I added a small side quest involving a girl's scout summer camp for "Abstráctomon" in Error Ware 2.

If you've played the Pokémon main games, you're probably familar with the concept of "TMs". They're usually treated as items you can find, buy or receive from NPCs. 

Using an TM enables you to teach a certain move to a Pokémon in your team, either just once or infinite times, depending on the generation of games.

I too want the player of my game Abstráctomon to customize his monsters' move sets, but I'm trying a different approach.

In Abstráctomon, you can get a note book called "Move Memo" early on. It lets your character take notes after a battle (wild & trainer battles) and write down any new move your opponent (successfully) used against you!

This happens automatically and you get a short notification at the end of the battle if there were new entries to your Move Memo.

In it, you can view all moves you encountered in a handy list with newly added moves at the top, highlighted with a small green ! symbol. 

I want to add a sort function that lets you sort the move list by number, name, type, cost to make finding moves that fit your team easier.

To teach a monster the selected move, it needs to have the correct type and enough EXP. The monster's current (not total!) EXP acts as a currency in this case. Your monster gets EXP for defeating an opposing monster, but beware - if it levels up, its EXP wrap around 0 again! 

So you have to decide if you want to train for a level up or rather stop when the EXP count is high, so you can exchange them for a custom move!

Do you like this idea? Leave a comment and let me know!

Time for some new Abstráctomon screenshots!

Here's the final Move Memo menu. Sorting works now, too!

I changed some sea floor tiles to make it more clear were you can and can't walk (shallow water vs. ocean floor).

Speaking of tiles, tiny pebbles now indicate the area you can push rocks in, You can walk over them, but the rock can't be pushed on them!

I added lanterns and new big hollow tree stumps (more about them here) to the forest area and turned part of it into a race track! 
Maybe you get a cool reward if you can break the record time?

Here are some things I worked on in Error Ware 2 since the last post.

Players can now use the WASD keys along the arrow keys. That makes it easier to share a keyboard!

In Abstráctomon, you can now turn on the spot without moving by tapping the directional buttons. 

Also, you might be able to find special nuts at suspicious places.
What they're good for? You'll have to find out yourself!

You can now easily go to your bag whenever you pick up an item. I improved the bag a bit, too. It now shows the last item you've got at start up.

I might add a sort function to the bag like I did with the Move Memo, but I'd need to change the code a bit for that to work.

Finally, I'd like to mention that I improved some of the monster's battle sprites.

That's it for today!

I added more borders to choose from when playing Abstráctomon! 


I had a hard time figuring out how to solve an scaling issue when taking screenshots of the game (still not solved!). They're never pixel-perfect even when I brute force the game to the 240x160 resolution... 

Anyway, while trying various things I implemented a debug feature to take a screenshot of the whole map at once (beyond the camera's current view) and figured I could use them for a game guide! 

Here's a preview of it (work in progress):

Quick tech update: 

I found a solution for the scaling issue (nasty gaps between tiles)! 

Seems like some graphics card drivers (= mine) have an issue with scaling Game Maker games. To be save I made it a toggle in the options menu.

"Sharpness A" now scales the image actually 1 px larger then it's intended resolution (481x321 instead of 480x320 and so on). 

The solutions online all suggested adding a pixel border to the tilesets, but that would be borderline insane with the amount of tiles I got! This 1 px stretch fixes it on my machine, so if you got that issue set it to "A". The "B" setting turns that fix off. 

Now I can scale the game any which way I want, so I added a third zoom option.

You can now choose from

Don't cut your eyes(?) on these sharp pixels!

A video about recent additions to Abstráctomon, coming soon to Error Ware 2.

Another quick development update for "Abstráctomon - Venom Violet Version" coming soon to "Error Ware 2" by U-GameZ.

I'm working on better lighting at night / inside caves in Abstráctomon. 

Here's a video...

...and some screenshots of my progess so far.

It took several different approaches but I finally managed to implement a lighting system that works with moving lights, too. I may tweak colors / brightness levels here and there, but for now I'm happy with the results.

Some neat visual stuff I recently added to "Abstráctomon". Happy Easter!

This time, I present two neat visual updates I finished today!

Showing off a new item + mechanic in Abstráctomon!

I ran out of space in the game options menu, so I added another page for the Graphics settings. Why I ran out of space? 

Because of the new LCD filter!

The filter displays faint black horizontal lines between pixels and also (very) faint RGB squares, one per pixel. It's a subtle effect but it emulates the feel of a handheld screen. Since we scale the view up, we can actually draw between the game's pixels. So these aren't scanlines in the traditional sense, more like the borders of the liquid crystals the Error Boy Adventure's display is made of. 

Whatever, I think it looks neat. If you like your graphics clean, just turn it off! 

Quite a few updates in this one! A berry system, "quality of life" additions and a neat little animation.

In this development update video for Abstráctomon I show off another use for the shovel, the finished berry planting process, holding items and some improved menus.

I rewrote the shadow system for large objects like trees and buildings in Abstráctomon. Their shadows now deform in a more realistic manner. 

In this gif

you can see the new shadows and a timelapse of the whole berry growing process.

Get a look at new plant-based ladder technology and a convenient place for your gardening needs.

I got lots of smaller things done in Abstráctomon this week. Here's a quick rundown:

You can now buy  berries and seeds from a lady in the Gardencenter. Seeds can be planted instead of a berry if you don't want to "waste" a berry.

Roughly 12 years after I graduated high school I finally figured out how sine and cosine work... So now reflections in water can have a wavy distortion. I'll probably use this for other effects (e.g. in battle) as well.

Blending a sprite in Gamemaker with a different color is quite easy to do, but for some reason if you want to color a sprite completely white, you have to do some trickery. I ended up switching to 3D mode (d3d) for a fraction of a second to enable white "fog" and then had to alter the distance of that fog to fade the "whitness" in an out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bonus Gamemaker 8 tip:

Since I added the "backlight" brightness setting to the game, I had an annoying issue with the text flickering when lowering the brightness (archived by a subtracting blendmode). I finally figured out the reason: 

To reduce lag in the menus caused by my crappy text script, I draw the text only for one frame, take a screenshot and then display that instead. But apparently Gamemaker's screenshots turn gray / black parts of the image slightly transparent (why???), hence the difference in the hue of the text.

I tried to draw a black rectangle under the sprite but here's a much easier fix:

To fix this, you can draw the screenshot with the blend mode draw_set_blend_mode_ext(bm_one,bm_src_alpha_sat);
which will ensure that the sprite drawn has its alpha set to 1 (= no transparency).