Platform Beginnings: An Idea with Legs - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 39

12. Include an Exit Event action ( control tab).
13. Include an End Block action ( control tab) to mark the end of the grouped actions.

■ Note Poisonous pansies may seem like an odd choice for a hazard, but they have an established gaming

heritage. They appeared in the underground caverns of Manic Miner in 1983—one of the first games to
popularize the platform game genre in the United Kingdom.

That should handle the automatic creation of lava platforms. Next, we need to make sure
that Fishpod restarts the level when he comes into contact with a hazard or goes off the edge of
the screen. We already have a parent object for all hazards, which should make this easier, but
things are a little more complicated for Fishpod. There are four different state objects that would
require their own collision event with the hazard object (all of the states apart from the dying
state object). So, rather than repeat ourselves four times, we will make obj_pod (the starting
Fishpod object) a parent of these four states and then just handle the one collision event between
obj_pod and obj_hazard .

Adding Inherited Events to the Fishpod Object
1.

Open each of these state objects in turn: obj_pod_standing , obj_pod_walking ,
obj_pod_jumping , and obj_pod_falling (but not obj_pod_dying ) and set the parent of
each one to be obj_pod .

Reopen obj_pod and add a Collision event with obj_hazard . 2.

Include a Change Instance action ( main1 tab) that changes into obj_pod_dying with
Perform Events set to yes.

3.

4. Add an Other, Outside Room event.

5.

Include a Test Variable action ( control tab) and check that the y Variable is larger than
0 . This means that the next action will only occur if Fishpod is lower than the top of the
screen (remember that y values start at 0 and increase down the screen). Gravity will
bring Fishpod back down again if he jumps off the top of the screen, so there is no
need to restart the level in this case.

Include a Change Instance action ( main1 tab) that changes into obj_pod_dying with
Perform Events set to yes .

6.

■ Note If you accidently try and make obj_pod a parent of obj_pod as well, then you will get an error

saying that this will create a loop in parents. It cannot be the parent of itself and we don't need it to be.

So although we have only added these Collision and Outside Room events to obj_pod , they
will also work for the four Fishpod state objects that have obj_pod as a parent. This is because
objects inherit events from their parents. The Fishpod state objects have no Collision event
defined with obj_hazard themselves, but their parent object ( obj_pod ) does, so they inherit this
event and all its actions. Likewise for the Outside Room event. However, when both parent and