Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Now that you know a bit more about what's in store, we'll return to the first task of looking at all
the resources we're going to need in order to realize the vision for this game.
Ready-Baked Resources
By now, you should be very familiar with the more routine tasks involved in making a game, such
as loading and creating resources. There are going to be a lot of resources involved in making
Zool, so you'll be relieved to hear that we provide an initial version of the game that has all the
sprites, backgrounds, some objects, and even a test room already created for you. None of the
objects have any behaviors, so the game doesn't actually do anything yet, but we've saved you
some of the simpler, monotonous tasks. All the same, we'll begin by looking at what has already
been created so that you don't miss out on any important details.
Exploring the Sprite Resources
Use Game Maker to open
zool0.gmk
from the
Chapter03/Games
directory on the CD and
take a look at the sprite resources. The
Zool
group contains all the sprites required for
Zool's movement (combat moves will come later), including standing, walking, falling,
jumping, climbing, slipping, and skidding
2
(see Figure 3-2).
1.
2.
Notice that most of Zool's sprites have a
Width
and a
Height
of
48
pixels (the climbing
sprite is a little bit taller), but they all have their
Origins
set to
X
=
24
,
Y
=
24
(the center of
a 48x48 sprite). It is important that the origin of each Zool sprite corresponds to the
same reference point on the character's body so that they match up correctly when
switching between sprite animations.
3.
Observe that
Precise collision checking
is turned off for all of the Zool sprites. Click on
Modify Mask
and see that each sprite has a
Manual
,
Rectangle
bounding box with
identical dimensions (
Left
=
14
,
Right
=
34
,
Top
=
6
,
Bottom
=
42
). As we saw in Chapter 2,
both of these are crucial to smooth movement and collision.
The
Platforms
group contains all the collision mask sprites that define the physical
boundaries of solid parts of the landscape. Different colored sprites are used for the
masks of platforms, walls, ledges, ramps, and slopes to distinguish them from each
other in the room editor. They all have a
Width
and
Height
of
16
pixels with
Precise
collision detection
turned off and
Automatic
bounding boxes that adapt to the visible
area of the sprite. Note that these are only used for collision and the visual appearance
of the landscape comes from a tile set, described in the next section.
4.
5.
There are even more collision mask sprites in the
Ramps
and
Slopes
groups but these
have
Precise collision detection
turned
on
for the simple reason that you cannot
represent sloped collision areas using a bounding box.
2
These sprites came from the original Deluxe Paint image files created for the SEGA Mega Drive
console version of the game (known as the SEGA Genesis in North America).
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