EL405: Advancing Antarctica

While working in the Game Factory 2 on my Dodge Intrepid game, I spent my last session crafting the Antarctica level. Because of the time frame involved in developing these games I don’t have the time to craft all of the graphics for these levels.

In GF2, it’s best to make the graphics first and then define them as platforms so that the player characters don’t fall off the screen. If you don’t have the time just yet to create proper graphics, but you still want to get a working demo, just create a colored rectangle object and define it as the platform. I used this method, first showed to me by Dr. Jerz, to set up my level. I created all of the platforms using gray rectangles, and then I would find the graphics I needed and lay them on top of the gray. The character will still be walking on the gray boxes, but the player wouldn’t be able to tell.

The Pro edition of GF2 comes with a number of cool textures and characters preinstalled in its library. While a lot of them are made specifically for a certain kind of game, the platforms and wall textures can be used for almost anything. I found a number of “crystal level” textures that I was able to shift to look like an ice cave. So I just laid those into the scenery and then re-edited them so that they would become active objects (the idea that these textures are “quick backgrounds” that can’t be changed to active objects still befuddles me).

Another trick that makes creating platforms a lot quicker is the qualifier property. If you make a rule that a certain character or object cannot pass through something with the property of 0 for example, then you can assign a whole bunch of objects with this 0 qualifier and you save yourself a lot of time coding. Sounds confusing, and for some reason you can’t use the qualifier option on everything, but it’s great when it works.