Ed's Metroid Enginez (No release yet)

Since we’ve flood with these topics,
http://z3.invisionfree.com/MP2D/index.php?showtopic=1682
http://z3.invisionfree.com/MP2D/index.php?showtopic=1676
http://z3.invisionfree.com/MP2D/index.php?showtopic=1662
I’ve decide to make a couple Metroid engines to help these and other noobs or otherwise who decide to make the leap.

Builds:

-Super Metroid Style (GM 6.1 reg/unreg)
-Mouse-Aim Style (more advanced GM 6.1 reg)

Program:

Gamemaker 6.1 unreg/reg
will work with GM 7 too

Gamemaker can be used to replicate almost any GBA game there is and more,SNES is a piece of cake, so lay off the ‘ZOMG U CANT MAKE SUPER METROID WITH TEH GM!’

These are plans for the future and I can’t say when I’ll have a build ready.
Your support (comments and otherwise) will greatly aid these project.

Schedule
-Super Metroid Engine (reg) TBA
-Super Metroid Engine (unreg) TBA
-Mouse-Aim Engine (reg) TBA
-fixes and upgrades as needed

you shouldn’t let them get thier hands on a metroid engine man, untill they have worked and put effort into it. just think about it a little bit man, really, and honestly, ask yourself on the side of every fangame maker “why shouldn’t everyone make a metroid game?!”, and for a second question what your name will or will not be marked onto as a metroid game. you have spent quite a bit of time programming, and so have i, now, havn’t you grown to understand what is a good idea as far as gameplay goes? you have thought of other things than “omg! im going to make a metroid game and it will be awesome and i will show my friends tomorrow when i finish it!”, no, you have created a knowledge through your struggle that is vital to creating a good game, you have found the shortcuts in making a game, and, if you have looked at other engines, from many games, you will of course know that every engine is different, and is made by the creator for thier needs. i have nothing against you giving a few pointers, and helping people on thier way, but please, for the sake of metroid, and for thier own good (since through work, they will find other passions involving this activity as well), do not simply give it to them. you can give a person a film crew, a thousand actors, top quality film, and any other objects they want, but that doesn’t mean they will make a good movie. give a person a crappy camera, some time, and a real passion to work past difficulty, and they will through time learn that certain things work, and certain things dont. anyone can write a book, but not everyone can write even a half-assed book without learning how to write well first.

…if you want to make something to help, that is cool and all, but giving them something goes far beyond that. if they are not willing to spend a little time learning to code (which they should be able to have fun with and create things with little to no problem with gamemaker), then what makes you think they will take that much time to learn your coding. Anything good takes time, and a love for doing it, you should of course respect that man.

i have nothing against help, and a few tutorials of how to do things in gm that are used in a metroid game would be a good thing if anything, but to be blunt, not everyone in the world needs to make a metroid game.

just think about it, have a good day man.

I’ve already had that discussion in my mind, and this is what I’ve come up with.

I’m making a fangame that when finished, any noob or otherwise will be able to play freely.

In essences, I’m giving them hundreds of hours of my time so that they came have a couple hours of fun.

Playing fangames inspire others to try to make “THEIR :stuck_out_tongue:” own games. This is what has happened to me.

So if I’m gonna give them a Metroid Fangame, why not share the knowledge that I gained making it?

I’m not gonna just make the game for them per say, but I’m gonna provide the foundation for them to build on. Instead of making hundreds of different examples, why not make a compilation?

My enginez will be mostly in code so those who want to make good games out of it are encouraged to learn. Why must one reinvent the wheel from the start?!

