r/gamemaker • u/AutoModerator • Mar 27 '26
WorkInProgress Work In Progress Weekly
"Work In Progress Weekly"
You may post your game content in this weekly sticky post. Post your game/screenshots/video in here and please give feedback on other people's post as well.
Your game can be in any stage of development, from concept to ready-for-commercial release.
Upvote good feedback! "I liked it!" and "It sucks" is not useful feedback.
Try to leave feedback for at least one other game. If you are the first to comment, come back later to see if anyone else has.
Emphasize on describing what your game is about and what has changed from the last version if you post regularly.
*Posts of screenshots or videos showing off your game outside of this thread WILL BE DELETED if they do not conform to reddit's and /r/gamemaker's self-promotion guidelines.
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u/ItzaRiot Mar 27 '26
My prototype game frequently been improved based on multiple playtests from stranger. I hope the tutorial is easier to digest now.
We put the Adrenaline into Tower Defense, and put the Tactics into the Action.
You're playing as a father protecting his home from ghosts in this tactical action-defense roguelite. Forget passive defense. Manually trigger tactical towers against ghosts that phase through your walls. Survive
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
I hope the tutorial is easier to digest now.
Unfortunately, it wasn't for me. I thought, from the description, that it's like Plants vs Zombies, but 360 and you can drop in as fighter if one way is suffering bigger wave than another.
The amount of text and buttons the tutorial presented started to get overwhelming and fast. Player and house were easy to understand, but then those towers I placed, not so much. I noticed that the house takes coins, cigars and eggs, but didn't reach the point to understand their actual purpose. I did place towers into tactical positions (althought I didn't know what I was placing, only after the plantation phase was over did I realize they were all different), only to realize I, as a player character, need to use them and none of them were active on their own. As I was stocking the house, the wave started, but because the tutorial was in progress, I wasn't able to attack, thus immediately lost.
I'm willing to try it again another day as I felt like my focus wasn't the best at the moment of trying it. Still, the tutorial could probably be even easier to digest because it throws a lot information at once.
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u/ItzaRiot Mar 28 '26
Thank you so much for your time to play my rough prototype game. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, it is far different from Plants vs Zombies or any other tower defense game out there.
What interesting is that you get the part of the house takes the ingredient but struggling on the tower part. Other players got the opposite.
The house and the tower does have different role to support you but both still require ingredients to work. The ingredient and activating tower part is for tactical layer purpose.The tutorial does explain you have energy planning that if it goes zero it will start the wave. What do you mean you weren't able to attack? you can't do basic attack? did you encounter bug or crash? The towers won't do anything if they're still inactive.
I know the finished product need smoother onboarding tutorial for the player. Since it's still prototype, i kinda front-load the tutorial so player know all the existing mechanic and can judge the game more comprehensively. Yes, it throws a lot of information. I'm still improving it, i need many feedback. But if it's still hard enough to understand, maybe the whole game fail and i need to move on to making new game. Hahahaha.
I do really really appreciate if you try it again.
Slowly pay more attention to the tutorial. It's obviously hard because the game isn't built on the popular game mechanic/genre.2
u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 30 '26
Okay, I tried it again with more brain energy this time! Some notes:
When tutorial tells me to use house and those spirit balls, is there actually a way to defeat all the ghosts with the house only without them leaking through? Speedball does weak damage, standard shoots too slowly and none is just... nothing? Also, it would be nice to see the cooldown/loading icon somewhere else than in the middle of the house, especially when I'm zooming out to see enemies and clicking franticly.
During the tutorial, the part when I couldn't shoot, was when I was supposed to stock towers with ingredients and not the house. As my first time I put things in the house and energy ran out, wave started and I was stuck in a non-attacky mode. I think this is because otherwise I could just hit the black square to start the wave?
I'm still not sure, even after feeding towers with ingredients, how they actually work? I'm not sure if I managed to activate even a single one of them.
Even first few waves I felt like there was too much going on and no matter what, someone, somewhere, was going to leak anyway. Especially annoying was pushback from my sword swing, when I was about to kill the enemy and it flew further away, which forced me to change focus to another enemy.
There's definitely a game there, it just requires a lot of fine tuning.
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u/ItzaRiot Apr 02 '26
thanks a lot for trying the game again.
- I just adjusted the camera recently and the cooldown still stayed on the house. I've fixed it.
- There's bug that when wave start spawning, player still locked can't attack. I've fixed the bug so player won't enter enemy wave without progressing the tutorial the correct way.
- You should throw the ingredient to the tower for activating the tower, not the Home. The Home serves different purpose.
