Beginner's Guide to GameMaker Studio 2

hello everybody i'm sean spowling and this behind me is game x studio 2 which is something you probably already knew which is why you landed on this video and uh whatever it is you want to do whether you want to make some hobby games you want to take part in some game jams you want to make uh you want to make a commercial 2d game you want to whatever it is you're trying to do um you're here and you want to know how how to use this thing how do i use game mix studio 2 um it's a pretty big topic game maker is one of the more accessible tools out there and for my money probably strikes the the best balance of most of the tools that exist currently uh between being accessible um and like easy to pick up versus being also quite powerful and versatile and allowing you to make big complex things um most tools tend to sort of lean one way or the other you know you've got your unities and unreals and your construct twos and all the different engines out there for me game maker uh lands pretty well in the middle there between like accessible and like powerful right and what that means is while it is easy enough to get into um it is also very powerful and very big as you know you can spend your entire career learning and mastering just this this one program but neither of us have time for a whole career in this video uh so we're just gonna go over the basics and get you started um we're gonna go over what a project looks like what the key resource types are and then at the end maybe we'll talk a bit about how to learn more how to get better and ways to kind of carry on whatever journey it is you're starting out today perhaps with this video so this over here what i have is a blank project uh totally empty this is what you'll see when you just make a new project in game maker and a project is made up of its different resources which we have over here in the resource tree or the asset browser um all the different stuff that our game is made out of will be kind of listed over here there's a lot of different resource types as you can kind of see from all these sort of default categories um but we're going to focus on three different types of resources just the the most basic building blocks of a video game we're going to talk about sprites uh objects and rooms um so first of all let's take a look at sprites um so i'm going to make a new sprite um there's about 101 ways you can make a resource type so i just did that real quick there i right clicked in this workspace resources create sprite there's a bunch of new ones coming in 2.3 where i will probably have to make this video uh entirely from scratch but but even at that point the fundamentals of game maker always gonna be the same so most of this is gonna be super relevant either way so i've made a sprite uh what is a sprite a sprite is an image okay um all the kind of images in your game whether it be like your player character sprite or like the background images just all of the artwork in your game is going to be represented in some way or another via sprites okay they can be animated but they don't have to be um and they can be like any different size and uh this is where as i say this is where all your images go i'm just gonna name this one like s smile and i'm gonna go and hit the edit image button and we get this image editor okay where we can draw whatever we want i'm going to fill this with yellow and i'm just going to draw a little smiley face this is just you know you might be reminded a little bit of ms paint or something with this it's like a simple image editing tool um loads of different little options you've got over here um a bunch of different things you can do we can make new make new frames like this and we can draw uh if we play this you can see it's like animating through the frames something you can do in this which is kind of cool um specific to game make studio 2 as you can draw while animating which lets you do some fancy little effects pretty niche little feature but not a lot of image editing tools have that capability so this is where you come just to do you know your basic image editing and stuff like that you don't have to make all of your sprites inside of game maker obviously but it has a tool there to allow you to do that stuff and um edit you know all the individual frames of your artwork um you can bring in artwork as well um let's just get this back to that smiley face because we're going to use that later um oh one other thing i'm going to mention while we're here as well if you do use a bunch of this tool um something you might not be used to coming from like other image editing tools is uh i know everybody likes this um is copy and paste works a little bit differently uh if i copy this or even if i if i cut this um it what it does is it doesn't place whatever you copy or cut onto the clipboard and instead creates a brush i think it also puts it on the clipboard so if you go into another tool i think you can still pay some not 100 sure actually um but um it creates like a brush um which means that then if you want to place it somewhere else you then have to click specifically in the place that you you actually want to put it which some people don't like but it does let you do some other cool things as well uh just something to be aware of when you're you're copy and pasting you can still copy and paste from other tools into game maker uh but when you do when you paste in game maker it's still going to take whatever is on the clipboard and put it on a brush so then you still have to like kind of click in place easier if you want to bring things in from other tools um is to click the import button on your sprite okay and then we can bring in artwork from outside of game mix that we may have made in photoshop or whatever a sprite or whatever whatever tools it is that you use one quick tip while i am here if you're making if you want to make art specifically for game maker um you will notice um why if i zoom in in the editing maybe here um we've got uh i've named my artwork in a particular way so you can see we've got this like four uh spring fact let's look at a different one let's look at this one um s lime attack strip six down here um you can see i've got this little animation of a slime doing like a little jumping attack and um they're like evenly spaced in a horizontal row like the whole animation and i end the name of the file with strip and then the number of frames so underscore strip