Super Freaks Arcade (Dev Log 11, Screen Wrapping/Option Improvements)
Here's a little peek behind the curtain for some upcoming Arcade features:
1 is that everything actually properly wraps around the screen now! This was a lot trickier to pull off than it looks. If you notice that purple debug grid, this is a spatial hashmap, and I coded one up to make collision detection a lot quicker and more efficient. Things in the game only collide with whatever is overlapping the same cells as them. I had to do some pretty weird stuff to make it so they can collide with things around the other end of the screen, in a fast way, so the game doesn't lag. I also had to do some weird things to make everything in the game drawn around the other side of the screen, and in the end I came up with a surprisingly elegant and not hacky solution for this.
2 is the options menu has been expanded. You can set visual, sound, and control options from both the main menu and even the pause menu! I have added the ability to disable some options when accessed from the pause menu in case anything that would break gameplay is added. This is a massive improvement over how these things were handled in Super Freaks 1 Ultimate Edition.
Arcade's framework has been very easy for me to work with and is drastically improved over Ultimate's, so when I'm done working on it a little bit more, I will be using it as a basis for some more projects. In the short term I would like to port the original Super Freaks trilogy (+ 1 Remastered) over to Game Maker Studio 2 with this framework and hopefully make web and android ports for them as well.