Rampant Gaming!

[cowgod]

http://www.orbitalcows.com/cbi.php

I've uploaded the beta test of Calfstronaut and the Computer Bug Infection to my website.

The artist I usually work with made this game himself using Gamemaker, and I'm setting up the beta test for him.

This is a casual game where you click on computer viruses to clear them off of your mainframe. There's various power ups to use and malicious code sequences that you can't click on.

There's screenshots and a preview video at the url. It provides a link for giving feedback. Anyone who sends in feedback is eligible to receive a free copy of the finished game.

Edit: The game gets installed to the C:\Games\[our directory]\ directory instead of the C:\Program Files\[our directory]\ directory because he can't figure out how to put the save file in the user directory with Gamemaker. So it just gets saved to the directory the game is in, which could be a problem if the program doesn't have write access to the C:\Program Files\ directory.

This isn't the sort of game that ordinarily gets posted here, but I figured I'd post it anyways in case someone wants to give it a try.

[McTeddy]

That was fairly nifty. Extremely simple, but engaging at the same time.

I have posted my feedback and offer congratulations to your artist on his first solo adventure.

[cowgod]

I'm actually pretty impressed with how it's turning out. The credit's all his though. The only things I did were the installer and helping out with the testing.

[unit]

[hanako]

working_directory is NOT necessarily the directory the game is in; read up on your windows docs. it usually is, but shortcuts can make it otherwise.

there IS a proper function for getting the actual game directory but I don't remember it off the top of my head. It won't work right while the game is in development, because non-exe source code runs from a temp directory, so it'll return THAT.
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Anime Games

[GuideBot]

There's also program_directory which is where the .exe is stored but when you're testing this will be a temporary directory, so may not work. You can also specify relative paths, such as "data\levels" which you can use in, for instance, a get_open_filename to start the file picker in that directory. It seems to work whether in the .exe or the .gm8, as long as the .exe and .gm8 are in the same directory.

I don't believe there's a way to get the "user" directory as used in Vista/Windows 7.

[cowgod]

[hanako]

Wait, what do you mean by the 'user directory'? Do you mean the documents and settings style directory? It's reachable, it just takes more work. Iirc it involves getting windows environment variables to find the path... sadly I don't think I have a script sample handy at the moment.
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Anime Games

[cowgod]

Yes. For instance, I was storing my options file in "C:\Users\Steven Fletcher\Saved Games\Orbital Cows\Angelband" for Angelband (which probably won't be called Angelband any more).

There should be some way for him to find the "C:\Users\Steven Fletcher\" part or even something like "C:\Users\Steven Fletcher\AppData\Local". In Java, there's an easy way to find out these sorts of things, but I don't know enough about Gamemaker to tell him what to do.

[hanako]

Yeah, this part isn't well documented, and while I've done it, I don't have the source code on this computer and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get hold of it.

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=472787 is a topic that at least touches on the subject of using environment variables, but anyone wanting to work with them will need to research them outside the GMC because I don't think there's a list of what they are anywhere... you'd have to go to other windows programming sites to find them.
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Anime Games

[cowgod]

I've forwarded that link to Eduardo. I think it will probably help him out, though I don't think he knows that much about Windows programming in general.

It sounds the same as what Java gives me when I look up the user directory. I told him where I've been storing saved games: [user directory]\Saved Games\Orbital Cows\[game name]\ . Maybe he'll do the same thing.

In my first game where I used the user directory, I put saved games in the documents folder. In my second game, I put them in the App Data folder because that's what Geneforge does. Now I'm putting them in the Saved Games folder because that's what the free games that come with Windows do.

So long as he puts it somewhere other than the directory the game is installed to, it'll be an improvement.

Thanks for your help.