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)

Summary


Great job on making it this far! You can applaud yourself again if you want. Make sure you review this chapter, especially the part on textboxes and string manipulation, as that can get a little bit confusing. Once you think you're ready, tackle the Review questions, followed by the Quick drills.

Review questions

  1. What's the advantage of the way we "randomly" spawned our platforms and enemies?

  2. What does changing the origin of a sprite do for positioning any associated objects?

  3. What's a switch statement and how is it structured?

  4. What are 2D arrays and how do you set them up?

  5. How do you create global arrays and variables?

Quick drills

  1. Edit the current initial array to include enemies (this is why we had the then-verbose subindex of the platform), and then create another initial array that follows the format of the first. Also put in a script that chooses between the two arrays and then implements the chosen one.

  2. Make different messages appear based on different actions in your game. Some might...