I thought it would be nice to reflect on the last couple days because for me, they have been mixed with adrenaline rushes, followed by gut punches. It's good to take a step back and get some perspective. To start off, I was part of a stream that was such a blast to be a part of. I have to say I felt really good after the stream ended. It felt like playing a gig you know you nailed. The four of us(Patty, Adam, Lauren, and myself) got into a great rhythm and just knocked it out of the park. Someone from the audience even claimed:

Man this stream is the best kept secret on YouTube. Everyone tweet this out.' – Jungle Inc.

For those of you who don't know Jungle Inc he's been in the crypto space before I even got into crypto three years ago. It was such a huge compliment to me. There were other compliments that went around, which I'm a sucker for. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush or the three pints of beer, or perhaps both, but I strutted out of my office into the living room like I was the cock of the walk.

“Cock-a-doodle doo” – NickelNDime

source

I'm Coding a Game – 1

I'm Coding a Game – 2

I'm Coding a Game – 3

I'm Coding a Game – 4

I'm Coding a Game – 5

Every time I look over the lesson or tutorial for this series I tell myself, “This is easy, should take me five minutes.” To my surprise it ends up taking me a week! Oh well, as long as I'm moving forward however slow at times is still progress. This week I worked on camera movement and tiles.

Camera and Camera Angles:

The first needed to do was resize the room. I made it wider so that the whole scene would not fit onto the monitor. Since I didn't have a camera following my character, my player could run off screen and it essentially looked like a broken game. So I wrote some code to address that, and assign that code to a camera in GMS2.

Now this game has room to grow... just like the plants I have in my basement... for medicinal purposes.

On the create event, I created a couple variables

The step events is where all the code for the camera.

The coding on the camera is pretty straight forward, but no less useful. The first part with the IF statement states that IF upon character creation(The player) follow it. The second part, is to make the camera move at a certain pace as the player is moving. If the character falls and is accelerates, the the camera will do the same. As the player slows down, so will the camera. Lastly, I wrote two lines of code, that featured the clamp command. Clamp is used to set a max, and a minimal on a variable. I used this to stop the camera moving if the player runs next close to the wall. If I didn't have the clamp code written in, then the view would stay centered on the player and there would be a lot of wall or dead space on the screen.

Part - 1

My apologies for cutting part 1 off abruptly the other night. I was falling asleep as I was typing. Let's pick up where we left off, shall we?

Waitin' For a Superman – The Flaming Lips

If you recall from part 1, my vocal cords were strained when I did these recordings. This is one of the songs I had to lower the key to accommodate my voice. It's originally in the key of, “Bb” and I lowered it all the way down to, “G.” There are two aspects of the song that I really enjoy about this song when I play it. The first is the chord progression. It's not a typical 1-4-5 progression, or 1-6-4-5. I believe the main progression is 1-2-5 then 4-1-2-5-4-1-5.

The second is the rhythm of the song. Along with the unique chord progression is the unique rhythm or strumming pattern. The emphases or accents change from the down beat to the up beat. I wouldn't classify it as syncopated, but it's pretty close to it. This is probably why I enjoy the Flaming Lips' music so much. It's just different enough to be interesting while not going overboard...okay some of their stuff may go overboard.

Yesterday I was fortunate to have the house all to myself for a couple hours. My wife took the kids with her to visit her sister, so I had the house to myself. Usually when I have that kind of opportunity, I forfeit the pants for the day, and PC game it up like an adult. But seeing as I haven't picked up my guitar in awhile besides for teaching and gigs, I thought I would take a crack at recording some covers. There was one problem, I blew my voice out last Saturday at a gig. When I say I blew it out, I mean I could not speak above my quiet voice or no sound would come out. Through out the week it slowly got better, but it still is not 100 percent, maybe around 55 percent. Oh no, what was I going to do?

I'm not a person who let's obstacles stop me from achieving a goal I have set for myself. There's a quote I heard a long time ago that I use to motivate me when I'm faced with a roadblock. That quote is from Randy Pausch. If you don't know who he was, he was a professor who passed away awhile ago from pancreatic cancer. Before he passed, he gave a lecture to his class known as, “The last lecture”. He didn't lecture about what he earned his degree in, he lectured about life. One of the topics he spoke about were walls that get in our way. It goes:

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” – Randy Pausch

Since I heard that quote, it will pop in my head whenever I'm faced with any wall that is on my path. Before I heard that quote, I found it so hard to find gigs, or get bars to hire me to play. If a bar owner told me they would call me and never did, I would just let it go. After that quote I would call the bar owner up to touch base. I wouldn't be pushy or abrasive, just check in. A lot of the time they would end up giving me at least a chance to play.

