Hello everyone, this is the third devlog of my game Gen of Space.

Today I would like to tell you about a new type of content in the game - boosts or modules for upgrading your ship.

Boosts are objects that you can pick up to improve your ship's stats or add extra content to your ship, but more on that later.

Boosts drop from enemies and objects you destroy. There are 6 types of boosts in total and now I'll explain the technical implementation of this mechanic.

I remind you that I work at Gamemaker Studio and write code in gml, be careful.

First of all, in the player, in the Create event, we declare the countdown variable, and that's where we'll start.

Then in the destroyed object, at the moment of destruction, we add code that with a 50% probability will spawn a random boost from the list of valid boosts if boosts are active in this mission

Next, we will look at the mechanics in the boost itself.

First, the Create event:

We create a chance variable, which is responsible for the rarity of the boost level. After the filtering conditions, we assign the upgrade variable the values color and ux. UX is the variable responsible for what the upgraded variable will be, in this case global.fire_countdown.

Next, we add movement and speed to the object and this is where the Create event ends.

In the Step event we are adding rotation and color change depending on rarity.

And now the most important thing - using or equipping the boost.

In the collide event with the player, we get data on the current fire_countdown for further manipulations.

Next, in the first condition, we learn that if the CD is equal to the default CD (1000) and the number of equipped modules is less than 3, then we can equip this boost.

And the further conditions only replace the current boost, if any, with a more advanced one, but it will not be possible to equip a worse improvement.

Note that the add_module function is an external function that adds data to modules_map. This is an array that stores cosmetic data about installed boosts.

You can equip a total of 3 boosts per mission, they cannot be changed to other boosts during the mission, they are reset after completion.

That's all. The code is not perfect, this is my first project. Thank you all for reading, I hope this was interesting or useful to someone. You can leave comments on improving the code or introducing improvements to the game itself in the form of ideas that you would like to see in the game.