Working working workings

I have been playing about with Game Maker Studio to see what t is like and what I can do and have been using one of my old flash games as a point of reference for me to try and re-create it in this. That way I don't have to think about what I need to do for a new game and its all just trying to replicate what the original did and perhaps add a little more to it.

I started off easy and tried re0creating the gun barrel and its movements (no shooting just yet), I then added in the bombs that would drop from the top of the page. Once I had the bomkbs dropping I then worked on functionising them so they are created on the fly and then dropped in when needed, also giving them random speed as well.

After that I created clouds and also applied their speeds randomly along with their depth of field so bombs dropping woudl sometimes be behind some clouds in front of others. After this I created a ground so that the bombs once impacting it woudl destroy and then respawn at the top and start again.

Through in doing all of this I have learned quite a bit of how all of this works and gives me a good insight in how to do things better. I have been working with my normal view of coding, get it working with rough code asap, then refactor and rebuild it making it better. I have seen that this is very similar to my working way in flash although flash was better for animations and a little bit more friendly/intuitive but that program was made for web stuff not games.

The next steps I am aiming to take on this, is adding in animations for the bombs exploding, also I want to set base variables for some things so I can then reference them as well as add in more functionality/difficulty. For example I want to add in a max amount of bombs, as you progress that can increase making the game more difficult. Also on top of this I want to set it that just because there is a max amount of bombs at a given time, doesn't mean you get that max all the time. i.e. say max is 6, but there might only be 2 bombs dropping until you blow up another, then it checks how many active bombs there are and what the max is then selects a random amount to add.