Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Multiplayer games offer game designers many additional ways to create playing experiences that are fun. Even games that are not very enjoyable on your own can be very addictive when playing with or against other human players. Harnessing this power requires designing games that treat all players fairly but still allow them to make the kind of meaningful choices that make games interesting to play. In this chapter we’ll discuss some of the strategies you can use to strike the right balance in your own multiplayer games.

So far we’ve controlled the behavior of the different objects in our games using events and actions. These actions let the instances of the object perform tasks when certain events occur in the game. In this chapter we are going to define those tasks in an alternative way: by using programs. Programs define tasks through lines of text called code that use functions instead of actions. This extends the scope of Game Maker considerably as there are only about 150 different actions but close to a thousand functions . These functions give you much more control than actions, allowing you to define precisely how tasks should be performed in different circumstances.

In this chapter we are going to create a version of the game tic-tac-toe in which you are pitted against an intelligent computer opponent. This opponent must have a strategy that will regularly beat the player to keep it challenging, but the computer opponent must not be too strong; otherwise the player has no chance of winning, and will quickly become frustrated and give up. We will also show how the computer can adapt its play to the level of the player. The game will be almost completely written using the GML programming language, so make sure you read and understood Chapter 12 on GML before starting this chapter.

An interesting and challenging game must involve tricky opponents that require clever thinking or quick reactions to defeat. Up to now, the enemies in our games behaved rather stupidly—they were just following predefined rules or attacking randomly. In this chapter we will make the enemies a bit more intelligent, but care must be taken that we do not make them too clever—we still want the player to be able to win the game.

So that’s it—you’ve made it to the end. You’ve completed all the challenges this book has to offer and, we hope, learned a lot about creating games in the process. You’ve battled demons, flown spacecrafts, dodged crates, juggled starfish, rescued koalas, commanded tanks, survived dogfights, hidden from mummies, and still had time for a game of tic-tac-toe along the way! We hope you’ve enjoyed this journey. Just because this book has come to an end, it doesn’t mean that your gaming projects have to. So before we say a final farewell, we’ll quickly mention some other directions you could explore if you want to continue enhancing your game development skills.

The design chapters in this book are founded on over two decades of amateur and professional experience developing computer games. Nonetheless, the following texts have helped to add structure and conviction to many of the ideas and concepts discussed therein: