![Game Builder Garage [Demo] -- 4. Tag Showdown: Making the Floor and Walls](/images/yt/hs/game-builder-garage-demo-4-tag-showdown-making-the-floor-9v58c.jpg)
Game Builder Garage [Demo] -- 4. Tag Showdown: Making the Floor and Walls
1You should know that there's no game powerful enough to contain me!
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I think we're just about out of random tangents for me to waste valuable descriptive allowance on... just who do I think I am?! I'm not MAKING anything here! I'm just taking credit for work that other people have done. Even worse if it's taking credit for following the directions they made to reproduce their great works!
It also means, on a less self-aggrandizing (and also self-deprecating?) note... that we can just get right down to it.
These videos are short, because they wisely chose to make the tasks contained within easier to digest and functionally relevant to some big important milestone in the progress towards completing our game.
By which I mean the game the game designers designed for us to design. The game. Wow, it sure got recursive up in here!
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Lesson 1: Tag Showdown
Step 2 - Making the Floor and Walls
Just as with the earlier lessons, it's actually important that we have proper context for literally anything we might be doing if we're going to do things the right way... so when the step promises something concrete like "making the floor and walls"... you can definitely expect more than just that. We've only just begun poking at this beast, after all!
For starters, they never promised anything to do with a game screen, but... well, all (video) games take place on a screen, don't they?! What a bizarre thing to just gloss over, don't you think?
...actually, this is one of the bigger tripping points when it comes to game design, I feel like. Actually DISPLAYING the things that are happening isn't even remotely trivial. In fact, there's a ton of super technical complexity in just "making stuff happen"... if you first need to worry about making it possible for people interacting with your game to SEE that happening, right?
The trouble is, it's super unglamorous... ... ... we don't care HOW it happens, just that we get to SEE it happening. So... it's... kind of a catch-22 situation like that.
Besides, don't feel like you need to anguish over it, since even modern day production grade video games all the way up to AAA have a hard time with... y'know, the "simple" detail of getting the game to display correctly.
I think it's because modern designers of the nuts and bolts technical mumbo jumbo want more pixels... but not TOO many of them, so they gotta anti-alias the sharp edges off. And they want lighting! Lots and lots of lighting. Lights so bright they'll bloom your eyes off! ...but not TOO much lighting, we need to trace rays to cast shadows and occlude stuff ambiently. It's gonna be absolutely specular!
Thankfully, we don't really care about that here. We just want to point, shoot, action. What you see is what you get! Now, gimme! Thus, we've mercifully reduced the "screen" consideration to a tangible little box to play around with.
But that's not all! If you want a floor and walls... what is a... "floor"... or "wall"? I'm not being trite, either... how's the game itself supposed to know what you mean? Those concepts are way too abstract for it! Give it something it can understand!
As such, we turn to objects. And object properties. THOSE make sense to a computer!
...actually, if we want to get SUPER technical... "object" is also pretty abstract. In fact, in the lingo of computing, literally anything with "properties" is an "object"... that is, if you need to describe a thing as more than just a glorified number... it's probably an object. Ever heard of "object-oriented programming"?! Even that "Game Screen" nodon or whatever? Also an object. Just not an Object Nodon. Which is itself an object. That person? An object. They're all just objects of different classes.
... ... ...I apologize, I got a little carried away... won't let it happen again. Probably. At least not too often. I think it makes it all the clearer why it makes just as much sense for our purposes to call them a "Nodon"... and that's even before you get to the fact that one of them is literally an "Object Nodon"...
Let's get back to the object of the game about making games, shall we?
As you can see, you have to be VERY careful with how you tell the software running the game what each of the things it's in charge of managing behind the scenes are actually like.
It might make sense to you that a long, wide box should remain stationary to be stood on... but the game still needs it spelled out that a proper "floor" also needs to be stationary, (hopefully) doesn't break, and otherwise doesn't innately DO anything but exist for the purposes of standing. Likewise a "wall" is similar in that it makes perfect sense to us that it should be a stable fixture enclosing an area.
Good thing for our sakes that the garage knows how to repetitively reproduce identical results if we ask it to.
...curses! Despite my constant effort to the contrary, the game world has closed in around me! I can't escape!
Game over!
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