six and then if i bring that in um click yes to that it'll automatically split it into the frames as needed which is very very useful um if you don't want to do that you just want to bring it in as one image then you just you know don't name it in any particular way and i'll just bring it in as one frame okay um if your artwork if you've already made artwork and it's not arranged in that particular exact way or named in that exact way the other thing you can do is go to image and um uh import strip image and like if i like select the same thing um you can specify exactly like where each frame is and how the how they're spaced apart and so on in order to bring them in as animations that way okay one other thing on sprites i will mention just before i move on just because this is a little keyboard shortcut that escapes a lot of people's notice is that to move between these different animation frames you can actually press the one and two keys on your keyboard um just to just to move between the frames like that just a little quick tip because um on you i know i didn't know that for a very long time and uh it's pretty useful okay so i'm going to close this down now just come back to our well i can just move around the this workspace that we've got here is like infinite i can like hold ctrl move the mouse wheel and sort of zoom out uh press down on the mouse wheel and like like pan around like that there's a laptop mode that sort of changes that in case you don't have like a scroll wheel and you're on a laptop i can't remember what it changes it to but it changes the sort of setup from panning around the workspace um and most of the different resource types here other than rooms uh will open up in in the workspace and uh you can kind of move between them like that um that's just kind of how it works but most of them also you can like maximize and just work on one screen like the image editor is maximized on on these tabs and so on like that so it's fairly easy to move around so let's talk about objects now in fact before we do i'm gonna i'm gonna recreate this because i want that smiley face again because we're going to use it to do a thing in a bit um let's just put this back into here so we just have this smiley face bright that's smile uh starts with s because it is a sprite so it is s smile and we're gonna make a new object now as well again a million one ways to do it i already right clicked in the resource tree 100 more used to make new things shortcuts as well you can press alt o or just right click in the workspace and just click create object the object i'm going to call this oh smile starts with oh because it is an object you see that's how it's how i personally name all of my different resources um in a game maker project you can do it how you want most generally the accepted thing to do is to name them based on the type of resource they are first um and then give them some sort of relevant name after that some people like to do obj underscore that's how i used to do in some of my older game maker tutorials um some people like to do like like spr underscore for sprite or um there's a lot of it or just spl without an underscore there's a lot of different methods it's just a good idea to name them with some sort of consistent scheme i'm really lazy and don't like to type too much so i just do one lowercase letter that represents the start of it and then um a capitalized word afterwards that is the name of whatever i'm making so this is gonna be oh smile and i'm gonna tie this object to s smile which is uh the sprite that we've just made so you can link a link a sprite to an object um and an object is all of the interactive stuff in your game it will be an object likely okay so think of things like your player um like if you're making a game about controlling a spaceship your spaceship player will be like an object probably uh enemies will be objects uh bullets um you know all that kind of stuff that's like interactive and collide with stuff but also just more esoteric things as well like you might have a ui controller object or like a menu object high score managers those kind of things right lots of different things can be objects the point is that objects just uh carry and contain all of the logic and interactivity of your game okay so the older when the player does this then do this and that's how they work as well they work on a system of events and actions uh which we'll come back to in a little more detail in a bit but the main thing to understand here is we have this events window we can add events into it such as like uh the players press the left key and then when this object or when an instance of this object is in our game it will be checking to see if the the player is oh that's the key up that's the wrong one uh wants to be uh keyed down it doesn't matter we're gonna come back for this later um so it'll be checking to see if the left arrow key is pressed down that's why it's keyed down right key up is for if you've let go of it right um i'll be checking to see if that is happening and if it is happening it will perform uh the events that we'll define in here we'll come back to that though um that's sort of the core of how we actually code logic in the game before that i want to come on to rooms so i'm going to open up room 0 which gets created for us every game maker game needs at least one room to exist in order to run and what a room is is it can be thought of as the game world all right like the game the game space if you will um that's why it needs to exist for the game to run to have anything to like show on the screen or anything like that um they can be used for all different kinds of purposes you can have as many of them as you want you name the different things maybe different sizes um they don't have to represent like the whole screen of your game you can have like a big game world and the camera is just focused in on like a small bit at a time so on so forth okay um you have layers um in the room editor as well so you might have like all your objects and well your instances as they're called um on one layer and like all your artwork on other layers and what layers do is basically at the most basic level they just control the order in which stuff is drawn okay so that the higher up in the list this layer is the further forward a thing will be drawn and so when two things overlap the one that's further forward will be shown to the player and the other thing will be underneath