Parabox Console and Caveman Craig 2
It’s been a real joy ironing out bugs with Caveman Craig 2; there, I said it. It’s not often I can say I enjoy what is usually such a tedious task. But I think I owe it all to the developer console I created some years ago, called the “Parabox Console”.
Essentially, it allows me to do everything that Game Maker’s “Debug Mode” does without having to opt to play in debug mode, and in addition offers better error management and custom commands. I can also have objects send messages to it so I can tell how my engine is behaving without having to debug with silly “show message” functions that can easily render the game playable if it starts popping up every step. For example, the director will send a message to the console whenever it spawns an object into the landscape, for example, “Director: Othnielia Spawn”.
I’ve gone almost overboard with custom commands, too. I can simply type “dosleep” in the console to tell all the cavemen to go to sleep (as pictured above), and “dowake” to get them out of bed again. I can edit core variables like the speed of time (unfortunately this does not include real life), and even create “sequences” which are basically preset scenarios (combinations of cavemen, etc) with a simple command: dosequence X (where X is the number of the sequence to do).
It’s a slight shame people haven’t picked up on this console a little more. Not for my credibility, but purely because it really is a useful tool once you get into it. I can see myself downloading someone elses too like this and never thinking to use it, but because this is my own tool I’ve forced myself to try it out.. and I’m really finding it useful!
-Rhys
Great, hope we get to play CC 2 soon.
In the picture, Craig is drawn great…but those other cavemen…look kind of weird. One’s red and one looks as if he’s yellow! Is this normal?
@Brandon
Haha; don’t worry =)
We don’t yet have all the animations for hunters, gatherers, etc, just Craig; so we are temporarily using Craig’s animations and blending them red/yellow/purple.
Sounds like the game is coming along well. I use your Parabox console when I debug my games aswell. It is extremely useful and better than game makers.