BTW, CFX is making something like this too, but it’s gonna out of my league :confused:
Mine will be out first though :stuck_out_tongue:

i think it would be cool if you made seperate different files, each with an explination of how to do many things with gamemaker for a metroid game (very much like the examples given at the gamemaker site). by doing that, not only do they learn on thier own, but they can do it rather speedily, with the ease of simply reading and taking a ten minute lesson on how to make samus move around. you could have a seperate file on how the hud can be created, and maybe a file that has a couple enemies, and shows how to use timers and such. if you made this a learning experience for others, they could benefit a lot from it, as it will not just be a download thing where they piece a few things together, but they can learn how to do many things themselves in case they would like to do some cool new stuff with metroid! just an idea.

you could take it a piece at a time, giving you breathing room and making it so people can learn at thier pace, rather than trying to get a whole engine in thier head, and giving up and simply using it as-is. trust me, if i saw a metroid engine, no matter how much you put text in, i would be baffled (if i had just started gamemaker). however, a simple file that shows the basics of movement would be easy to learn, step by step, and let the reader relax as they learn, and rather than tackle a mountain all at once, they could take a few lessons at climbing before actually starting.

I think a mentioned a compilation…

And yes, I plan to make multiply files addressing each part of the engine and all adding up to the complete engine with a tutorial in chapters.
E.G. chp1 chp2 chp3 chp4 chp5 chp6 chp7-full engine

BTW, dont plan on adding all the super metroid elements like the grapple beam.

I need the Mouse-Aim engine so bad… I can’t seem to get it onto my game :frowning:. Its been causing my enough troubles already. And BTW smartdude, I don’t see the harm in releasing engines. I plan to release one myself one day (after this game goddamnit…). Releasing engines helps people more than you think. Not everyone is a pain in the ass (but it seems like more than a little are coming here) so don’t pretend like they are.

a full engine is not really needed, if it is in parts, they will get it. also, if you are doing the parts of a metroid engine in small sections (basic movement, door transitions, etc.), i would be more than happy to help out, i would just rather see people learn from this rather than have many people just copy and paste (and if you made a just full out engine in a package, trust me, they will). if you look at it, a short couple of lessons can be far better to all, that is why they dont try to teach everything in a class at once, they teach one thing at a time, and build on it.

Smarty…your preach’n to teh choir :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m with you on the lessons thing k :wink:

But I also plan to make it where they can put together a little mini-game by just customizing to rooms for like fun and getting a feel for putting rooms together. I’ll have samus, the map and health, some doors, ground objects, tiles, some enemies and a boss, and rooms set up for customizing. They can play around with that for a bit and when they get interested in making the game deeper, they start the tutorials.

Trust me, nobody will be able to copy and paste something and make it work in their game if they don’t understand how or at least what it needs to work. And if they do understand and get it to work, than Mission Accomplished :slight_smile:

sounds reasonable, would like to see how it goes, i eagerly await its release.

The way I see it, if you can’t use Game Maker, how the hell is an engine
going to help? If you CAN use Game Maker, shouldn’t you be able to make
your own engine? That’s my problem with people. They say, “I’m making a game
but all I need is the engine! I can’t program =(”

If they can’t program at all, how would they be able to understand the engine?
I have seen this happed a few times. People who can’t use GM that have good
engines don’t know how to work with them, so the ending game product isn’t so hot…

With me, I don’t think I have ever asked for a Metroid Engine. From the very start
I have tried doing things for myself, maybe once in awhile I would glance at some
other engine to see how a certain thing could be done, but in the end I found
my own way to get that task done. All my knowledge came from testing my own theories and the use of tutorials. They are a great way for a newcomer to game design to get to see how things work, and through learning these basics they can
start to program these things themselves.

Tutorials would probably help people along more than a full engine, they are brief and to the point, while a full engine may be too overwhelming for them to understand.

I can understand the codes etc. when i’m reading them and can write very basic ones. But when i go into writing complicated ones like the ones required for a metroid game, evry thing goes tits up

I myself am not a very good GML programmer. I mean, I understand how to write GML code but I just need to learn more commands. Im cabable of creating a simple Metroid engine with multi-directional aiming
and jumping/ flipping, but I have not looked into many features GM has that will actually be needed for Metroid (ex. Map System, Ammunition/ Health display).

i strongly disagree with this statement. one person can only do so many things. what if a pixel artist wanted to make a fan game? like some others, i am very clueless on how i should make my game and the GML language. I could make the sprites, but who would program the game? right now im a 1 man team, and it would really help if he released these just so i could tell what he did with the objects and how he went about doing certain things.

