plasti, where did you find all the tutorials to do most of these things?
i particularly want to know how you did the level transitions and fade in at the intro scene
The only thing I've ever used a Game Maker tutorial for is saving and loading data to and from text files, which is something that this demo doesn't even use (though Chatters will probably use text files for options and save files). Everything else I've learned from reading the bare basics in the help files and years of richarding around. To ensure that my knowledge doesn't become obsolete, (and so I can use BASSMOD for music) I've used Game Maker 7 for a long-ass time, and will probably continue to use it until it is completely incompatible with modern versions of Windows.
If what you're asking is how I did the level start and level clear messages, each message type is an object that draws some colored rectangles and some text. The level clear message objects always shows the same text, but the level start message objects draw the value of two global string variables. These values are set in the room creation code for each level to, for instance, the "LEVEL 1:" and "WALNUT WOODS" values you see in the first level.
Certain things are disabled if there are any level start or level clear message objects in existence; the player can't move, king silverback won't shoot projectiles... and I think that's it actually. The levels are designed in such a way that it is impossible to be hit by a wandering enemy or stray projectile in any of the level start or possible level end locations. To ensure that the level end message only comes up once, the level end sign object is deleted upon touch; this isn't visible, however, because the sign is always in an area on-screen that would be covered up by the level clear message anyway.
Also, the level start message object is created by the player object on creation. However, it doesn't display its text until it waits one frame. It does this to avoid calling on the level name variables at the instant of the room's creation, as for some reason room creation code, although it does happen before the first frame is rendered, it doesn't seem to happen until
after all the objects are created and their creation actions are run.
Whew. I think that's about it on that subject. Surprisingly complex for a one-day game, isn't it?
Edit: Oh yeah, and the fade in/out to/from black effects from the intro. Each fade effect is an object that draws a black square over the position of the screen (view_xview,view_yview,view_xview+320,view_yview+240) with an alpha value (I think I used draw_set_alpha) that changes with each step. These drawing functions are most easily done with GML. Either that or each one is actually a black rectangle sprite stretched to fit the screen and positioning itself at the screen position. I don't remember which I actually did. Either way, both of these objects have incredibly low depth (some large negative number) so they always draw on top of everything else.
The fade-in object starts at full alpha (1) and subtracts a small value each step, and deletes itself once it's no longer larger than 0. The fade-out object does the opposite, starting at 0 and adding a small amount each step as long as its alpha is less than 1. The fade-out does nothing by itself (it only makes the screen black) and has to work in conjunction with the object that creates the fade-out to do something like go to another room.
I'm done textwalling for now. I need to loving sleep.