So where was I? Oh yeah, not having a voice and trying to record. Well I decided to pick songs that I could still sing. Next I changed the key. A lot of the songs I sung yesterday where lowered by one to two and half steps. Lastly, I held back vocally on parts where I would usually belt it out. With that said, I sung as loud as I could without losing my voice. If you listen to the recordings, you can here in certain points where I was pushing my voice to the edge. All in all, I like how they turned out.

The Songs

Laminated Cat – Wilco

Don't worry this song has absolutely nothing to do with laminating cats. In fact it has nothing to do with any animal. For the life of me I still don't know why this song is titled the way it is. It is however, a really enjoyable song to play from start to finish. It's a song I typically don't play when I play out, because your typical barfly does not know, nor care who Wilco is.

The song is based on a main riff. When I've watched it performed live Jeff Tweedy plays the song in open G tuning. When a song is in an open tuning, I will try to arrange it so I don't have to do an alternate tuning just for one song. Maybe one day if crypto goes to the moon I will hire a guitar tech, pay him a 4 figure salary a year to tune my guitars. Yes you read that right, I will pay him 4 figures(message me if you're interested). Anyway, I found a work around by just down tuning the 6th string down to a D. Now I can't play it note for note, but I'm playing the right chords, and when you put it up to the original, I believe it stands on it's own.

After the singing and towards the end of the song, there is this rhythm change up that happens with the guitar. I was just about to nail it when I thought to myself, “I'm going nail this part!!!” It was at that moment that I made a mistake. I chose not to re-record the song because I liked the feel of the recording, and it's pretty funny seeing me try to hold it together.
Lyrical Breakdown

Springtime comes and the leaves are back on the trees again

Snipers are harder to see my friends

Weeding out the weekends

Summer comes and gravity undoes you

You're happy because of the lovely way the sunshine bends

Hiding from your close friends

Weeding out the weekends

Candy left over from Halloween

A unified theory of everything

Love left over from lovers leaving

Books, they all know they're not worth reading

It's not for the season

When autumn comes you sit in your chair and you stare

At the TV square

Hiding in the deep end

Weeding out the weekends

Winter comes and the days all start late

There's motion on the boughs where the dark shapes prowl

Feeling out the feelings

Feeling out the feeling

Candy left over from Halloween

A unified theory of everything

Love left over from lovers leaving

Books, they all know they're not worth reading

They're not worth reading

It's not for the season

When I read these lyrics and break them down, I pretty sure the lyrics are written from the viewpoint of an introvert. When the lyrics talk about summer it's all optimistic and playful. Yet, the verse ends with, “Hiding from you close friends, weeding out your weekends.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znXF4D5oLmQ

https://www.cinnamon.video/nickelndime/watch?v=204378634499130705&l=L25pY2tlbG5kaW1l

I'm Coding a Game – 1

I'm Coding a Game – 2

I'm Coding a Game – 3

I'm Coding a Game - 4

Sorry for the delay everybody, this installment threw a curve ball at me. Let's start with importing the artwork I got from Adam. For some reason when I imported it, some of the files got rid of the transparent background. I then tried to make a transparent background in MS Paint only to find out, MS paint will not save a transparent background. I spent way too much time trying to do this when the whole time GameMaker Studio 2 has a feature to put transparent backgrounds in pictures.

The next step was to make the sprites into objects and assign it some properties. Now if you recall from my first installment, I had already defined a set of properties for the main character. This new character or object would be sharing the some of the same type of properties such as gravity, how the animation runs, and some others. Rather than coding the exact same code, it was easier just to cut and paste.

Ahhh...Control C and Control V, is there anything you can't do?

As you can see, the collisions for the object are exactly the same. Next I created some new variables for the enemy object.

The flash variable was a variable I used along with the “Shader” resource. This resource allows a coder to alter the pixels of an object in a variety of ways. Tweaking with the shader a coder can make an object darker, lighter, or change colors completely. I wanted to simulate the effect of the enemy lighting up when stuck by the player's bullet. It just gives it that finishing touch feel, and a lot of these games can be hard to tell if enemy is hit or not.

