Here's how it's gonna go down...

This week has been very productive. I added something into the game, finally. After so much prototyping during the development cycle, I finally got one thing to work. Say you're playing the campaign. You press the '0' button. What does it do? It takes you to a dialog box. You type something into the dialog box, and the game saves.

It may not sound like much, but making a save game system in Game Maker proved a little difficult. I finally got it to work. There is one glitch though. If you load the game from the Main Menu, it will take you to your previous save, and somehow see through walls. I tried fixing it, but there doesn't seem to be a way. I'm afraid that that's one bug that'll ship with the game :/
I'm not proud of it either..

But there is some more news.

We'll call you Leroy...

Just kidding. But we will announce the official tagline to Pathways 2.

Return to the Dark.

Sounds catchy, no?

Above is the simplest script I could type to just save and load games. You would think coding this simple function would be maybe 5 lines of code long. Coding does get complicated. The learning process is so...

I'm currently working on the levels for the third chapter in the game, The Mystery. I won't spoil the campaign here, but I will tell you that I have just 2 more chapters to complete. I'm so excited to be almost finished with this game! I hope that you all like it as much as I loved creating it. I'm so tickled.

And I'm so glad that they're here for us. They aren't like other developers. They're Bungie. They allowed us to create this game. The gave us that right, and in return, they got a spot in the game. You see the screen above right after the Recon-2 Softworks splash screen. And it'll live on forever. Bungie gave us the IPs we so love. Every moment in Marathon, Myth, Halo; we still relive and revisit these worlds they created. Heck, I got Marathon 2 and Myth sitting right above my computer. I'll pop a disc in later...


But I think that'll be all for this week. See everyone next week!
-baile045

Above, you see the final design of the long concepted main menu. No telling how many times I've redesigned it. Originally, it didn't even have a background. There were more buttons, and most were pointless. It didn't have the logo. It was bland, but after a long process of just designing what Pathways main menu would look like, here's the final product. But that's the main menu.

Here's the title menu. I think it's beautiful.
But not much here. You get here after the Recon-2 splash screen and Bungie splash screen (we thanked them for letting us make the game). The main theme begins to play, and you can just sit here and listen if you want, but we all know that you want to play the game. So you click Main Menu, and go to the Main Menu.

Above, you see the Game Maker IDE, and a level in Pathways Into Darkness 2. I have 3 more chapters in the game to complete. Thanks to Game Maker's drag and drop interface, level design is pretty quick. After I complete the levels, i'll add the story details into the game which is fairly easy. The story is told in a way kinda like Marathon, except that the dead bodies are the terminals. You talk to them, like in the original game, but don't ask questions. They simple tell you if there's monsters ahead, if a ladder is somewhere in the room, or just a general piece of information, like how they died.

At first, we took weapon sprite off the internet and planned to intergrate them into the game. We cut that idea on count of copyright infringement possibilities. So in spite of that, we created our own, and i'll show you the weapons. There are only 2 present in the game, and each have a bottomless clip (we'll tell you why later).

This is the Hellraiser pistol. It is the first weapon you will use in the game. It fires a single round, and is semi-automatic (meaning you have to keep hitting the spacebar to fire).

This is a AR45 Individual Combat Weapon System. It is an assault rifle, and is fully automatic (just hold and mow).

Now I said that I would explain why the guns have bottomless clips. I tried to build a ammo system, with a sum number of bullets in a clip. The system would not work no matter how many times I tried. The game would crash or display so many errors. I had to cut it due to frustration and time constraints. Im sorry, but at least you can mow headless's c:

The monsters of the game would probably be the most important aspect of the game. They all will try killing you. I even hid some so that you will walk past them, and they'll come up behind you and attack. Headless's do not shoot gunk at you, Ghoul's don't throw rocks, and so on. And there's a reason for that, too. I could not create a complex A.I that could make decisions on the go. As much as I want them to, no... and I wish it would work. I have a lot to learn about GML. But at least they give you something to shoot at, and the Headless's snowy plover screech will live on in the game. Anyways, here's the monsters.

And what wraps up the enemy part of this post.

This is the screen that the 'terminal story' will appear in (minus the text).

Well that just about wraps this week up. I did promise a gameplay video, but due to slow internet (it suckssss), we'll try again next week when my provider decides to speed it up.

See you next week!
-baile45