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)

Sprite animation


In this section, we will teach you how to animate your sprites as opposed to giving them single subimages for each state that they could be in. This is a very simple concept, so let's dive right in.

For this section, you might want to use an external program for your sprite editing so that you can easily draw different frames of animation for a single state with ease. Most external editors will allow you to (in some way) see the previous frame when editing the next one so that you have a frame of reference. A very good image editor we've found and used (although it is intended mainly for pixel art) is Aseprite, which is at http://www.aseprite.org. You could consider it both free and paid, and both versions are the same. For $10, you get a prebuilt program with everything ready, but you can also build the source from Aseprite's official GitHub repository. If you want to build it, some guides are available.

With your image editor, create two different animations, one for walking...