Many arcade games make use of transitory opportunities for gaining bonus points. Gaining Bonus Point can make all the difference if you are trying to make it to to the top of the High Score table!

In Catch a Clown, bonuses might take the form of the appearance of a special clown that attracts a large number of bonus points – or penalty points – if it is clicked on. In this post, I’ll describe how to add a bonus clown to your game.

The bonus clown is a fast moving clown that appears every so often at a random location, and moving in a random direction. Clicking on the clown in the normal way gains you a generous bonus points score, to reward the fact that you managed to click on this hard to handle visitor!

To start with, duplicate the normal clown object and name the copy obj_bonusclown. We shall modify its settings in a moment.

The appearance of the bonus clown is handled using a special controller object (the second controller object, if you have already added one to keep tabs of the High Score; we could just use a single controller object, adding the additional commands to our score controller object, but for now we shall find it convenient to keep control actions for different game functions in their own controller objects.)

Like the score controller object I introduced in Who’s Best? Keeping Track of High Scores, the bonus controller does not have a sprite associated with it, although it does need to be added to the main room. The bonus controller object has two events associated with it. The Create event, which is used to start a timer/alarm that will be responsible for creating instances of the bonus clown. And an alarm event that triggers a ‘Create Instance’ action – in this case, the instance should be an instance of the Bonus Clown object. For convenience, use Alarm 2 in the controller object.

Returning to the bonus clown object, the collision event and Alarm 0 event remain the same as before, but we need to modify the other events as follows:

- if the bonus clown is clicked on, the player should receive a generous points bonus and the bonus clown should disappear. Modifiy the Left click (Left Pressed) event actions so that 25 points are added to the player’s score. Delete the Jump to random and random move actions, and add the Destroy Instance action (It can be found in the Objects panel of the main1 tab).

- when the bonus clown is created, we want it to start moving quickly in a random direction. Select the Create event and add a Jump to Random position action. In the Start Moving action, use a higher speed than the original speed of the normal clown. I used a speed value of 8 for my bonus clown. We now need to add two more alarm actions. The first one will destroy the instance of the bonus clown, the second will tell the bonus controller to start counting down to the creation of another bonus clown.

- add a set alarm action using Alarm 1, and set it to apply to the self object with 100 steps.

- create a new alarm event, using Alarm 1, whose sole action is to destory the current object.

- return to the action list for the Create event, and add another alarm action, this time for Alarm 2.

- set the number of steps to 200, but this time apply the action to the controller_bonus object.

Now, when the Create action is executed in an instance of the bonus clown object, it will set the alarm in the bonus controller that is responsible for creating future instances of the bonus clown.

Try playing your game again. How does the addition of the Bonus Clown affect the way that you play the game, if at all? Combined with the High Score feature, are you any more (or less) likely to play the game just one more time, (or keep returning to it over a period of time), compared to the version of the game that did not include the additional scoring features? Why?

How might you add a poison clown to your game that appears for a short time every so often and inflicts a penalty on the player if they click on it? As game designer, how might you try to entice, or even trick, the player into clicking on it by accident?

Even whilst the literal design of a game may stay largely the same, you will hopefully have found that by changing the game parameters the game may be be made harder or easier, and possibly more or less enjoyable to play. Modifiying colour themes can also introduce variation that keeps a game fresh over several different screens, even if it’s underlying mechanics are the same.

Many traditional arcade games have exploited these techniques to provide a series of levels within a game that provide progression through it in terms of increasing difficulty, as well as providing some sort of narrative – for example, the design of the room backgrounds may chart a journey from a village, through a wood, into a mountain cavern, out onto a grassy plain, and then into a despot’s castle – all whilst retaining the same ‘mechanical’ game design underneath.

Anyway, that’s it for Catch a Clown as far as tutorials go… I have a new game for you for the coming weekend… (That said, some of what we’ll be covering will still be applicable to Catch the Clown, so you can keep on polishing it and customising it further if you want to…:-)

Feel free to post a link to your ‘final’ version of the game – it’s good to share :-)

As well as providing a way of measuring ’success’ whilst you are playing a game, scores also allow support the element of competition with other players and against your own previous attempts at playing the game. Game Maker provides support for a High Score table that will keep track of the 10 highest scores that have been achieved playing the game.

