Dev Log Entry 9: Viewport is verb now (and so can you)

This is a dev log about creating a game called Newtius in GameMaker Studio 2 (Indie edition). Starting with entry one might make this easier to follow.

In entry 8 I attempted to apply what I thought I learned about alarms to newitus by creating five and only five enemies that moved horizontally across the screen right-to-left. I did this successfuly though it took a really long time.

As always, the Official newtius project page on itch.io is up, featuring the last playable version.

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The warm up

Tonight I attempted to follow video one of the many parts long Space Mods tutorial play list, part being only eight minutes long.

It’s been almost successful as I have a large “room”, a camera and a viewport. Like the video the camera follows round the ship all the same. The issue is the background keeps coming out a solid color rather than a the actual background image sprite I selected. No idea what I’m doing wrong.

At the end of the video she say she’s going to re-do the whole thing as code anyway. So instead of trying to figure it out I’m going to move on.

I should take a moment here to pause and mention I had attempted to manually fork my original version of “space rocks” manually. This involves creating a new repository on GitHub, cloning that repo and copy/pasting the files over excluding the git folder and…anyway I think I screwed it up pretty good. This may be related to the inconsistency issues I’m having. Either that or the tutorial is working from a different starting point then the ending of the space rocks tutorial.

Camera, persistent object

In video two, as mentioned, she got rid of all the the camera/viewport stuff setup in rm_game and rm_start room properties. The proceeded to make a obj_camera object. Which is persistent and drag-and-dropped into rm_start.

Video two didn’t go very well at all and I have no idea why. Well I have some idea. In any case where as hers is a small portion of a big room with a camera following the ship, mine is a big window of the whole room in cases zoomed way out. All my object names and GML are the same as hers so I have no idea why mine is different. I also can’t get the background image to display properly, only a solid color.

Since I’m so far removed from the tutorial so early I’m not sure if I’ll benefit from continuing or not but I guess why not, right?

(later)

Following that tutorial video two went about as badly as it possibly could have. My version runs but soon after starting the game it gets a runtime error. Which again, same GML so no idea.

The video is from 2020 though and GMS 2.3 and some other minor updates have been released since then. What I’ll probably do since that viewport/camera demonstration image above makes sense on some level is create a new blank project and see if I can use the documentation to get it follow the player object around using nothing but GML code. Once I think I understand it I’ll see if I can add it in some rudimentary way to Newtius.

In fact, I think I’ll just stop this post here. Normally I would keep adding to it through the experimentation and adding to Newtius phases but I think my posts have been getting too long so I think instead I’ll just post it.

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The latest version/progress of Newtius can always be found at my GitHub repo:
https://github.com/tildesarecool/newtius