Day 9: Asteroids Clone is Now Playable Online

The final pin for this project is on the board! I'm thrilled to announce that the first official project of the Corkboard Studio Developer Bootcamp is complete. The final, polished version of my Asteroids Clone is now live and playable at the top of this very page.

The last step of this journey wasn't just about finishing the game loop, but about turning it into a complete package. That meant adding a proper main menu and a loading screen. For the menu basics, I found a fantastic and straightforward tutorial from GameMaker themselves that helped me get started.

However, adding what seemed like a simple menu room created a surprisingly complex challenge. It required me to refactor a portion of the code, moving global variables to a new loading object to ensure they were initialized correctly. It was a fantastic, practical lesson in how adding a single new "room" can have ripple effects across the entire project's architecture.

I didn't quite figure out how to get the size of the game to adjust dynamically though. It is fixed at a 960x540 resolution. I built the game at 1600x900, so it took me a little while to figure out how to scale the game and the gui together. It wasn't as straight forward as just resizing the game in GameMaker. I'm sure someone with more experience could figure out a better way to do it. 

But hey, the game is fully functional, and I'm incredibly proud of it as the culmination of this first bootcamp project. Thank you for following along with this part of the journey.

Now, with Project 1 officially complete, it's time to get ready for the next pin on the board: Bootcamp Project #2. Stay tuned!