Pipes
Oh so many Pipes. Over the course of this last week, the tiles for Zarnok Fortress have been finalized, so I can start creating permanent levels instead of the temporary decoration I've been doing thus far.
I started by filling a Template Room with a Background tile. The Space background will be drawn behind this layer, and man did it take long. So long that I came up with the idea of using Sprites and scaled objects instead, which is a similar solution to this week's other large endeavour; Pipes.
Pipes will act as a visual indicator for connected systems. Basically, activate a Terminal and it will send power down a pipe to unlock a door, or activate a Light Bridge, etc. Perhaps more interesting are Power Conduits which must be shot with a laser to temporarily charge a system. Get ready to double time it across a Light Bridge before it shuts down or race to a bridge before it shuts down.
Obviously elements such as these show up rather often in a game, even if they are just to be used for the sake of decoration. To make it easier to add them to a game, I wrote a 200+ line script for a System that will draw the pipes. Thanks to GameMaker Studio's Room Editor, Objects can be scaled freely. Based on a scaled square sprite, the System I wrote traces the edges of the square. Then I added functionality to offset the start / destination points so that the Pipes could have unequal beginning and end points. Lastly, I added cases for simple 90 / 180 degree pipe systems.
Until next week!
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