Adam

All of us were once beginners, and all of us must've had some old crude techniques that may or may not have worked but found out there were other ways more resourceful.

Take my first game for instance, I didn't know variables back then, so when I wanted an object to act different because a variable would've changed, I created a new object just to do the thing I needed that was the same as the old one only maybe a different color. Though using different objects for different purposed for the player object may work, it would today be ineffective and give me more work in the long run. This lack of variable knowledge also led me to do, in my second game, I had a boss that I planned would be taken out after some hits. Because I didn't know how to set an energy variable, I made 10 boss objects and in each of them set them to change to the next one when it got hit. Later in that game say by quite a few months. I changed it to use an energy variable.

Then came my first two breakout games and I had many instances of the bat, one being under the influence of a different powerup/down. I later changed this in one of them to variables and one advantage is that they could be cumulative, like I can have a tiny bat that has reverse controls and is slow. And proved to be less of a burden too.

What were your old techniques you since replaced?

You're working on gamemaker and then you take a long break, why, maybe to play with a game, maybe another program. Maybe you're away for months from GM, you don't refresh yourself on anything during that time and then months later you come back.

But what is this?

You see your code for the first time in months, but it looks like someone else wrote it, you forgot what it did, you forgot most functions, you didn't know how you made your own game. You start a new project, and you're thinking I knew how to do this but why can't I remember how. What are you to do?

It never happened to me even as I took long breaks from GM, but I have came close to deleting a major project because I didn't know what I was doing to make it work.

And there's also a lesson here.

-Comment the code whenever possible (I usually don't do this outside the step event)
-Refresh yourself on GM every once and a while.

Hello, what is the longest time you've ever spent trying to do something in gamemaker un-assisted like figuring out a problem or adding a new feature. My record though I don't know what it would be would be for at least 2 days. (And I didn't like that either)

Figuring this question relates to DLL's I figure i'll post it here.

I found lately, game maker's saving and loading system doesn't handle DLL's and i'm wondering how I could make a system that would allow me to save information supplied by the DLL as well. I'm aware of the file writing functions but i'm not ready to take a huge risk with using them when I know nothing about it.

Any answers, I would guess several of you wrote systems that would save added DLL supplied info considering how widely used they are.

I was just wondering what size of tiles you usually use and what you base the sizes of tiles and objects upon. I generally use 16x16 tiles, and usually base the sizes of my objects horizontally and vertically on multiples of the number 16 with 16x16 or 8x8 at the smallest.