Just tossing out random ideas, but who says you must use Game Maker?
It’s a good program but it is pretty complex, and for your game there are
tons of Metroid Engines out for GM I think.

Correction, there are tons of platform engines out there, but nothing that integrates the mini-map, warping, or inventory and scanning really well.

This is what my enginez are here to accomplish. Err, well, when there get ‘here’ thats what they’ll do.

I disagree. What if, right now, I wanted to make my own 2-D Halo game? I can come up with a cool story, make all the sprites, design all the levels, enemies, and power ups, and compose/remix all the music myself, but I can’t program it, or just don’t have the time to after doing all those other things.

So, I go to Google, and I find a really nice open source 2-D Halo engine. I stick in my Master Chief sprites, add in all my own resources, make all the enemies and upgrades and extras, and then I can begin creating the levels and making the game, watching it all come together. The alternative would be to create my own really nice 2-D Halo engine, and watch it take up 3 years of my life to do the same thing.

Of course, if your goal is to become a better programmer it’s definitely worth the experience of programming a 2-D Halo engine for 3 years. But what if your goal is only to make the Halo game, and you want to stick with your music, spriting, game-designing, and story-writing skills? Programming is the grunt work.

OR, maybe you do want to learn more about programming as you make the Halo game, but you don’t have the time to make an entire really nice 2-D Halo engine yourself. If you get a really nice open source 2-D Halo engine from the internet, it’s probably not going to be so good that you can do exactly what you want to do without digging into its coding. If it’s commented well enough, you’ll be able to look at how it’s made and learn from it.

At least, looking at entire engines is how I went from copying crappy 3-D shooter engines and changing the textures, to making my own solid 60 FPS mouse-controlled 3-D Metroid engine with literally one Game Maker object that controls everything, one Game Maker room to store the entire world of rooms you walk between, multiple platforms and solid things along the same z axis, a shiny translucent mouse-controlled easy-for-me-to-use pause system with text and choices and options, an entire model making program running in the same fashion designed specifically for the game, etc.

I dunno if anyone else noticed that huge leap in my programming skills, but that’s how it happened. I just looked through a few nifty open-source 3-D FPS samples on the Game Maker Community, wondered how a few things worked, looked at those segments of code, and figured out the logic. And since logic is the very core of programming things, past the basic syntax and functions of a language, learning a few simple logic tricks built up exponentially and could be applied to just about everything I programmed.

Edit: Fixed up mistakes.

I’m just wondering why so many people seem to predict bad things will happen if a full featured metroid engine to the general population… Sure a few bad games will get made, but this is unavoidable with ALL game engines, commercial or open source. I’d say that the possibility of a really good metroid game coming from this engine outweighs this con. Yeah I know people won’t learn how to program and all, but isn’t one of game maker’s selling points is creating games without the need to learn a programming language? I’d bet the majority of GM users fit this mindset. I know because I was one of them, until I started reading some faqs and tutorials, playing through demo games, downloading and analyzing source codes when available, and eventually learning some basic GML before attempting to create my own engine. I’d have to concur with Troid that programming the engine is no fun at all. Especially when you are still learning the syntax of GML through the included tutorials (which kinda suck).

i believe the gamemaker tutorials are a good source for learning, most of what i know about making an engine is from them, and annoying questions on forums. also, i am talking about the tutorials in the faq section of gm site, which expands it to a crapload of resources.

Sounds great, small, limited engine to learn with, and then lessons to be the “finishing school.” Sounds cool, just what I need.

Thanks man. I appreciate the time and effort you’re putting into this, so that we can put more time and effort into something, so someone else can put time and effort into something… It’s the pyramid effect!

SA-X

i am waiting for the mouse aiming most, it will help me with teh necron g@me i am/will make.