furry game developer and I am currently working on a breakcore bullet hell, garlic-like inspired by games like Vampire Survivors, Touhou and Yume Nikki; expected to release early next year! Check it out on STEAM and give it a wishlist if it peaks your interest!  💋 💋 💋

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2088840/Picayune_Dreams/…

[enhousestudios]

GLITCHED is an RPG where strange glitches appear across the world. When Gus is attacked by one, he becomes aware that you- the player- exist. You'll form a friendship and attempt to patch the world back, together!

6+ years of dev time, comin' this year!

[vikintor]

Hello!

I'm Vikintor, a Brazilian video game developer mostly know for my 2D and 3D surreal-occult-religiously psychosexual horror themed games. I'm going to link some of my creations here:

cw:bodyhorror

TEOCIDA

Teocida is an esoteric experience focused on puzzles and riddles. Explore the enigmatic passageways of a twisted microcosm filled with symbolic faith landscapes and erotic nightmares.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1569470

Itchio: https://vikintor.itch.io/teocida

TAMASHII

A mysterious entity is summoned to a twisted temple to discover the source of evil that emanates from within. Inspired by obscure Japanese games from the 90s and late 80s.

steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1026400/TAMASHII/…

Switch: https://nintendo.com/store/products/tamashii-switch/…

PS4/5: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP2187-CUSA16338_00-TMSPS4SIEADIGI00

ESTIGMA

Glitched mix between Q-Bert and Pacman with surrealist horror aesthetics! Secrets included 👀!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1495640/Estigma_Steam_Edition/

Itchio: https://vikintor.itch.io/estigmaextended

Physical: Available in Super Rare Mixtape vol.3:

ANOMALICE

AnoMalice is a 3D surreal First-person puzzle game and shooter hybrid inspired by Teocida.

Itchio: https://vikintor.itch.io/anomalice-episode-1

Phisycal : https://superraregames.com/products/srg-mixtape-volume-4

GITHMAP (fangame)

A Dungeons&Dragons fangame made in the Doom Engine and using Baldur's Gate3 sprites.

Only one map available, you don't need to own Doom to play it. Setting inspired by The Lich-Queen's Beloved (An adventure for Githyanki heroes)

[schottidev]

First post!

Hi tumblr! My name is Schotti and Santria is my light-hearted, modern-setting RPG with a strong emphasis on exploration and character interactions, featuring a tactical battle system! It also contains psychic powers, UFOs and stuff like that! No yetis tho. I will share here more elaborate posts too long for twitter, stuff from artists I like and/or 90s fantasy/mecha anime stuff.

P.S. actually, yetis might be involved.

[cyanroxanne]

Putting those new Gamemaker audio effects to work

[vertebrae-entertainment]

1.25.23 - ‘Anchor’

Hi y’all! Its been a while since we did a proper blog update, so i figured it was time i talk about the thing people usually talk about when i bring up the main character of our fishing game: “whoah, he’s a big dude huh?”

Designing a tough guy

When me and Åge first discussed this project, I told them two things would make me automatically passionate about it. The first was that the main character should be a hot dude, and the second was that he should be transgender. Now, at a glance it doesn't seem that complicated (and it really isn’t). I like hot dudes, I like to draw bulk, and I am a trans man myself. Seeing as we are a two-person team, there’s no CEO to tell me what I can and cannot do, so naturally this was how the basic concept ended up.

Following from there I started designing. I took some amphibious inspiration, building him sort of like a frog- top heavy and with long legs, lending itself well to animating acrobatics. I wanted to make him tall and menacing, with a shadow covering his face to make him seem mysterious. At the same time I couldn't forget his fishing lifestyle. In the end he ended up somewhere between Batman and Popeye, with a sprinkle of elegance for good measure. It turned out to lend itself really well to build him like he was hunting monsters for a living, as that was what the game was turning into.

After settling on a color scheme of black, white and red, and taking inspiration from the simplistic designs of the UPA-revival movement for ease of animation, I figured he needed a tattoo- both to top off the design and hint at his marine connection. The anchor seemed obvious! A symmetrical object right on the middle, plenty of body hair, and our main man was ready for the screen!

The tough guy through a queer lens

I have a huge soft spot for towering tough guys, it's no secret. From Conan to the T-800, this hyper masculine archetype may seem dated and boring to others, but personally I cannot get enough of it. What kind of pressure does it take to make a man two steps from a monster? In an odd sort of way, I suppose I find it relatable. Furthermore, I always find masculinity as a topic lends itself really well to a transgender lens- it's like free nuance! It is one thing to be born into this cruel, limiting role.. But what does it tell of a character, their story, when it is a choice?

Some people express confusion learning that this fisherman is transgender, which drives the question: should you be able to tell? Frankly, I think there should be a hell of a lot more trans men in media before we tackle this question. Assuming someone can’t be genetically tall and bulky due to the gender assigned at birth is an awfully dated idea to begin with, in my humble opinion.

