Achievement Unlocked: Super David!

Remember David S.? He’s working with instructor Andrew as part of Game-U’s New Jersey Accelerate program. David recently unlocked a significant metaphorical achievement – he finalized and exported his GameMaker-built Super David platformer!

As Super David neared completion, David’s drive for excellence led him and Andrew to fine-tune the project to practical perfection (a condition only slightly removed from theoretical perfection). They spent many hours searching for, and fixing, bugs that could break the game or hinder optimal gameplay. Before exporting the final game, David and Andrew even anticipated future bugs and added a few tweaks to prevent them! For instance, what if the variety of background colors interfered with clear display? That wouldn’t be good, so David and Andrew switched all the background colors to the same shade of blue. What if the player’s falling animation, which showed a few idiosyncrasies in the past, failed to trigger the level restart event? That wouldn’t be good either! To avoid the possibility, David, with Andrew’s help, coded a “Press [R] to Restart” option into the game. He also included an alarm that counts 2.5 seconds after a loss before displaying the restart prompt, in case the player doesn’t realize he can press R to restart the room.

Next, David worked on an important visual tweak to polish his game’s executable icon (i.e., the Chrome desktop shortcut or the iTunes Dock symbol). Rather than retain the default GameMaker Studio icon, David opened a copy of his player’s “idle” sprite in GIMP to create a new .ico file based on his player. Together, David and Andrew uploaded the new graphic into GameMaker and used it to replace the default graphic. Last of all, David exported his game files and saved them to a flashdrive to take home! His Super David platformer, with its custom launch icon, will soon appear on David’s own desktop, ready to play any time he is!

Awesome work, David! You’ve got a great-looking game that’s clearly fun to play. Thanks for sharing this project with us. As you take on a new projects and new skills in Unity and Maya, as well as GameMaker, be sure to keep in touch! We’re excited to see your progress and the cool things you create!