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Rusted Moss retrospective draft notes

2/16/2024

Sorry for not updating the site much, I've been busy with other stuff, but will try to find time for it more frequently.

Rusted Moss retrospective thought dump

I've wanted to write a little about RM and things I would have done differently in retrospect. There is too much to really go over, so I'll just write some more basic notes for now and maybe edit later.

In terms of production, proper pipe-lines and development tools came in pretty late. This substantially increased dev time, as it could take a lot of time to test changes. I thought dev tools would take too long to implement compared to time saved, but was sorely mistaken.

As it turns out simple things like being able to teleport the player to the cursor and quadruple the gamespeed made testing way faster, and only took a few minutes to implement ( I made all of twwwr without either of these ). Another tool that came in handy was the ability to teleport the player to any part of the map, these 3 combined made it possible to access more or less every place in the game in a few seconds.

Also worth noting this was only added due to requests from the publisher to help QA, so without that suggestion it's likely RM would have been a way worse game due to slower development.

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Just to be helpful, here's a list of some dev tools we added(roughly ordered in usefulness compared to implementation time)

  • Gmlive: lets you update rooms/sprites/code etc. without having to recompile the game, meaning checking changes takes 0.5 seconds instead of sometimes 30+, genuinely makes game development 2-10x faster. Implementation: Easy. Value: Very high
  • Gmedit+builder: A separate code editor/development tool for gamemaker, runs way faster and is less buggy than normal gamemaker. With the builder extension you can even compile from gmedit. I honestly prefer using gmedit exclusively when I can get away with it. Implementation: Easy. Value: High
  • Teleport to mouse: Pressing R instantly teleports the player's position to where the mouse is. Implementation: Easy. Value: High
  • Toggle-able game speed: pressing a button lets us cycle game speed ( 1x, 2x, 4x ). Really helpful for skipping cutscenes etc. Implementation: Easy. Value: High
  • Map teleport: bring up a map of every room and teleport there. Implementation: medium. Value: High
  • Instakill everything: Makes all enemies have 0 hp, useful for checking i.e. boss deaths. Implementation: easy. Value: medium