I am out here making what I  would like to see a trans man in a videogame do, which is be huge, wrestle monsters and kiss cute guys. A topic me and Åge started tackling back in the Liquid State days was the concept of a trans power fantasy- which is exactly what it reads on the tin. While there are few men (trans and not) who fit into the shapely mold of a hyper masculine, sword-swinging barbarian god, many admire these characters and live out their fantasies through them.

Besides, you can tell! We specifically make excuses to show off his shark-teeth patterned top surgery scars because we want people to know. Hey, are you a trans guy that likes bulky dudes? This one’s for you!

In conclusion

While my inspirations are deceptively simple and reasons are uncomplicated, I often catch myself thinking about this design. Is it realistic? Is it alienating? Is it empowering? Is it wise? Even if he was designed straight from a trans man’s gut with no worries about the greater question of good representation, I often find myself thinking as though the task of representing all trans men lies solely on my shoulders. It is an unrealistic, unfair expectation. I am not all trans men, neither is he. 

His design and background is a love letter to one of my favorite types of characters, no doubt mixed in with years of queer, man-loving brain soup. He is what I like, and what I want to see in a video game. At the end of the day, I can only hope that what I enjoy also appeals to others.

So far, all signs point to yes. :)

This is our fanart wall, right by my desk at our office. I put them right where i can see them every day. Thanks for the support, folks- it means the world to me.

-Hauk Want to know more? Follow us here or on Twitter for regular updates on this project- or click here to join our discord!

[entropy-game-dev]

About a week ago, I realised that I still didn’t have icons for each of the various robot cores that you can gather throughout the demo, so I decided to do up a bunch and gosh, they are SO CUTE! Much more so than the awful soulless killing monstrosities that are the full-size sprites that you’ll be encountering within the dungeons. I think they’re readable enough, and should serve to show you who you have at a glance.

By the way? this is absolutely not the long post I promised you guys (that is still coming); instead this is just a quick one to say that I’m still here! I took the month off work specifically to get the demo ready for internal testing by the end of the year, and I’ve been working feverishly with very little time for social media posts :(

Please expect some exciting news early in the new year, whether it be gameplay footage of the demo, more posts about the game, or possibly a free public demo and steam page!

[myamano4]

O1D_L0V3_L3TT34.fla (Cataptation)

I had the idea, browsing through Wiby, and talking to my friends.

I want to make a love letter to the old internet, from 2000 to 2014 or so through Cataptation. So here's a little concept I've drawn up (heavily inspired by warriors kitty's warriors kitty design, from @warriorskitty at https://www.tumblr.com/warriorskitty) because I miss it, too much.

ITS A CONCEPT, PLEASE ITS SO UNFINISHED.

[milonogiannis]

project BIRDCAGE

Music by Barry “Epoch” Topping ( https://twitter.com/nostoppingepoch )

Something we’re working on alongside ECO BREAKER. I’ll make a blog post about it soon.

[thewakingcloak]

How to use GameMaker's filters for lighting!

Got a new lighting system for ProtoDungeon 3. Take a look!

I had a similar effect in 1 and 2:

The difference? Now I'm using GameMaker's new filter system, and it seems to make things run much more performantly. I wanted to share with you how it was done!

First, a little on how the effect works:

Behold a daytime scene from ProtoDungeon 3!

For a cool nighttime effect, instead of just making things darker, let's employ a Hollywood trick and shift everything blue:

Okay and now the fun part: lighting! For that we just don't do the blueshift in a particular area (if you've tried this before, you know it's easier said than done)

Here's how it's done!

Part 1 - The Filter

ProtoDungeon and The Waking Cloak already use palette shifting to represent nighttime thanks to Pixelated Pope's excellent palette swap shader, (which I still highly recommend for individual layers or sprites!), but there are some limitations when trying to apply a palette swap effect to the entire game, and I kept bumping up against those limitations.

Cue GameMaker's new filter layers! Filter layers are basically just built-in shaders that apply to everything below them.

There's a lot of kinds of filters. Here's an example of a Contrast/Brightness filter (which I will eventually be using to replace my existing janky shader):

So how did I get Night_Filter working? What I've got above isn't an out-of-the-box filter

I tried a few methods here. Color Balance, Color Filtering, and Colorize all do neat things and are more than capable of making a nice "blueshift" (and I may still use them for tweaks later). However, I wanted to stick strictly to my palette, meaning when I blueshift the daytime colors to nighttime colors, all those nighttime colors are also in my palette. Very recently, the LUT Color Grading filter was added to GameMaker, and this provided a perfect opportunity.

Okay, so what is LUT Color Grading? LUT stands for "lookup table." You have an image, the LUT Texture, that contains a HECKTON of colors--in this case our table is 512x512 pixels = 262,144 colors. Each color maps via its RGB values to a specific location on the table.

