Devlog #1 adding a shop.

I just found out that itch supports an easy way to post devlogs so I guess I should use it.

Welcome to my first devlog and I want to talk about my MANY struggles with trying to make my shop system.

I first started with a tutorial on making menus and submenus and I decided to use it for my shop system. I decided that the shop should be used during gameplay to not disrupt flow and to add a bit more challenge. So I used the main menu as a base and copied it exactly into the shop and then changing what I want. Now is a good time to mention that I’m making this game in Game Maker Studio 2 which uses the GML programming language. The menus work on a basis of the 2 statements “switch” and “case:” the main problem with following this tutorial is that I didn’t fully understand the switch statement so when it came time to shake things up for my shop I got a little confused and had to research it a bit more on the online manual.

Let’s jump forward a bit to when I have the meat of the shop setup and I’m working out my submenus. It works on a system like Case 1: = submenu 1; case 2: = submenu 2; etc, and then these cases had their own cases so you could have something like, case 1: has 3 subcases, subcase 1 of case 1 is upgrades, subcase 2 of case 1 is weapons, etc. I had noticed a weird bug where no matter which subcase you selected in the shop it would select that subcase from the furthest down case in the code. After about 2 hours I realized I had forgotten to put a VERY crucial statement called “break” at the end of each case which meant that when you tried to select subcase 2 from case 1 it would also select subcase 2 in case 2 and case 3 and case 4.

Remember how I said earlier that I had watched a tutorial and copied the code from my main menu? My main menu only had one subcase so I never saw this earlier and when I expanded it for my shop I had also forgot to copy the break statement.

Anyway this concludes my first devlog and I hope to continue this game in the future and infact I’m about to go start working on beta 3. I have a discord half-setup for suggestions and bug reports but you can always report them here and I would really appreciate suggestions, bug reports, and feedback as it helps me make an even better game. Finally I have a trello board if you want to see what im working on or what I have planned

Discord: https://discord.gg/2gaxUZ3QUx/ Trello: https://bit.ly/3kfxvhi/