Woah!! Once again you delivered an amazing project!! I admire your talent and skills and hope someday to be as good as you are :) You truly inspire me! The blur caught me off guard xD And the details are soooo great! I may be nostalgic but I love the Matrix xD But the Ghost effect looks great as well!
Viewing post in Hologram Cyberpunk in gamemaker comments
Thanks :D Well, I'll need someone to test my multiplayer game soon. Have you ever heard of Soldat?
I’m making a game similar to that one, 2D, destructible terrain, a shooter, but with way more effects and juice.
Multiplayer, though, is a completely different beast than singleplayer. You really have to shift your mindset beyond standard solo game dev. It’s genuinely hard.
I once made a simple multiplayer game, but never released it because it was really simple multiplayer system like moving, shooting, jumping platforms and some simple ai. So same boring stuff. Also I sucked at pixel art back then. A few years passed, I went through tons of tutorials, and now I’m taking another shot at it. What I’m doing now feels like compound interest in a bank. For years you don’t really see any results and it’s frustrating, but after a while the gains start to become obvious.
For example, over the years I’ve watched pretty much every YouTube video from every channel about GameMaker. Earlier it was JS, PHP, C++, Python — but GameMaker, in my opinion, is extremely intuitive for small projects.
Problems start with bigger ones, and that’s when it hit me: the key is building your own system.
You need to really understand how loops and data structures work. GM is actually very similar to JavaScript, you’ve got structs, constructors, and a lot of modern mechanisms. There aren’t many good books about GameMaker itself, but there are tons about JavaScript. And once you understand the concepts, it’s easy to transfer them, but first you have to know how GameMaker and GML actually work.
The problem is that if someone today scrolls TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube Shorts for an hour or more, they’re basically burning their brain’s creative capacity. They won’t create anything meaningful, because the brain just isn’t adapted to that amount of constant input.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human evolution had almost no data overload. This massive spike only happened around 20 years ago. There’s no way our brains could have adapted that fast to something previous generations never experienced.
That’s why I don’t even have Instagram or TikTok installed on my phone. I completely cut interest in those apps. I use Facebook only for GameMaker, indie dev, and gamedev groups. Because what’s easier: spending an hour learning what it actually takes to release a game on Steam and configure it with your engine, or an hour of scrolling, where dopamine is served on a silver platter? You go to the bathroom and you scroll. That’s the world we live in.
So yeah, I drifted off-topic a bit, but even though we live in times that give us huge technological advantages, we’re also addicted to technology in a way that’s genuinely destructive.
You description kinda reminded me of The Finals! I've never played it, but a friend of mine is a streamer and has played it sometimes. The idea of destructible terrain is really satisfying when pulled oof, but it has a massive work behind it all, too much for my little brain :')
I agree with you! I never installed tik tok and only have instagram, mostly because I used it as my canvas for my musical persona, so I needed a medium where I could publish my music, videos and stories, but I still try to keep off of it as much as possible. Now it became my meme sharing app where all I see are the memes I get from my friends xD And also quit facebook because it was my main offender for procrastinating.
GML has very shot material indeed, and the manual is rich, but a bit too superficial or difficult to read sometimes. When I feel stuck I start asking blackbox about the language and especially the engine itself ( since I didn't find anything about it ) and treat AI as a teacher who can help me study rather than give me solutions, and I feel like it is helping me learn faster. I still spend time on forums and see some amazing posts and videos, but sometimes tutorials or videos are way too specific.
I thought of multiplayer in the past, and still wish to work on a project someday, but at the moment I don't think it's a challenge I could take xD