To display the High Score table at the end of the game, we need to add another event to the controller_score object (as introduced in Points Make Prizes – or Penalties…) that will detect when the game has ended, and then display the High Score table.

From the controller_score Object Properties dialogue, click on ‘Add Event’ and then select Other. From the popup menu that appears, select Game End. This event is raised whenever the game ends, such as when you click on escape to stop playing the game. From the score actions tab, select the Show Highscore action and add it to the list of actions that are are executed when the Game End event is raised.

Now when you play the game, you should be able to keep track of your score as you play, and then see whether or not you have managed to make the High Score table at the end of the game!

To increase the element of competition when you start a game, how might you display the high score table at the start of the game using a similar technique to the way you added the High Score table at the end of the game? How satisfactory is this solution likely to be in general?

If you explore the Events option, you will see that as well as the Game End event, there is a Game Start event.

This can be used to display the High Score table at the start of the game in much the same way that the Game End event displayed the table at the end of the game.

Unfortunately, whilst the display of this table at the start does mean you know what score you need to achieve in order to make it into the top 10, the fact that the game has actually started to run *underneath* the high score table may be problematic; for example, if you are playing a game where your player can be attacked and ‘killed’ by monsters before you manage to close the high score display, your experience of the game will not be a good one!

We’ll come on to see how to create a special start screen for the game in a few posts time – but for now, I need to get back to the grind and make that high score table mine… ;-)

If you tried playing the ‘Catch a Clown’ game with ‘identical but different’ clowns, customised during the Editing a Sprite activity, you may have found that you introduced some additional, arbitrary rules of your own to make the game more exciting. For example, you might have decided to only click on the normal clown, and ‘punish’ yourself (with a ‘doh!’) each time you clicked on the ‘bad’ clown.

One of the key things about computer games is they can be designed to enforce these “arbitrary rules” through the software coded architecture of the game. In this customisation howto, I’ll show you how to bring scoring rather more to the foreground in a Game Maker game.

The main reason why we’d want to do this is to keep your players engaged with the game by providing them with a real time report on how well they are doing as measured by their score: remember, we add 10 to the score for each ‘good’ clown that is caught, and lose 10 points for every bad clown that is caught.

By default, the running score is displayed in the title bar of the game window (if you are playing it in a window, rather than in full screen mode).

Displaying the score

To display the score in Catch the Clown, we need to add a score reporting object.

In the nomenclature of Game Maker, this sort of object is referred to as a controller object.

Open up Game Maker, and load in your Catch the Clown game (or whatever variant you’re working on!), and create a new object called controller_score. We are not going to use a sprite with this object, although it will be “drawing” the score to the screen as you catch the clowns.

In the score controller object, we want to use the “Draw phase” to write the current score onto the screen.

Click on “Add event” in the controller_score Object Properties dialogue, and add a Draw event.

From the Score actions tab, select the Draw Score action. We can keep the label (“Score:”) as it is.

To begin with, lets place the score result somewhere in the middle of the screen – set the x and y positions each to 200 or so. (How can you find out the size of the room? ;-)

To change the font color, in the controller_score object properties, add a ‘Set Color’ action *before* the Draw Score action in the list of Draw actions. (You can find the ‘Set Color’ action in the Settings area of the draw tab.)

The score controller object now needs to be added to the main room. In the main room properties dialogue, click in the objects panel, select the controller_score object, and then click to place it anywhere within the room (the actual place where the score is displayed is determined by the x and y settings in the Display Score action).

A question mark will appear to show that an object without a sprite has been placed in the room.

If you now run the game, you should see that a current record of your score is displayed as you play the game. Every time you click on a ‘good’ clown, the score should go up by 10 points… but what happens when you click on the bad clown?

To make the score go down by 10 points to penalise the player for clicking on the wrong clown, you need to change the Score action in the badclown object:

Save your game, and play a couple of rounds with it.

Does treating the good and bad clowns differently affect the way you played the game? To what extent did seeing the score within the borders of the game affect your engagement with it, and the desire to replay it?

In the customisation of our first Game Maker game, if we are going to award points for clicking on a ‘good’ clown, and take away points for clicking on a ‘bad’ clown, we need to be able to distinguish between them. The easiest way of doing this is to use a different colour theme for each type of clown.

