A quick and easy way to do a sword-slash effect in GameMaker!
When my enemy parent object gets hit (all enemies are children of this object, so any enemy that gets hit basically), first check to see if a hit alarm has already been set. If not, go ahead and set it for 1/10th of a second, play a sound, and call instance_create_depth to create the slashEffect_obj. Note the x and y positions–we’re adding a random number from -4 to 4 to x and to y. This is so the slash object is not always created in the exact center of the enemy object.
The slashEffect_obj’s Create Event then picks an angle using “image_angle = choose(90, 180, 270, 360)”. We could include more or less angles in the choose function here, but this works pretty well. This, combined with a bit of randomness to the x & y coordinates of the object, helps the slash effect look a little different each time.
The image_speed of the animation is also set (I’m setting image_index = 0 here for some reason, but it’s totally not necessary). The only other event is Animation End, which calls instance_destroy() to kill the effect object.
(Oh, and back on the enemy object, when the alarm hits 0, it will set “isHit” back to false and the enemy can be hit again.)
EDIT: I have this working in game, but it’s not yet ready to show what this looks like. Keep an eye out–should be ready next week, I think! In the future, I’ll try to show code of stuff that I’ve already shown you guys. :)
Let me know if you have any questions!
I don’t always have something visually interesting to show for #screenshotsaturday, so I set up a poll to see if people were interested in seeing screenshots of code (people have requested this before, but I couldn’t tell if they were serious or joking!).
Turns out 80% so far are actually interested, so here ya go, lol. This is kind of nice for me because working on a game isn’t always working on the glamorous visuals. I spend most of my time here in the code!