When I was little, I saw the movie Incognito (1997). Or at least parts of it. I don’t remember the movie well (I don’t think the world of art dealership and forgery is that interesting to an 8-year-old in general), other than one scene. In this scene, the painter who forges a Rembrandt doesn’t start by looking at some old picture as a reference, but takes a photograph of his father as the basis of his painting. He basically takes a reference that has no direct relation to his project (other than it being the face of an old man and, well, some in-film-symbolism) to then paint over the bits that actually matter for it to look like a Rembrandt.
In the same vein I started programming along with the very detailed and well-explained GameMaker-51(!)-part-video series “Action RPG Tutorial” by Shaun Spalding. I don’t want this to be an Action RPG obviously, but it gives me an insight on different workings in the code. I then plan to “paint over” the bits of code that I don’t need and adapt them to my game. So there is now an animated player character, even though that won’t exist in the final game… but at least I feel like I’m getting more of a hang of GameMaker :)
So this is how some of it looks:
I disabled the isometric render-object for now, as I think it’s smarter to build the whole character-movement-logic of the game in top-down anyway and just render everything in isometric at the end of it. That seems much easier (or at least less maths-heavy) than trying to build functions (like collision) on the basis of the isometric map.