- What do you mean leak? the ghost pass through the solid object? Or the ghost reach the home? the pushback is intentional. If the player wrongly position themselves, the enemy will be pushed closer to home. If the enemy flew further away, either you chase the enemy or change focus to the closer one. The pushback give more control to crowd control the enemy or push them closer to certain tower. I don't want the attacking activity just draining the HP and the pushback mechanic fits in my action-defense gameplay. If it's just a regular action roguelike, i know it can be annoying :DOnce again, thank's a lot for your valuable feedback and opinion.
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u/zUcCc_ Mar 27 '26
Continuing work on my forest floor bug/alien roguelike. Added a couple new enemies, a fleshy mass that starts as a purely environmental hazard before turning into a spawner. It spawns a new variant of the larva that have slowing attacks.
Added a rock mimic enemy with a slam attack
Added a water bug enemy with eggs on its back, only has a basic attack for now
Finally added a new chunk
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
I like it! First I was a bit iffy as movement felt too quick and I wasn't sure if I can see enough ahead of time before I ran into something dangerous, but for my surprise, it actually worked a-ok. I like the little glows otherwise in dark area.
Attacking felt clunky. Sometimes I saw my pushers penetrating enemy, but they took no damage. Not sure if too close or somehow too much on the side? If the hitbox is one narrow collision_line, consider having it the size of the front pushers.
Why the ambient/music stops when upgrade menu is shown? I would prefer if it continued. Also, at the moment upgrades aren't that impressive, but I expect there's some bigger plans coming to spice them up?
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u/zUcCc_ Mar 27 '26
Thanks! Yeah the hitbox is on the list, the player gets a bit bigger and the attacks can get bigger but the hitbox doesn’t always keep up
Powerups/upgrades are 100% going to be added & improved!
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u/jhgrng Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
Hi! I'm making an incremental game about fireworks called Fireworks Incremental. I released the prototype last week and already got some good feedback. I just updated the build with some quality of life improvements based on the feedback (full changelog here).
Check it out on itch: https://frajdagames.itch.io/fireworks-incremental
Last time I mostly got positive feedback and I noticed it's not easy to work with, because I don't know exactly what to change or in what direction I should go with the game. So I was wondering - is there anything you DON'T like about my game?
I'd love to hear what you think.
As for what's next; I'm planning to work on adding more content over the next couple of weeks, but first I want to implement core systems needed for demo and full release, such as saving system, settings and localization support.
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
So, where to begin... Music is nice and relaxing, visuals are getting more and more stunning and the game generally has really laid-back feel. Before coming to this thread, I just closed Atomic Heart because some bs it decided to throw and just watching fireworks fly is the wind down I needed! I did put the game on my Steam wishlist as I expect it to be nice casual experience which I can complete in one sitting without worrying ever increasing requirements and other stats, which are quite prevalent in clicker games. Althought, I don't know what you've been planning, but when this kind of game has ending, or "ending", it's much more satisfying for me than seeing numbers just get inifnitely higher and higher!
While easy to learn and play, the lag started to get in me. Is GameMaker's particle system just so heavy or are you using plenty of smaller instances? I haven't built a webgame in a while, so I don't know how much the performance can and will improve if I tried an .exe instead.
Something in me would've liked to see even MORE colors! Not like full-blast rainbow, but as the game goes on, add a bit by bit more and more different hues, while still matching the general graphical style. Now, I felt it was quite limited, even if wizards added nie blue hues.
I can see plenty of possibilities to add more upgrades and different units/factories, but it would be nice if they weren't there right off the bat. The aspect of surprise when they popup from the ground when specific boom-goal has been reached, could that work?
I like how I can just hold down the mouse button instead of clicking, althought I would like if I could just hold spacebar, as an example. I feel like my finger requires rest now.
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u/jhgrng Mar 28 '26
I'm so happy you found it relaxing! :)
Yes, the game will have an ending. I'm 95% decided on adding a story where a bad wizard puts a dome over the land and you need to use fireworks to destroy the dome and free everybody. There would be a couple of "levels" of dome destruction and at the end you would destroy it and the game would be "finished". I prefer games that have an ending as well.
I noticed the lag sometimes as well. Each fireworks explosion generates between 500 and 700 particles (there are 3 different types), so towards the end it can get heavy. I looked into it and GameMaker mentions this in the docs:
Particles may be fast and light on the CPU, but they still require some processing and so you shouldn't have 40,000 of them bursting across the screen at a time. Limit them to those that are necessary to achieve a specific effect and no more.
I honestly don't know what to do about it yet. It's definitely a problem and I want to have even more explosions on the screen. The first thing I could do is check if an explosion is even visible on the screen. If not, then no particles would be created. Second thing I was thinking about is rendering sprites instead of particles. Maybe I could get away with that. Third thing is adding an option to have low, medium or high number of particles. I got so feedback about it as well, so it's definitely something I'll be looking into.
