Dec 24, 2024

ACTION GAME MAKER - Gotcha Gotcha Games

Hello again, everyone! ACTION GAME MAKER producer Morino here!

We’ve received a lot of comments leading up to this 6th letter, and I’d like to thank you all! Some of the comments have been asking about how to get ready for the launch and what kind of assets ACTION GAME MAKER will support. So today we’ll go over what kind of assets and resources are supported!

Visual, audio, and video assets all have different formats, and so we’ll cover the default formats available out of the box as well as details about the assets included with purchase. So let’s get started!

General Information

Supported Resolutions

As in PGMMV, ACTION GAME MAKER supports custom resolution input, so you can make small resolution or full 4K projects if desired! But the default included assets are designed for a 960x540 image scaled to a 1920x1080 output resolution.

Supported Image Formats

BMP/PNG/JPEG/SVG/WebP are all supported by default, so you shouldn’t have any issues getting your image into ACTION GAME MAKER.
The default assets are primarily provided in PNG for ease of use and easy editing.
When creating your own original assets for an ACTION GAME MAKER project, we suggest using SVG or WebP formats due to their compression ratio and support of transparency data.

Objects

Godot treats Objects using the scene format. Each scene is saved as a .tscn file. This makes it very easy to export or import Objects. This is because animation, scripting, and other node settings are all saved within the scene file. However, this could be subject to change in future versions, as image and sound resources are not included and have a fixed path. You would need to manually add this missing information to the exported or imported data.

Scripting

ACTION GAME MAKER does allow the use of GDScript in addition to our custom visual scripting system, and you can use both freely within a single project. C# support is not available at this time.

Regarding Plugins

Any plugin that is designed to work with default Godot is expected to work with ACTION GAME MAKER.
As ACTION GAME MAKER’s additional functions are closed source, any plug-in or function changes that require a recompile of Godot are not supported for use with ACTION GAME MAKER.
However, any plugin that can be used with the official build of Godot should work with ACTION GAME MAKER.
Indeed, while there may be some compatibility testing to ensure that there are conflicts with ACTION GAME MAKER’s changes, all Godot 4.3 plugins for the 2D pipeline are expected to work. More information about Godot’s plugin system can be found here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/plugins/editor/installing_plugins.html

Graphics

Tiles

The included tileset are 24x24 tiles designed to be used with Godot’s TileMapLayer Node:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/using_tilemaps.html
TileMapLayer has no size limits, so sizes like 8x8 or 48x48 are supported, but you’re free to use unusual sizes like rectangular 16x64 tiles or whatever your project needs.
Additionally, if you separate them into layers it is possible to mix tile sizes (resolutions) in a single scene. So it’s more than possible to use both 24x24 tiles and 48x48 tiles simultaneously! In addition, thanks to the power of Godot, ACTION GAME MAKER supports the following tile layouts:
Isometric

Half-Offset Square

Hexagon

Autotile

ACTION GAME MAKER uses Godot’s Terrain and terrain tileset functionality. Typically, using terrain tiles requires manual configuration of tile connections (Peering Bits) and collision shapes for each tile. However, ACTION GAME MAKER can auto-configure Peering and collisions as long as the tile image matches our template structure.

The portions of the tile connected by the red lines represent the connections checked when determining tile placement. Users are able to paint these lines to configure the tile Peering, and this is how the autotile function determines if a tile should be changed when placing tiles into your game world. Note that if a peering extends to the edge of the tile it can connect to any other tile with a matching peering, so please be careful when configuring your tileset and tile peering.

Note that the above image is only an illustration with Peering Bit display enabled. The actual tiles look like the image below. For this sample, we used 24x24 pixel tiles, but other tile sizes will be supported.

Characters

The included character and enemy assets are designed for use with 2D bone animations. You can learn about Godot’s 2D bone animation system here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/animation/2d_skeletons.html
More than 30 animations, including the skeleton data, is included, so the animations can be quickly customized by changing the texture (sprite) data.

Texture Formatting

The default character uses a 240x144 PNG formatted image. The character ends up being sized 24x32 after compositing.
Below is a sample of the included characters. Simply replacing the sprite inside the texture file with your own customized version is enough to get started with making an original character!

Animation Data

All included animation data can be customized or appended to with your own creations. The male character includes a lot of weapon-based melee attacks, while the female character has more of a focus on movement and special abilities. Both are designed for use in Metroivania-style games.

The animation data is stored in the Godot tres format. This means that they can be exported or imported into other projects as desired. Just make sure you use the same bone structure to ensure compatibility. Note that the male and female characters do have differences in their bone structures, so the animations are not directly compatible.

In addition to bone animations, sprite-based animations are also supported. In ACTION GAME MAKER, you will need to create the sprite animations using Godot’s Animation Player, as the “AnimatedSprite2D” node is not supported. Please see this Godot documentation for information about the Animation Player:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/2d_sprite_animation.html#sprite-sheet-with-animationplayer

Character Images

Character busts included with ACTION GAME MAKER are sized at 1080x1080, and full body images are sized at 1272x2000.
Base, happy, anger, sadness, surprise, and fear expressions are included!
Note that due to the large size these images are in the WebP format.

Backgrounds/Environment

In order to enable large amounts of scrolling, images designed to be used with Godot’s Parallax2D function are included. You can learn about 2D parallax here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/2d_parallax.html
Included are 2 backgrounds: a sky-heavy outdoor environment and a skyless cave environment, with multiple layers.
For very distant use in the most background layer, the outdoor image is 720x1152, and the interior image ix 720x576.
For middle distance backgrounds, such as mountains, both the interior and outdoor images are 720x576.
For backgrounds nearest to the player, such as ones that include the ground, the outdoor version is 720x1152, and the interior version is 720x1728.

Audio

BGM/SE

The included assets are all in the Ogg format. While WAV, Ogg, and MP3 are all supported formats, Ogg was chosen due to the reasonable file size and ease of looping provided by the format. While the default Ogg metadata (LOOPSTART, etc.) are not supported, it is still possible to create specific loops manually using offsets.
Please check the Godot documentation for more information about supported audio formats:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/assets_pipeline/importing_audio_samples.html#supported-audio-formats

Video

The only video format supported by ACTION GAME MAKER is Ogv (Ogg Theora). H.264 and H.265 codec videos, while a popular format, are not currently supported by Godot due to Godot’s structure as an open source engine. Some additional information can be found in the Godot documentation:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/animation/playing_videos.html

And that’s all there is to know about the default assets included with ACTION GAME MAKER! While we tried to keep it simple today, I think this gives you an idea of how versatile we’ll be thanks to the power of Godot! While the included assets focus on a pixel-style side view action game, it should be possible to create a variety of games using these assets, especially if you start creating your own assets. And that was our goal for today: to give future ACTION GAME MAKER developers information needed to get started on getting assets prepared!

That’s all for today! Unfortunately we’re not quite ready to share the release date, but I can tell you that we’re still working hard during this holiday season. Our next letter will be in January, so I hope everyone is able to enjoy the holidays while they wait!
Have a Happy New Year!