5 replies to this topic

[Swordkirby9999]

I would like some advice on 2 things

What do you think is the best way to make cutscenes using Game Maker lite? Should I try to make them animated using objects and alarms or just a simple comic with a few animated quips? I nkow it's possible to create cutscenes with Game Maker, but I want to know the most efficient way you think would work.

Also, for the areas I'm currently working on being a desert and the plains you start the game in, what do you think I could do to make things look a bit better based on what I tell you? I'm sorry I cannot provide screenshots, but it's really not much to look at right now

Plains (game start)
*You crash land on the planet you'll spend the game in. it is sunset, the sky is pink with an orange sun following the view in the background. There is also a pinkish-orange tint everywhere to match the lighting of sunset. Though the tile set in not finished yet, it is grassy like you whould expect for plains, with the ground a pale green color and pink dirt

Plains (main game)
*Remove pink tint, replace sunset with moving clouds and yellow sun that follows along the vew. The tileset may be changed as well to be brighter and less pink.

Desert
*It's not just all sandy like you may expect. Some rooms will be filled with sand dunes, while others closer to the plains will have shrubs, dried grass, and lots of rocks. Also, the deeper you are in the desert, the thicker the blowing sand will be. these sandstroms will obstruct just about everything...platforms,enemies, you, and even your HUD. There will be cacti

What do you think so far?

[sonosublime]

I quite like the sound of this. just so you know, you don't have to make a completely new tileset for sunset. Just make a regular tileset for during the day, and then at sunset, create an object that draws a pink rectangle (with an alpha<1) over the screen to give everything a pink tint.

[Conan87]

I was thinking the same thing with the rectangle covering the screen to give the pink tink, also if this is the first time you really dealt with cut scenes I feel a comic type approach would be best with little to no animations, eacher single frames or multi or a combination of both.

[Swordkirby9999]

I quite like the sound of this. just so you know, you don't have to make a completely new tileset for sunset. Just make a regular tileset for during the day, and then at sunset, create an object that draws a pink rectangle (with an alpha<1) over the screen to give everything a pink tint.

I'm already using a transparent background for the pink tint, just like the sandstorm. I just have the Foreground box checked off. Glad people like my ideas ^^

[Spyro Conspiracy Theorist]

I can't really tell you how you can make your tiles look better without any screenshots; the way you describe them sounds nice, though. I live in a scrubby desert, so it's always interesting to me when a game environment tries to go in that direction. It can be quite beautiful when pulled off correctly.

As for cutscenes, I personally much prefer the scripted ones with alarms. They keep you in the experience, even though you lose control, and they ensure that there is only one "version" of the world (rather than the "in game" version and the "comic" version), which I think is very important to a game. As for which would be the most efficient, that would all depend on how you do the comics/animations, and how much time you spend on creating each set of art assets. Scripted events with alarms don't really use any extra art assets, though, so I would imagine that generally those are going to be quicker and more efficient. That said, I don't really have much experience with implementing comics, so I could be wrong.

[Meganinja]

It all sounds good, except I wouldn't put the sandstorm covering the HUD. that makes it feel like the HUD is part of the game environment that you are moving in, when it really isn't. Although you should try both ways and choose which one you like better.

As far as cutscenes, fully animated cutscenes take a long time to make as you must draw every single frame yourself, but if done well can be fantastic. Doing picture by picture can work well also, but the main advantage is that it takes a lot less time to make a few pictures than it does to make 30 or so pictures for every second of cutscene. You could also implement the cutscenes within the game environment itself and just have a textbox and/or voice acting to make it feel like a good scene. You could script it so that characters can have predetermined movement or expressions during cutscenes as well. This would probably take about the same amount of time as picture-by-picture cutscenes, and might be a smaller game size since giant pictures aren't really needed for this to work (although voice acting can take a lot of space). It all really depends on the game, your preferred style, and the amount of time you have to spend on cutscenes.