Something a little different today. I wasn't sure whether to bother documenting this, but what the hell. I was showing off GameMaker to a friend of mine in person, showing how quickly one could get something simple with interesting effects going, and basing it loosely on some messages he'd sent me over Steam a few days before about transforming Zenzenzen into something called Pork Anus. So here's the rundown of how our Pork Anus ended up.
Player sprite is a straight-up Pac-Man ripoff with several frames of animation for mouth opening done roughly by me deleting parts of a circle. He moves in four directions by the arrow keys, with the sprite rotating for each. This does mean going left he appears to be upside down from the regular player's point of view.
"Pork Anus" object says that in text. Appears in a random location on screen, and every frame has a chance to move some a bit on the X and/or Y axis, which in practice means it moves in kind of a jerky diagonal. Whether he goes left or right, and up or down, is randomly determined at creation. Was having problems getting this to wrap around the screen edges correctly, so instead when it leaves the screen it gets destroyed and a new random one created. When Pac-Man collides with one of these he grows by a few percent, and a new random Pork Anus is created. Also when Pac-Man gets one of these a voice clip of me saying "Pork Anus" plays.
Second object is more of a graphical anus, but still very loosely. It is the more interesting thing in terms of trying out new ideas. It moves forward at a constant speed, with every frame a chance to alter its angle somewhat--in practice this means every several seconds it takes a slight turn and keeps moving that direction. When Pac-Man hits one of these he shrinks, but not evenly by X and Y, so he ends up more stretched with time. When one is destroyed by running into Pac-Man, one is always created to take its place, and there's a chance of a second--so as the game goes on they become more numerous and hard to avoid. Also, if they overlap with each other they start to grow. With increasing numbers and that, you get a situation where they start to get impossible to avoid, but this is not exactly a Balanced Game.
Working on that object actually did bring a lapse in my knowledge up. Instead of them growing, I originally wanted two that collided to become one larger one. However, since the collision event happened for BOTH of the colliding things, whatever I wrote in would happen twice. Destroy the other object? Both get destroyed. Grow large? Both grow large. I'm sure there are ways to work around this, and I can even guess at one. Instances of objects have a unique ID, so it should be possible to get those and declare the "greater" and "lesser" one to be treated differently, so even if the code ends up run twice they would both decide to resize A and destroy B. Hopefully there's an even better way I'll eventually learn, though.
Probably about an hour spent messing around with this.
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