There are a lot more than 262,144 colors (RGB supports 16.7 million), but the filter's shader handles the "in between" colors too. It looks up the color's position on the table and changes it to whatever color is actually there. If we used the table above, it wouldn't actually do anything, because when it looks up the position of each color, it finds... that color. What we need for a palette swap is something more like this:

This is what I made by taking the original LUT image (which I found in a secret GameMaker folder), opening it up in Aseprite, selecting the colors I wanted to change, and then doing a color replace at about 30% tolerance:

And then did that for all the colors!

You could use any image editor if you wanted to do a simple palette swap this way. (Also, technically, it doesn't have to be at 30%. It can be much lower, but I found it could be a little finicky for some colors.)

Once you're done, you add it as a sprite in GameMaker, then select that sprite in the LUT Colour Grading filter, and voila.

Part 2 - The Lighting

Okay, so that works! Now for the lighting! Remember above where I mentioned not doing the blueshift in a particular area?

Well, the issue is... you can't punch holes in layers for the lighting (I tried). I also tried a similar method to what I had before: each light is an almost-invisible, translucent circle that alters the colors just enough to not trigger the palette swap. Unfortunately, with the color lookup table, this was finicky and unreliable.

The answer? Don't do any of that. Use surfaces instead! (It's always surfaces, somehow)

So the basic idea: copy the lighted (unfiltered) areas below the LUT Color Grading filter layer to a surface before the filter is applied, then paste that surface after the filter is applied.

I know that sounds wild but bear with me.

We'll need a few things for this.

2A - Light Objects

Mine are a fair bit more complicated since I have a state machine and all kinds of activation/deactivation code. The main thing we'll be using for this is pretty simple though: keeping track of a radius and having a position (with x, y position being built in, of course).

I called it obj_light. If you wanted, you could just have the Create event do "radius = 16;" (or whatever number) and just put one of them wherever you want light to show up.

For an extra flicker effect, I use random_range every five frames between radius - 0.5 and radius + 0.5, but I'll let y'all figure that out.

2B - Light Manager

Next, we'll create an object to kinda just set stuff up. We'll call it obj_light_manager. I made it visible and persistent. In its Create event, we'll create two surfaces, one for lighting and one for masking (I'll explain that in a bit). Initially, I just made them both the same size as my base resolution (320w, 180h).

global.lightingSurface = surface_create(320, 180); global.maskLightingSurface = surface_create(320, 180);

Then we'll add a few cleanup events (always clean up your surfaces so you don't have memory leaks). I put this in both Room End and Game End events:

if (surface_exists(global.lightingSurface)) surface_free(global.lightingSurface);

if (surface_exists(global.maskLightingSurface)) surface_free(global.maskLightingSurface);

Now for the magic part: in the Room Start event, we'll hook into the layer's events with layer_script_begin and layer_script_end.

var _nightFilterLayerID = layer_get_id("Night_Filter"); layer_script_begin(_nightFilterLayerID, lights_surface_create); layer_script_end(_nightFilterLayerID, lights_surface_draw);

2C - Layer begin/end scripts

Alright let's make those scripts now, lights_surface_create and lights_surface_draw. I'll drop these in pastebins with some comments since they're a bit lengthy and tumblr's code formatting is nonexistant:

lights_surface_create

lights_surface_draw

The explanation for how they work is all in there. Basically, we'll copy the light areas (not filtered yet) to a surface before the night filter takes effect in lights_surface_create, and then in lights_surface_draw we'll paste them on top of the night filter, and voila, lights!

Note: since I'm using subpixels, this method produced non-subpixel lights, which was pretty jarring. In order to make this work with subpixels, I made the lighting surface the base resolution multiplied by the zoom factor, 1280x720 with a 4x default zoom. When I draw the mask surface to the lighting surface, I have to use draw_surface_stretch. Finally, instead of using layer_script_end, I had to draw global.lightingSurface stretched in the Post-Draw event after the application_surface is drawn.

Let me know what you think! Thanks for reading!

[backyard12345]

a game i’m making in gamemaker, called Tulip!

[enhousestudios]

GLITCHED has thousands of lines of unique flavor text.

Yes, I wrote UNIQUE FLAVOR TEXT for every object in my RPG

Thousands of lines of lore, jokes, memes, existential crisis fuel, and more.

You should reblog and follow so you can see a new line every Flavor Text Friday™ until release. 

[aamakuruu]

Finally, it’s here!

A deltarune x Silhouette Mirage fangame made with GameMaker! Links :

https://aamakuruu.itch.io/silhouette-rune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slAIjOKGJJU

[aw0gamedev]

Enemy healthbar visuals change depending on what status effect they're affected by.

Unarmored vs Armored

Only certain status effects like fire can be applied to armored enemies. Fire burns it away.

[cyanroxanne]

For Screenshot Saturday I wanted to make some comparisons with the first demo of Shield Cat (for SAGE 2020) with the current Chapter 1 demo

Here's more!

[chinykian]

Really loving the CRT shader by ZIK. Thought I would use it for some doodling.