nath0rn atm

I had an email about the Hospital of Horrors game asking many questions. Since I wanted to release the source for this game after it was done Uni wise, I figured I should get around to it now!

Before you get too excited, here are some things to remember.

• The music and sounds have been removed. Using copyrighted material in a University setting is acceptable for presentation purposes, but not really in any other situation.
• All the graphics in the game were created by Bettina Walsh. Please don’t steal or use them for anything unless you have her permission!

To see what it’s all about, you’ll need the following. The addons are included in the package, but if you wanted to know more you can follow the links:

• Game Maker Pro v8
• Extreme Physics 2.0 (2D physics engine for Game Maker)
• FMOD Sound System (Industry Standard Sound Libraries for Game Maker)
• CleanMem.gex (A cheap hack to make the game appear to use less memory then it does ;o, but it’s not enabled )

I think the game will open in the Lite version of Game Maker (non paid version) so you can check out the codez (which I really don’t care what you do with), but you wont be able to compile it.

So download here and check it out! (ZIP 11,124KB)

Hospital of Horrors was developed for a University final project. I did the programming and worked with Bettina Walsh, who created all the lovely art work! After 12 weeks of development, the game has reached a playable BETA stage. For now, development will be on hold to focus on another things, but there will be a finished version later down the track. We have some YouTube videos, check them out! If anyone would like to download the Desktop version, they can do so here. Please keep in mind it’s not a finished product and there are a few things which need improvement, but the basic mechanic of it is there.

If anyone was interested, the game was developed in Game Maker, since it’s great for sticking together a simple game, and also for prototyping ideas! If anyone is wanting to explore Game Design to create their own ideas, I’d highly recommend this program! It’s a great introduction to basic programming knowledge and design iteration.

From here I’m going to develop my skills further into ActionScript while learning PHP/MySQL so I can create Flash based games and have knowledge on how to build appropriate web sites suited to hold them. But really I don’t think it’d be long before I get into some serious stuff. ;o Anyone want to model some 3D for me? :3

Recently I had an email from someone asking about the Game Maker Text to Speech DLL, apparently it will be used in some educational software in the U.K. Awesome I think! However I haven’t touched this since 2003. After some quick research there appears to be already some other extensions to Game Maker which allow this functionality, but some rely on nasty methods such as calling vb scripts. So with some inspiration I’ve created a package that will allow the DLL to run with Game Maker 8 using the “Extension” feature. To get it to work on my computer I just had to install the Microsoft SAPI 4 (The newest version is 5 though).

The extension, containing an example and (some partially updated) documentation can be downloaded here! Please provide some feedback if you can.

GMTTSExtension.zip (547kb for GM8)
Original DLL (180kb for GM5)

Bellow is ripped straight from the old readme.htm, the links should still work.

Note: If you have Windows Me or 2000 you should already have a speech engine installed. You can however add more engines if you want. Windows XP also has a speech engine, but it’s not compatible with the DLL, so you’ll need to download another engine. Windows XP users also need to install Microsoft SAPI 4 (825KB).

Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines
Microsoft Engine 4.0 (7.3MB)

L&H TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engines
American English (0.99MB) voices
British English (2.54MB)
Dutch(2.58MB)
French(2.24MB)
German(2.18MB)
Italian(1.97MB)
Japanese(3.00MB)
Korean(3.03MB)
Portuguese(2.39MB)
Russian(2.85MB)
Spanish(2.36MB)

A while back (2003ish I think) I wrote a DLL extension for Game Maker. Although a lot has changed Game Maker wise, I thought I’d give it a home and a permanent link due to people in the forums still asking about it. You can download it here. Game Maker Text to Speech DLL.

All help/support should be included with the file. Please don’t ask me for help, since I’ve lost my knowledge of Game Maker from being away from it for so long. Who knows, I might make a return.