Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom Update #2: Ghost & The Mechanics of Possession

Which would be a sick band name, by the way.

It's taken me a lot longer than expected to get rolling on this, mostly because of school & work but also because I've rewritten the basic movement mechanics twice now. The system is, like, embarrassingly simple, & the first two systems worked fine, but I wanted a general solution that would allow me to easily add new movement patterns for different monsters. GameMaker code is always pretty quirky though, no way around it, so at some point you've just got to call it good enough. That point has been reached, apparently.

The Ghost is complete. (Also a sick band name). For now, the player starts the puzzle by placing the ghost on any empty tile, though I suspect that will change. Also, "play" and "puzzle" are being used pretty loosely at this point. Anyway, once placed, The Ghost can spend one move to travel any distance horizontally or vertically, and is allowed to pass through walls & other monsters.

Join with me in the comforting illusion that this hastily drawn placeholder art & complete lack of animation is not actually indicative of what the game will eventually look like:

This is an Inky spinoff Pac-Man prequel now.

Tiles that you're allowed to move to are highlighted in blue & tiles that you can attack are highlighted in red. I figured it was worth getting this working off the bat, there's nothing fun about having to memorize a bunch of different movement patterns. That's why chess is possibly the least popular game of all time? Too late to rethink opinions, buddy.

The Ghost is unique in that its attack doesn't actually kill the monster, but possesses it, allowing the player to take control of it. These placeholder monsters can't do a hell of a lot, but man are they ever happy to be here:

You can depossess (I guess?) a possessed monster at any time, either to land on an empty tile or to possess another monster, following The Ghost's movement rules, as shown above.

Next, let's get an actual monster up in the mix. First up is The Orcish Cowboy. It's got a projectile weapon, so it has to be a cowboy. But it can't be a regular cowboy, because of the name of the game. Orcs are monsters, right? STOP THINKING JUST DO IT.