The Duel

Download The Duel from itch.io

Watch Gameplay video

Though this game is part of the Legendary Quest of Sándor Rózsa universe (as one of the contestants is Sándor Rózsa himself), I decided to put this game on a separate page. As usual, this was made for HEJ’s (One Game A Month) challenge, where that month’s theme was: DUEL. And here’s the story….

The theme was announced at the first meeting in January, and as sometimes, I didn’t have any idea and decided to drop this month’s challenge. So I started to make new scripts and revise old ones and gather these in one project for later use. Around one and a half week passed when I realized something. Should you read the Sándor Rózsa page of this homepage, right in the first chapter I mentioned how I envisioned multiplayer games in this world. And actually one of those ideas is a duel game. But not a duel with two pistols, but with one pistol. Two players have to complete a platformer course filled with traps, spikes and seemingly impossible jumps to reach the golden pistol. The winner takes it all!

First, I had to do something I haven’t done before (and this is a good practice): a split screen. I realized there was no tutorial on youtube about this, made specifically for GMS 2. No results when I googled it. I found only GM 1.4 videos, and it seemed easy enough, so I started to meddle in GMS 2. So, setting it up in the editor was somewhat easy, making two views with visible boundaries, and then two basic sprites, followed by their individual cameras. And it worked. But when I wanted to combine it with my current camera system (having it form the views for the user’s display), it brought no good or very bad results. It took me a couple of nights to sort out that the functions that I tried don’t even work, and then I found some built-in variables to handle these. And the Heureka moment came and the split screen worked perfectly. So I could move on with the game.

I implemented the new menu scripts, it turned out they are still faulty, so those needed some mending. Finally I was able to move around the two players, followed by my special camera system. I put in some usable objects from the Ian Stokesworth project, and started to pick tiles from my old Sándor project. That means the palette for the tiles are over the top, 12-16 shades per color, which is a lot. But I had to work with what I had, very few new graphical elements were made (like the climb the ladder anims, or the moving obstacles, those are new).

To my delight, Allegra, my darling girlfriend agreed to draw some layouts for two maps. So, when I was still coding, she watched what obstacles I have made and drew on a grid paper what she thought would do as a platformer level. And they turned out to be great! I loved them, so I started to build them and tweaked some stuff to make the maps mostly harder.

I made a bunch of new code or meddled with existing ones to fit this particular game. Old ones include the spikes, the ladder, tile based collision, player controls and full movement. New ones include the checkpoint system (flying the player to the last one, destroying old checkpoints so the player won’t fall on them accidentally). The morning star and sewer stone objects got a new moving script, which makes them “fall” in a direction like they were affected by gravity (with increasing speed). I used paths for the first time, and will try to use them for a new moving script, as my older one sometimes fails to do its job. This moving script has some nice acceleration and deceleration probabilities and I will check if I can make something similar or better with the path system. I also made some nice thundergrids. Those react to the characters, and if a player jumps on a red button, the grid zaps the other character. Those are there so players can obstruct each other. I also put some wildlife in the game in the form of fish and birds.

The game turned out to be quite fun, where people sit and yell in front of it. 🙂 After the meetup, I implemented an Easy and Hard mode to choose from. Besides that, I put away this project for now, but seeing it played by others I would say it is fun enough, so I will return to it at some point to realize it as a party game or something.