Back on my Bullshit

It's been ages since I touched gamemaker. I got confused, and then I got bored, but now I'm back into it.

    Lemme tell you. I have not made jack shit of progress. Other than having collected enough stray tiles to pretty much cover anything I feel like making (Thank you YMS pixel art world.) and then smushing a few different tilesets together to make one big school set. I guess I've narrowed the idea down to some horror set in a school (very original), but beyond that I don't have too much. I wont be worrying about that until I have my actual framework in.

Framework Struggles

    Gamemaker is not RPGmaker. Anyone who has ever even looked at the two softwares can tell you this. If you want RPG mechanics, you need to build them in from the ground up. That is what I'm currently working on.

    The newest update of GMS  came out in like April or something, and it added in a good amount of things and fixed some bugs. Not only that but there are new tutorials and more written about the engine. I figured it was worth taking a refresher course on what little I knew, and cross referencing it with my old notes. 

The guy who's tutorials I was following very early on (Matharoo) got hired by yoyoGames to make in-house tutorials for GMS. (I mention using his assets in this earlier post.) So he went dark on his channel for a bit while he worked on the tutorials for the official page. This meant I went into the tutorial dark ages, because his were the best. However those videos are out now, along with the new version of GMS. Allowing me to continue on a fresh note.

That new RPG tutorial series came with a partially complete template, which I am studying as best I can.

However I am stupid, and get very easily overwhelmed by massive chunks of new information. It's bad, I get heart palpitations every time I open GMS on my computer. 

    Back to the main topic. Before I start doing any story stuff in my game, I want to have a solid template I can work off of that has everything I need, and nothing I don't so it doesn't overwhelm me.

Very specifically, I want a movement system that supports WASD and arrow key input. This is because WASD is popular, but I like arrow keys. I think I can carry this sort of dual-control system into other things like object interaction.

I also want to have a similar menu system that shows a list inventory along with character stats. I'll need to play a few more RPGmaker games to get the feel of them in order to replicate that better.

What now?

    Since I'm working in TXT files, the next move after I'm satisfied is to test it all in engine. After I'm happy with what I've got, I'll post my findings for future reference.

Btw, trying to understand the maths for this is COOKING ME. HOLY FUCK. and so many tutorial makers seem to think it's helpful or simplifying to not tell you what anything means, in favor of just telling you to copy. I can't copy what I don't understand! Simply copying character by character doesn't mean I know how to write, so it definitely doesn't mean I know how to code. Especially since we're essentially writing and solving complex math equations with elaborate variable names. These things aren't intuitive.