First first. As in my first at least.

Just googled, and found out that the greek word for “Fear of dogs” was Cynophobia, so that’s what I’m calling my FIRST game.
First completed game at least.. (I hope)

The story so far: I didn’t think I was going to participate in this thing yet because
1. I had other plans today
2. I hadn’t got any idea what kind of game I would make and
3. I’ve never made a game before, and have just started learning java in school.
But then
1. plans got cancelled
2. I thought I could make a game about my fear of dogs, and 3 is hardly an argument at all, right?

So I started my little project earlier this evening in game maker by creating a little red circle known as obj_player and made him walk around in a room filled with instances of obj_wall. Next, I made a dog (a circle in different colours with a tail) and named him obj_dog. If I ever get a real dog, I will definitely call him obj_dog.

So, I have a player and a dog (or dogs if I place more than one), what now? I found out that to add a little to the phobia-feel, I could make the dog(s) turn around to always look at the player. This prooved more difficult than I thought, and I sat maybe an hour calculating the players position relative to the dogs and some advanced sinus-to-degree-formulas that ended with the dogs never facing the right way and a divide-by-zero-error when the player and dog had same x-position. I was almost about to give up, but then I asked a good friend of mine who thaught me that I could just use a code called point_direction with the x and y values for each object and get the job done in two lines. So that’s where I am now, I can move around while a bunch of dogs are watching me as I go.
For Collaboration I might ask my roommate to make some music, or I’ll ask a dog to be my voice actor Or maybe vice versa..

I’m not sure where to go from here, but I think it will end up as either a puzzle game where you can’t go too near the dogs, or a “notgame” like the ones Jordan Magnuson are making, where I rant a bit about how scary and bad dogs are. Anyways, I’m learning lots of new stuff about the Game Maker Language! Screenshot-time (I may change some of the sprites later):

Uh oh…

Sit?

Tags: MiniLD #21