These video tutorials show you lots of the basic techniques needed to create a game in Game Maker. If you follow each and complete the task you will have a better idea of the type of game that you can design and develop in game maker.
Video 1: Making an animated sprite
To make animated sprites you create a sequence of frames that come together to make a sprite look like it is moving. To slow down the moving create multiple copies of each frame in the game maker sprite editor.
Video 2: Make an object move to right
Remember a sprite is only a costume that changes the appearance of something. To be able to make things do stuff we need to make objects that can be programmed. In plain English you ca say when I hit the left arrow key I want my object to move to the right at a speed of two. Then it is just a matter of selecting the correct events and action in game maker to make this happen.
Video 3: Adding movement to go left
If you want an object to move in different directions, you to program this. Remember if something is moving left and then right you need different sprites to make it appear to point in the correct direction.
Video 4: Use vspeed & gravity to jump
If you want to make and object jump in game maker you get the vspeed to a negative value e.g. -5 (this makes the object go up), at the same time you also need to set the gravity to direction=270 for down with a value between 0.1 and 1. This will make the object come back down. The higher the value e.g. 1 the faster the object will fall again. If you want it to jump higher decrease the gravity value or make the vspeed a higher negative value.
Video 4a: Adding a jumping sprite
To make your jumping object appear to be more realistic you can change the sprite when it goes into the air and change it back when it hits the ground again. To make your object stop set direction to 0 and gravity to 0 when it hits the ground.
Video 5: Making an object kick etc.
To make animated sprites do different actions you can create different animated sprites to make it look like it is kicking or punching. It's important to create a range of sprites to make as many actions as you need for your game.
Video 6: Making food disappear
To make food disappear you need to check in the food object of a collision has taken place with something e.g. pacman. You then destoy the food to make it disappear. If you did it the other way about and checked the collision inside the pac man object then all food would be destroyed when pac man collided with it. You can also add points to the score when the food is eaten. Take your time with this as you can use this for lots of things in a game like bullets destroying enemies.
Video 7: Make something shoot a bullet
To make something shoot a bullet you need to create a new instance of the bullet object at x and y coordinates relative to the current object. This means if we wanted a rocket to fire a bullet you would set the 0,0 coordinate for the rocket where you want your bullet objects to appear and then create new instances of the bullet objects moving in a certain direction and speed relative to this. This will make more sense when you do it. Take your time with this one also.
Video 8: Making better sprites
You can make better graphics for your game by making them in fireworks or photoshop and importing them into game maker. Look how this is done below and how much better it looks than the last rocket ship. We will also add some movement to the rocket.
Video 9: Make an enemy fire
If you want to add artificial intelligence to an enemy to make it fire bullets back at your rocket this can be done by programming the enemy object with a timer and making it create moving instances of enemy bullets.
Video 10: Getting killed
To make your own player be killed when it collides with something you can destroy the instance of itself upon collision with another object such as a bullet.
Video 11: Adding buttons with effects
Normally on the start up screen you will have buttons to start game, load help screen or exit etc. You can quite easily make good buttons with hover effects by programming button objects and using some different sprites.
Video 12: Check for next room
Game Maker will sometimes produce errors if you do not program correctly. The video below shows how an error occurs when you try to go to a new room and it does not exist. You can stop this happening by using the selection programming technique (an if statement) to check that the room exists before trying to go for it. The selection technique is needed to obtain a merit criteria in the Develop Computer Games unit.
Video 13: Using views in Game Maker
You can use views in Game Maker to only show a certain amount of a room on the screen at once. Views can also follow your main object so that you can follow them through a platformer game for example.