Game 05 - Sinking Ship Game: Good Start

All three characters huddled together

LINK to the game
Initially I tried to make the game genuinely out of pixels. So each character was only a couple of pixels in size. Game Maker didn't like that one bit so instead I just faked single pixels by making everything out of 32x32 blocks of color (with a few exceptions). It looks great. I'm very happy with the graphics so far.




I've spent about 9 hours working on this game today alone.
The programming has been quite problematic. This game is my most ambitious yet and it's all quite shaky. The characters teleport through walls and stuff but I'm getting there. I think If I changed the control scheme I could actually fix this problem quite easily but it would involve rewriting a bunch of hard work. I'll probably make a branch and experiment with it to see if I can get it to work well.

The aim of the game is to try and get all three characters to safety at the top of the room. Currently the water rises slowly every second but ideally I'd like it to be relative to the amount of 'moves' taken. This means that the game will become turn based rather than action but I think it will benefit from the change (I THINK it might actually fix two massive bugs too. I hope so).
Each character has their own traits. The guy on the left is 'slower' but he can hack computers (white squares) and build ladders whereas the woman in the middle next to the button is a fantastic climber and can scale vertical walls. The guy up the top right is a professional at swimming and can hold his breath for long amounts of time. his height and strong thigh muscles means he can jump high too.

I am very quickly starting to doubt how viable procedural generation for this game is since it's very strategy/puzzle based it could render some levels unbeatable unless executed very finely.

Controls:
left click and drag each character to move them. They automatically fall to the floor so you shouldn't be able to pull them up a level (although you can).

right click a character to see their available options. 'Jump' is currently not implemented and the swimmer only is partially implemented.


PS. It's currently impossible to do much more than move side to side and push buttons but I honestly do feel like I've made a ton of progress.