The Story Begins - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 320

Puzzles
The design of the level itself provides a puzzle in terms of physically reaching each new area, and
there are three distinct puzzle-episodes within this. These take the form of the two prisoner cages
and the thirsty pirate, so there are really only two different types of puzzle. In this section, we'll
look at these in turn and highlight the main points of their implementation.
Figure 13-6. You can create new object animations in Anime studio (left). The final animation just contains
the object and not the entire parrot image (right).
Carrying Objects
Both of the puzzle types require the player to retrieve and use objects within the game. We
thought it would be more interesting to allow Archie to carry items and rather than worry about
an inventory system, we're only allowing him to carry one at a time. We've introduced a new
variable called holding for obj_parrot along with a new set of constants for defining which
objects Archie is carrying ( HOLD_NOTHING , HOLD_KEY , and HOLD_TANKARD ). Archie's Draw event then
draws this object on top of his character sprite when the holding variable is set.
You should find it easy enough to add a new object to the code, but creating an animation is
a bit trickier. You'll need to render a new version of Archie's flying animation using your object
image in place of one of the “Holding” layers in the animation hierarchy (see Figure 13-6). You
then need to hide all the other layers and render the animation out again so that just the object
appears in the animation. See Chapter 10 for more information on the whole process of rendering
out animations from Anime Studio and getting them into your game.