Book Image

GameMaker Programming By Example

By : Brian Christian, Steven Isaacs
Book Image

GameMaker Programming By Example

By: Brian Christian, Steven Isaacs

Overview of this book

This book is excellent resource for developers with any level of experience of GameMaker. At the start, we’ll provide an overview of the basic use of GameMaker: Studio, and show you how to set up a basic game where you handle input and collisions in a top-down perspective game. We continue on to showcase its more advanced features via six different example projects. The first example game demonstrates platforming with file I/O, followed by animation, views, and multiplayer networking. The next game illustrates AI and particle systems, while the final one will get you started with the built-in Box2D physics engine. By the end of this book, you have mastered lots of powerful techniques that can be utilized in various 2D games.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Helpful information on GameMaker


This section is sort of a "mash-up" of a bunch of important information that we didn't get to tell you before, but that we will now. Some of it is especially helpful to prevent you from writing code that would be flawless in other languages but incorrect in GML.

Before we begin though, a very useful GameMaker community is located at https://www.reddit.com/r/gamemaker (and we've linked another later). The community is very helpful and answers any questions you might have, and they sometimes post projects and code that you can use that might be tedious to make otherwise. The same goes for the community linked later.

Quirks of the GameMaker Language

So the first bit of information will be on the GameMaker Language. Let's talk about data types. Pretty simple, right? They include, int, float, double, char, string, and bool. Well, GameMaker actually only has float and string. Integers are just real numbers, and characters are just strings. There are no Booleans. true...