u/PrincipalSkudworth

So I’m still quite new to gamemaker and I saw there was a debug mode and knew it existed but hadn’t bothered looking into it. So when I was having issues and wanted to see a variable’s value at a given point I would force a show_message into the code. Dumb, painful, and super inefficient. I finally googled how to use debugger mode and found this video which was super helpful.

https://youtu.be/CRiRXIpIdYw?si=grV7hVCwbqHKLGk

That has drastically helped improve my ability to debug and fine problems. So my question is what other useful tools, functions, or extensions am I not even thinking of asking about that you have found super useful?

Oh I also found this set of scripts that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but has made letting the game use keyboard and mouse or all major gamepad controllers super easy to integrate after like 15 min of setup. And it seems like you can also use it to allow players to change key bindings and much more that I haven’t delved into yet.

https://offalynne.grebedoc.dev/Input/#/10.3/

Basically the title, new to pixel art an trying to make characters and animations in the style of the gba fire emblem games. Looking for constructive feedback.

Edit: I figured out the issue. I’m an idiot lol. I accidentally lied about my code, but by accident. Apparently my draw event for oFadeLose was actually a DrawGui event, which is why it was going over everything. I was googling some more and saw people fix a similar problem by putting the thing they wanted on top in a draw gui. So I was going to do that for retry button when I caught that oFade already was that.

The morale of the story is: Read your own code carefully lol.

I did search the sub and found a bunch of issues with fading out, but none of them seemed to address my issue.

So I've been following sergeant indie's youtube tutorial for Turn Based Strategy Games and it has been great. I've had to do my fair share of research to account for old things that don't work or work differently, but its a learning opportunity. So I'm on video 16 where we are doing a fade out when all the player characters die. So what is supposed to happen is they alpha is supposed to increase and then the little textbox pops up and it finishes fading. Then player can then click retry and it resets the room. Idk if its just a thing he wrote 9 years ago that works slightly differently now, or what.

My issue is that for some reason i can't sort out, his text box isn't darkened while mine isn't. So the first picture is what his looks like, the second picture is what mine looks like. I'm almost positive it has to be something with the alpha in "oFaceLose" draw event (detailed further down)cause i tried changing the color to blue and the same thing happens just in blue.

I've tried to account for depth as well, when I create the oFadeLose elsewhere in the code I use the create_instance_depth with depth = -4 And when the oRetryButton is created in the oFadeLose Step event I use create_instance_depth with -6. And my cursor which is supposed to be above it all at -100 depth is also being impacted by the alpha.

The youtube video I got this from is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVy63-OYJ8Q&list=PLFAuv8mcArkU5QeQv6qec5BKbZYdaWBjb&index=17

Below is my code the the object "oFadeLose" we use for fading out:

Create: // His code is visible at 19:23

alpha = 0;

finalize = false;

Step: // His code is visible at 22:00___________________________________________________

//Finalize is set to true in the main cursor step event when the user clicks retry.

if(finalize){

if(alpha <=1){

alpha += .05;

}else{

room_restart();

}

}

else{

if(alpha < 0.8){

alpha += .05;

}else{

if(!instance_exists(oRetryButton)){

instance_create_depth(room_width/2, room_height/2,-6,oRetryButton);

}

}

}

Draw:// his code is visible at 23:52 __________________________________________________

draw_set_color(c_black);

draw_set_alpha(alpha);

draw_rectangle(0,0,room_width, room_height,false);

draw_set_color(c_white);

draw_set_alpha(1);

Next is the code the the box "oRetryButton"

Create: //his code is visible at 26:08

endText = "The Heroes have fallen.";

Draw:// his code is visible at 28:23 _______________________________________________

draw_set_colour(c_black);

draw_rectangle(x - 256, y-128, x + 256,y,false);

draw_set_colour(c_white);

draw_set_font(fCrit); // this is just a font we created of a specific font and size

draw_set_halign(fa_center);

draw_text(x, y - 64,endText);

draw_set_halign(fa_left);

draw_set_alpha(1);

draw_self();

Sorry for the long post, but I am trying to include all of the relevant info and be super thorough. I actually thought I might have figured it out once or twice while writing this, but didn't. I didn't find additional things to check. Anyway I'd appreciate anyone's insight.