The last bit of code I worked was the dying animation. With this code I set the hit points with the variable hp. When the hp is equal or less than zero, it runs the dying sequence.

This little bit of code will simulate the enemies body being pushed by the force of the bullet as it is dying.

All in all I noticed the coding becoming a little more complex. I still can understand it, but it's getting to the point where I really have to stare at it awhile to understand it. What I do find helpful is the program will notify you if a line of code is incorrect in real time. The last time I programmed something that feature was not available .. of course, the last time I attempted to program something was 20 years ago... and it was on a 20 year old mainframe...

...yep

...I was pretty cool.

Here's a video in case the written word scares you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VibGIH9Q7uw

Here's it on Cinnamon:

https://www.cinnamon.video/nickelndime/watch?v=204210464576505045

NickelNDime Out

Foursomes...

There have been some greats...

There was these guys...

Then there was...

and lets not forget these ladies...

but now there is a group of four that make all of those groups pale in comparison.

I speak of this group of four...

Am I overselling it a bit?

...Okay I am, but I don't care. Here's why.

Their names:

Adam

Patty

Nickel

Lauren

Beside my wife and kids, this was the funnest I've had with a group of people in a long time. I'm still trying to wrap my head around why it was such a blast. After thinking about it for awhile, I think I came up with my answer, but it needs a little explaining.

There's been times in my life where I have played gigs with top notch talent, and it sounded off the whole night. There's also been times where I've played music around a campfire with people who play music more of a hobby and it was magical. This experience would fall into the latter of the two.

Sometimes moments just work. No matter how much(or how little) planning goes into it. That's what this was. The stream just worked. No one talked over one another, everybody waited their turn to speak. When somebody did speak it was something interesting which then flowed into something else. There was never a lull in the conversation, and the viewers stayed engaged till we called it a night... Well, Adam called it a night, everyone else wanted to keep talking. I'm convinced more now than ever he was the student that reminded the teacher to assign homework.

What I found interesting about the whole experience was the group was made up of four very different people from different walks of life. We are essentially strangers in the real world and our lives would probably never cross paths. Now, I could see going to the bar or pub with them and having a couple of pints, their treat of course.

We plan to do another one in a couple weeks, you should definitely tune in! Don't give me that, “I'm in a different time zone and it's four in the morning when you guys stream.” Make it happen!

NickelNDime out!

I'm Coding a Game – Part 1

I'm Coding a Game – Part 2

I'm Coding a Game - Part 3

I'm back with adventures in game coding! Did you miss me? It was so fun to dive back into coding and making art for this project. I can't wait until I get to create the music for this game. I am thinking that will be more towards the end of this project. Let's go over what I've accomplished since my last blog post about gaming. But first: the changes I've noticed from the previous version of GameMaker compared to the new one!

Differences between GameMaker v1.4 and GameMaker v2

I decided to purchase the most recent version of the program GameMaker v2 as I continue forward coding my game. Definitely a huge upgrade! Right off the bat, I noticed that the interface is so much easier to navigate. Many elements such as sprites, objects, and events are streamlined. They are also visually linked to each other. For example, if I click on a certain object, it then connects visually to the events tab, then to the actual code of the event. This makes it so much easier to mentally picture how one connects to the other.

Another new feature is that coding is checked in real time, and the program will let the coder know if a line is faulty. If a variable is created and not used, the coding screen will have an alert by it.

The new program will also let you know if there are syntax errors in real time, such as this one.

The last new feature I noticed was the background and layers window. This new feature allows the coder to place objects at different levels so all the objects appear in the correct order. In the past version, it was rather difficult and time consuming to achieve this task, but in CMS2 layers are arranged in a window:

Now the coder can visually see how it all lays out on the screen and can make adjustments quickly.

That covers all the differences I noticed. I didn't spend oodles of time trying to spot every single change. I just wanted to get to coding!

Guns, Bullets, and Recoil!

Creating Gun and Bullets

The next step in this game was to give a weapon to our hero and make that weapon able to fire. The first step of the process was to create the artwork. There were three pieces of art I needed to make:

The gun

The bullet

...and the bullet flash. This isn't the actual artwork. The actual one is just a white circle with a transparent background. When I posted the original, I couldn't understand why I couldn't see it. I spent 10 minutes cussing about how stupid the computer was until I realized I was trying to upload a solid piece of white onto a complete white background. Not one of my better moments.

Once they were all drawn up and loaded into the program it was off to write code for these objects and to give them properties.