To make a badclown sprite, I created a new sprite, using the same clown image as for the original clown sprite, and named it spr_badclown.

Double clicking on a sprite raises the Sprite Properties dialogue. If you click on Edit Sprite to open the Image Editor, you can then change the image that has been saved into that sprite (you won’t change the image that was imported into the original clown sprite).

Zoom in to the sprite using the magnifying glass/zoom tool. You can then modify the image to make it feel evil… ;-)

There are several ways of changing the colours used in the sprite:

1. In the Image editor: from the Image menu, experiment with different settings from the Colorize, Colorize partial, Shift Hue, Intensity and Invert menu options, until you find a setting that you are happy with.
2. Edit the image directly: Change all pixels with the left colour in to the right colour, and the eye dropper (‘Pick a color from the image’ which sets the left color with the color you sampled from the icon).
   Click on the right colour square to pop up a palette from which you can choose the colour you want to use to replaces the original colour.

If you want to share the image, or save it as a standalone image that you can reuse in another game, save it as a bitmap file from the File menu in the Image Editor. I’ll have a think about how we can share images over the next few days..

Create a “badclown” object (obj_badclown) using the spr_badclown. For now, give it the same properties as the original clown, and add a few instances of it to your game.

Even though the different clowns behave in the same way as far as the gameplay is concerned (that is, they are both identical in terms of how the game is played), does having two different sorts of clown affect the way you play the game? (Have a go, and just see…:-)

Customising the look and feel of your game further.

If you have time, why not use the Image Editor to modify the appearance of the other image assets used in your game, such as the room background or the colour of the walls?

Visual Game Design Considerations to Think About

To what extent do colour themes affect your enjoyment of the game? Do you think that the selection of a colour them might affect the usability of your game? That is, how easy it is to play?

Do you think that different colour themes can be used to change the ‘tone’ of a game, from something light hearted, for example, to something dark and brooding.

In the same way that particular colour pairings may ‘clash’, do you think that a colour scheme can ‘clash’ with an audio soundtrack?

One of the things I’d like to explore using Game Maker is how to help you develop your own multi-level game from a standing start. This might take the form of a leveled version of Catch a Clown, the game introduced by the first Game Maker tutorial, or it may be based around the maze, platform or shooter type games.

Whilst recognising game design can be a never ending process, there is far much more that you can do within Game Maker to build on a basic game and customise it to produce your own unique interpretation of it.

Each week, I’ll try to post a ‘getting started’ tutorial, that looks at the design of a particular game, and then also post a series of ‘reference’ activities that describe how to customise, modify or otherwise extend the game in a variety of ways.

I’ll also post a set of Game Maker files that show how a game might evolve if you implement each customisation in the order they are presented. (Note that some of the customisations can be omitted, or done in any order, whereas some build on modifications that have gone before. However, you may find that some of the terminology or ideas referred to in ‘later’ customisations assume you have familiarised yourself with the preceding ones.)

I’m guessing that 1-2 (or 3-4, maybe 5-6, depending on how keen you are… ;-) hours should be enough time to try out some or all of the mini-activities to customise your game.

Once you are happy with your finished game, I guess we need to think about how we can share our game files so we can see what others reading the blog think of our customised games? :-) One way would be to upload games to the YoYo Games/Game Maker community site. Another would be to create our own community site somewhere? What do you prefer?

Setting the Scene

To provide a context for the first set of customisation activities, let’s modify the first game so that we can control how easy it is to catch a clown, as well as adding in various bonuses and penalties that are awarded when a clown is caught.
I’m going to assume that you completed the “Your First Game” tutorial, and found out how to:

• create the wall and clown sprites;
• create the fixed wall, and moving clown, objects;
• create and decorate a room, including the addition of a background image;
• added a background soundtrack to the game;
• used an alarm to add a bit of uncertainty to the game;
• added a short help/description page to your game;

(Phew… I think we’ve come a long way already…!)

If you haven’t already done so, just try adding a second and maybe even a third clown to the room. Simply select the clown object in the room’s object panel, and click within the room to add an additional clown:

So, here are the customisations I’m going to suggest:

Normal clown
Reward: +10 points.
Changes direction to a random direction after every 50 steps.
Jumps to a random location and changes to a random direction each time it is caught.
Original speed 4, increases by 0.5 each time it is caught.