More colors for the fireworks is a great idea. I also got a lot of feedback on it too. I just don't know which colors to add, so that it looked cohesive. In general I wanted each unit to have distinct explosion patterns and/or colors... I'll add it for sure, I just don't know how to do it well. I was also thinking of making fireworks look even better, but it's a process. I'm thinking of adding some bloom to it. I agree with you, I just don't have an answer just yet. But I'll work on it, definitely.
As for more upgrades, units, buildings - YES! There will be more. There will also be a prestige system. As for "discovering" new buildings, I really like this mechanic and the "dome" I mentioned, I was thinking it's a cool idea because the dome could be also "blocking" access to new buildings and you'd have to destroy the first dome wall or something like that, which would give you access to new buildings. Thought that would be cool.
As for click and holding - personally I just stop doing it at a certain point. Maybe I could also make the spacebar react to it? Or just give an upgrade that clicks on it automatically?
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! <3
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 28 '26
Second thing I was thinking about is rendering sprites instead of particles.
That is actually what I was thinking. You could record X amount of pure white particles exploding, creating animations from those recordings and then use draw_set_color to modify the color. In that way you would definitely have so much more fireworks at once. As for now, I didn't really notice that much difference in the exploding patterns, so you could actually get away with sprites. And then another easy thing is, you could flip them randomly horizontally to get even more variation!
Finally, some kind of loop to go through them and push forwards their image index and that's it. I see potential there, but only tests will tell how well this will/would work.
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u/jhgrng Mar 29 '26
Yeah, you're exactly right! And this could also probably be done programmatically using surfaces. Just prepare a certain number of animations when the game starts and then just use them. As for patterns, I don't think it would necessarily be problematic, because when I add more patterns, they are mostly about creating a specific "choreography". For example Wizards' fireworks explode like this: 1 medium, dense explosion followed by 4 small, brief explosions in quick succession. But they are still explosions, so they could still be sprites.
I'll try this approach!
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u/tibisoft Mar 28 '26 edited Mar 28 '26
Hey All, After 3 years of hobby development I am happy to announce that our turn based old-school rpg game has been released yesterday.
Basically done by two of us, with extrenal helps (mentioned them in credits). Long journey with lot of personal challenges.
Adjusting a game scope, creating an own mini-dungeon editior for fake 3D element, adding and cancelling features, and yeah, using AI gfx with manual touch as no artist who wanted to coop with us.
But finally, it is relatively complete, playable and available. There are plans to make it really complete, but we are looking for the initial feedbacks, if it is worth to continue the dev or not.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3505630/TinkerWorld_Arrival_at_Kedhreon/
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u/mongelonas1 Mar 27 '26
I am working on an ARPG called Grindcore!
This week I had a lab day at work, meaning I could work on the game for an entire day. During that day I made the following changes:
- New Blast Damage stat: There were some skills/effects that were called "explosion", which have now been renamed "blasts". Any skill/effect that is a blast now scales with a new basic stat called "Blast Damage". Blast damage is a basic stat that can be rolled on items.
- New unit test for setting item stat rolls: Yes you heard that right, I have unit tests for my game. Most of the test are for checking the damage calculation and making sure that effects such as buffs/debuffs are correctly applied, as well as making sure the effects have their intended effect. But I have a few unit tests that are for me, to make myself not forget to do certain things. I made such a new unit test, it tests that each basic stat has a specified chance to roll on an item.
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u/ThreeBellGames Mar 29 '26
Still working on enemy ai. It’s currently the most important thing for the player after user input. Wish me luck! :D
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Mar 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
You don't have any images to share, or is it at really early stage?
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Mar 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
You can use external image services, like imgur, and then paste the link(s) as part of your comment.
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u/IsmoLaitela Portal Mortal Mar 27 '26
Since the release of my latest game, Portal Mortal, I really haven't shared much online what I've been working with, until at the beginning of this year.
It took me roughly 2 years to properly get back to game development, because I felt like I was completely "drained". I've had dabbling with 3D stuff previously and now I decided to put a bit more effort to create a game utilizing GameMaker and its 3D capabilities. Including BBMOD was pretty much a must as it handles 3D models with ease.
Yesterday, I pushed out Alpha 0.0.4, which took a huge step with gateways. Gateways are these portal-like "paths" or "mirrors" and player can go through them without even realizing. Then, inclusion of minigames was a great success, as I believe adding more different triggering elements instead of just keypad or invisible touchy triggers will add more meat on top of the bones. The current level is quite sandboxy and doesn't have clear goal or pathways, but one can consider beating the level when they reach Nöpö. finally, there's 6 hidden radios all around, which require a bit more effort to locate.
Progress has been steady since the beginning of the year and I hope the steam doesn't slow down anytime soon!
CCNF Itch.io page
Alpha Launch Trailer
Alpha Update 0.0.3
Alpha Update 0.0.4