Development 2: Programming

Programming this game has been the biggest exercise I've done with states, or using a bunch of the same objects that are using different "states" to orchestrate what they're all doing. I've played with states before in a game I wanted to make about an orphanage for fully grown clowns acting independently, and used some of the code from that, specifically kids starting out as IDLE and then responding to outside events, like "the presence of a squirt gun" or "the presence of a piece of cake." From there, their actions branch out to different actions, like "reloading the squirt gun" or "eating the cake" without getting stung by a bee. Given that this game has been developed in Game Maker Studio 2, a hurdle I hit a couple times was with the built-in function of "move towards an object while avoiding other objects," the function script mp_potential_step. It sometimes results in children spinning in circles indefinitely, usually because one of their friends has fallen unconscious at their feet, which my girlfriend said makes sense: kids do freak out sometimes. It's something I will try to mitigate though so it doesn't break the immersion of the game.