Delta Blog

Something I struggled to find on the internet was a decent working example of a rolling health meter, a'la Earthbound. For those not familiar, you have a HP value, and when you take damage, it isn't applied automatically -- instead, your HP instead ticks down to that value, like an odometer in a car. In Earthbound, this is not just a cosmetic effect, and as long as your HP is still ticking down, you're not dead yet, which then leads to other clever mechanics not usually seen in RPGs. What I had trouble finding was how to a) reduce and b) display the "rolling" effect -- what examples I found were cheap, and simply reduced HP by a fixed amount until the target HP was hit. What I wanted was one where the meter is quicker the more health you're gaining / losing, and slows to a crawl when nearing it's target. I figured it out, so here it is. It was done in Gamemaker's GML, but should translate relatively well to other languages. Calculating the num...

In working with Gamemaker Studio, while it's built-in language, GML, is very much like C# with training wheels on, it just does some things differently from other programming languages. An obvious example is that it doesn't need type declarations, and couldn't give less of a shit about line endings. The following would be required in C# and most programming languages: string name = "Joel"; int age = 32; In GML, you can get away with: name = "Joel" age = 32 While this is great and makes things quicker, it does kind of foster bad habits. A less obvious example is that Gamemaker Studio treats strings as non-0 indexed char arrays, which is surprising in itself, but also that index 0 will return the data for index 1, rather than an error. This was an infuriating quirk that messed with a text rendering script for like, ages. If I had the string "Peter Piper Picks Peppers" and tried to copy it out one character at a time from index 0...