Bad clown
Penalty: -10 points.
Changes direction to a random direction after every 50 steps.
Jumps to a random location and changes to a random direction each time it is caught.
Original speed 4, increases by 0.5 each time it is caught.

Bonus clown
Reward: +25 points.
Appears for 100 steps (approx. every 100/30 ~ 3 seconds) every 200 steps (approx. every 200/30 ~ 7 seconds).
Changes direction after every 50 steps.
Moves with speed 8.

As I post the customisation activity posts, I’ll add ‘directory links’ in here to point to them…

• Editing a sprite

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a great believer in experiential learning, and learning through doing. So working under the assumption that we’ll learn most about game design from actually trying to build a game or two, I’ve found an game creation application that let’s us do exactly that…

Game Maker has been developed since 1999 as an educational, game development application by Mark Overmars.

Game Maker provides a complete game creation environment, that allows you to design, build and play your own computer games. Game Maker is ideal for building 2 dimensional arcade style games, although it can also be used to create 3D games. There are several game development environments designed specifically for creating 3D games, but they tend to be rather complex.

One of the advantages of Game Maker’s visual design interface is that you don’t need any experience of computer programing to get started, (although if you are a programmer, you’ll find there are ways of getting your hands actual code if you want to!).

So, before we being, you’ll need to download and install Game Maker…

Download Game Maker (for free) from the YoYo Games website: http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/try

Install it on your computer…

When you start Game Maker, you will be asked if you want to register for the commercial version. From looking at what the free version of Game Maker offers, I think it will do just fine (so you can just say no to buying the commercial version of the game – click on “Don’t Upgrade Now”), but if you do want to pay for the upgrade, I won’t stop you!

Game Maker will only run under a Windows operating system (which is a pain for Mac users like me :-(

If you do have an Intel Mac computer, Game Maker seems to run okay on a Windows partition installed under Boot Camp or Parallels.

(Y)Our First Game :-)

“Your First Game” is a simple, 2D arcade game in which you must catch clown as it runs around a circus arena. I’m guessing that the first activity I’m going to suggest should take 1 to 2 hours to complete, at the end of which time you will have built your very own computer game.

Over the weekend, I’ll post some ideas on how to customise the game further to create your own, unique interpretation of the game.

What I’m going to try to do is find a way of structuring the Game Maker activities to help you achieve two things:

1) gain a hands-on understanding of the software technologies and techniques that underpin interactive computer games; and

2) explore the design and development process used in the production of interactive computer games.

As with many software applications that are published on the web, Game Maker is supported by some online documentation and tutorials. Learning how to make effective use of online support materials is an important skill, so fto give myself and easy start, i suggest that you follow the opening tutorial provided on the Game Maker website.

So here you are: download and open the “Your First Game” tutorial, which can be found on http://www.yoyogames.com/make/tutorials

(IT Skills: although there are several files associated with the tutorial, you only have to download one – a ‘zipped’ archive file. This file contains all the tutorial files in a compressed, space saving format, making it ideal for transporting several files from one computer to another all in one go. Most computers can ‘unbundle’ a zipped file automatically, although other standalone applications can also do it for you. (These tools will also typically support ‘zipping’ a folder and all its contents to create a single, zip archive file from a collection of documents.) Example applications: Winzip, ALZip.)

Once you’ve got Game Maker up and running, work through the “Your First Game” tutorial to create your own game.

In the same way as I suggested you try to be mindful of how you were interacting with the Kongregate tutorial, try to step back every so often as you ‘play’ with Game Maker and pay attention to the following:

1) How is the game initially described?

2) How is the design of the game specified? What elements or components of the game are described?

3) Is there any relationship between the elements identified in the Design Document and the physical layout of the Game Maker environment?

Once you have finished your game, play with it, and maybe even show the game off to someone you know.

Feel free to start customising it – maybe even post a few suggestions as to how you can customise it as comments to this post.

I’ll post a few ideas of my own about how to customise the game over the next day or two…

I’ll also post some ideas about how you can share any games you produce, as well as how to grab screenshots of the game, and maybe even how to make some movies of it being played…

Have fun! :-)