It was a busy two weeks experimenting on some tech to make the game look better. I’ll be talking on Normal Maps for 2d sprites and drawing hand made normal maps, deferred lighting and myst/fog shader

Normal Maps

These are typically used in 3d where you have the normals information stored in RGB of each pixel, so if you have 1,0,0 color the normal is sticking to the right (x), 0,1,0 the normal is sticking upward (y), and 0,0,1 the normal is sticking out in the Z direction.

These normals information are used with the lighting part of the shader so that it gives more depth to the rendering.

Go and have a look at this online tool to generate normal maps: https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

Unfortunately the generated normal maps (especially when it’s just from 1 diffuse image) are not accurate. There are other tools which will generate normal maps, some from multiple images with different lighting conditions, but I always wanted to experiment with drawing normal maps by hand.

You basically pick a color from a normal map containing a sphere, and paint with that color. You can use photoshop/Gimp or a more focused tool like Sprite Illuminator.

If you want to use Photoshop, you can use the 3d system where you can drop in a light and move it around to see how your normal map is behaving. This gives a nice tutorial on how to start: https://magazine.artstation.com/2019/04/handpainting-normal-maps-in-photoshop-with-nick-lewis/

Here are some other interesting articles on 2d sprites and normal maps:

Deferred Lighting in Game Maker Studio 2

In order to calculate lighting on sprites, you need to use a shader to do the calculations per pixel, and if you have more than one light, the ideal is to use a deferred lighting shader. What this entails is to have different surfaces (buffers) where to draw the diffuse, normal maps, and specular, then pass these surfaces to the shader to calculate the resulting image. This causes a bit of nuisance in GM because you have to render the thing multiple times with different sprites (diffuse, normal, specular). I opted for splitting these 3 phases using GameMaker’s Draw Begin, Draw, and Draw End for diffuse, normal, and specular respectively. Then pass the surfaces at the end to finally draw to the application surface. Since I didn’t have time to draw all the normal/specular maps, I created default shaders to have a flat normal map for the current sprite, and no specular for current sprite.

I created the deferred lighting shader following this great resource:

Myst/Fog Shader

I’m no shader guru but there are lots out there who do crazy stuff with black magic, i.e. insane math. There are some cool demos over shadertoy.com and you can easily adapt them to GameMaker Studio 2 with some tweaking to get it like you want it.

Also this resource is also interesting when it comes to shaders: https://thebookofshaders.com

I’m always thinking on how to make the game look better, and I thought perhaps dynamic lights might give the game a bump in visual quality. So I took a screenshot and did a quick 2 minutes mockup of how it would look like if the game had dynamic lights and shadows. Here’s how the game looks right now (simple circle light), followed by dynamic light mockup.

I thought that looks nicer! So I invested some time to make a simple implementation as outlined here and here.

This is how the dynamic lighting prototype looked. I modified it a bit to expose part of the platforms as otherwise it would be just dark.

Ok, the platform edges can be smoothened, and even the shadow edges. But the gist was there. The first reaction was WOW. But then after some playtesting, the shadow lines dancing around with you weren’t a nice effect as I had imagined. Since the light is always with the player, the shadow lines were always on the move and believe me, it really annoys you while playing it. It may look cool in a statical image or even in a video, but when playing it it feels like you have a sort of cognitive overload with all those shadow lines zapping around your avatar.

So yeah, back to simple circle lights ?

I’ve been using GameMaker Studio 2 for the last 4 or so months on a roguelike platformer with a ton of humor called Pyramid Plunge, and it’s kinda funny how I ended up really liking this engine. This is how it started…

So I heard about GameMaker several times for several years but it always looked too basic whenever I looked at it. I had an idea for a roguelike platformer and felt like experimenting a bit before actually starting the random level generation. So I decided to try something out. Try to make a simple platformer (static screen) where you can jump around and shoot enemies with a gun. I said I will try GameMaker and Unity side by side, i.e. give each engine a couple of days and decide from there. Now I’ve been using Unity for 10 years so I thought it was going to be an unfair comparison. But for 2D I was more used to NGUI and didn’t yet get to use all the 2D stuff tools they’ve been adding.

I decided to start with GameMaker Studio 2. I installed it, and started some asteroids tutorial just to get an idea of the engine. My first reaction when I realised the horror that each method needs to be in a separate file was, “WHAT IN THE HELL?? Uninstall!”. And that’s what I did.

So I went back to Unity and started on the simple platformer and for the couple of days I spent on Unity I was not really happy. It really felt that Unity was not made for 2d games, and that’s what it is. It has been adapted for 2d. I felt like I could do more in that time and also I wasn’t feeling the controls were anything close to what I wanted.

I decided to give GameMaker another chance. I re-installed it, and this time I said I will forget all about the nice OOP stuff we’re all used to, and the code editors, and try to forget about Unity for a couple of days. I finished the asteroids tutorial and then started doing the simple platformer with shooting. To my surprise I started getting a good feel for the platformer not to mention the speed to get things done. I can’t exactly pin-point why this is because on paper Unity is much more advanced. But the tools in GameMaker are so razor-sharp focused for 2D games and the API so simple to get you started that you feel like a rocket is attached to your chair.

Once I was happy with the controls and had a sort of fun toy where i could jump around with the character and feel the controls were precise enough, I thought I will probably get stuck when trying to do level generation since it’s more abstract. But I got something running after a couple of hours. From that point on I never looked back and kept improving on that prototype.

If you’re holding back from trying GameMaker because you’re used to Unity, and you want to do a 2D game, I strongly suggest you give GameMaker a chance. If you’re going to try it, prepare yourself for the following:

• Forget the typical classes with methods. Each method is a script file and can therefore be used by unrelated objects. I’ve heard they will be changing this soon
• Forget anonymous methods (lambda) although I’ve heard that is coming soon too
• Forget about dropping PSDs and such. Unity’s import pipeline is much more straight forward but this is not a show stopper.
• Forget about using animation tool for keyframes etc. It’s all code baby – just get used to programming the animations with tweens, as it should be. I never liked using keyframing animations anyway in Unity either. In fact I had done my own tweening library for unity. For gamemaker I use this: TweenGMS Pro
• Forget playerprefs BUT there’s an awesome free plugin with the same functionality but you don’t need to remember calling Save – playerprefs_gm
• You might get confused with the GameMaker versions they have at first, but in short the free version is limited to number of objects/scripts/etc you can create. You will get hooked and then buy the creator version (39$). This will not create optimised builds though as they have some VM version, and also it’s only for one platform that you run the IDE in. So you can then upgrade later to the Developer version (99$ or the difference if it’s just an upgrade). Then they have the console version which is just 199$

Once you get over the above, and change perspective on GameMaker, you’ll get up to speed and enjoy implementing your next 2d game really fast.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Unity but if the project is purely 2D, I’m convinced GameMaker is a better choice since it seems to be its main focus.

If you want to playtest the vertical slice of Pyramid Plunge join us on Discord 

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