when they when they overlap okay so in the room editor what we can do is i've mentioned that instances a few times um what we can do is we can place instances of our objects so when you make an object so our oh smile over here we've essentially created a blueprint for that type of thing whether it be a player or an enemy or whatever else and then we can go ahead and specifically place it into our game world by just coming into our room i have the object selected i have the instances layer selected if i hold the alt key down you can see i've got this uh object underneath my cursor and i can just click and place one you can also you can drag them in but that's a bit slow i like to just hold alt and just click and you can click and drag and just drag in loads as well like that and you can then like resize and rotate and do do whatever you want with it give it some specific creation code for this specific instance so this instance is different in some way to other copies of those smiles that we've placed around the place do all kinds of things okay i'm just going to place one in the middle and we'll make it slightly bigger than a normal one is okay and we can play some more of them and so on okay now that we have you know a game world and we have an object in the game we can actually run the game so if i press f5 or just click this little arrow uh here's a little play button um it'll compile you'll see the game compiling at the bottom down here while you can't because i'm in the way but behind me uh behind my chair there was a bunch of uh text uh like scrolling up the screen you could see uh the game was like compiling okay okay uh and with that done we have here our game made in game maker studio two is just the default you can change all of that and the icon and all that kind of stuff but this is our game it's just a black rectangle um with a smiley face in the middle and that's all our game because we don't have any other logic or interactivity okay we just have this one room and this object in and by all the default settings the camera will just show the whole room and show whatever's in it okay so that's where we get our object so now we know those what those three resources are those are the three resources that you're basically going to have in any kind of game or any basic game you know uh anything you're making as a beginner is likely going to be made up mostly of sprites objects and rooms maybe sounds scripts and a few other things but for the most part sprites objects and rooms um let's come back to the object though our own smile and just double click it in the resource tree to reopen it if you've lost it you'll come back to your workspace and get it open here i'll just close down these other things as well so as i was saying before an object is made out of events and actions an event is when something happens in your game um be it the user pressing a button uh the passage of time the object getting created or destroyed by some other code that's going on um these are like triggers right that will happen and cause uh whatever actions you've associated with that trigger to go off which then might cause other events in other things to go off and then so on um so for example we've already added the key down left event here which is an event that will trigger whenever the player presses the left arrow key assuming this object there is an instance of this object in our game currently and then in this window we just have a text editor where we can write in gml code actions to carry out okay um this is where some of you are probably noping out like well no there's programming i i was told there would be no programming i was told game maker didn't need programming not for me and i'm out just stick with me for a moment um because uh there is an alternative okay um we'll get into a little bit about code in a second but if i just right click this and go convert to dnd or when you make the project in the first place you can set dnd to be the default um dnd stands for drag and drop and then instead of having a code window you'll have this uh this thing i don't know how you call it the dnd editor where you can drag in uh pre-built actions that just do specific things so when key down left is pressed we could do like uh um it's tough for me because i don't use drag and drop so i don't actually know what mostly how much these things work but we could set a direction set direction fixed yeah we can just set our direction to 180 there we don't even have to type that in we can just click this little arrow set our direction to be the left and i think we can just give ourselves some movement right some like uh the lost set speed yeah the set speed and that will happen afterwards uh speed in whatever direction we're facing to five pixels of frame and and then we have some logic okay we've got like pressing the and i'll just zoom right in here so you can see so when we press the uh left arrow key we set a direction to 180 uh directions they they work from like starting zero facing to the right and then they go anti-clockwise so 90 degrees is up 180 is left and so on but you can just click the arrow anyway um so it's basically lapse set speed to five um if we round the game now actually we still have our object on the screen so if i press the left arrow key he now goes off the screen hey we did it we put some logic together we made a thing happen in the game well done everybody congratulations okay but i want to bring us back to um the code in fact i think i can convert this if i convert to gml uh okay yeah you actually get so if you write some dnd logic you can actually convert it immediately back into the code equivalent okay so you can see here we just have some text that just says direction equals 180 and speed equal five and that code will tell the game to do exactly those things that we were just doing if we ran the game now it would do exactly the same thing okay um so that's a good thing if if you wanted to get if you if you only know how to use drag and drop and you've used it you maybe want to get started in gmo you can maybe convert some of your actions just to sort of see how it works um but i honestly and i've said this multiple times before and my mind really hasn't changed much on this over the years um i would always recommend if you if you want to take the gaming even remotely seriously just start with start with the code okay a lot of people i know i think like oh i don't know how to code i don't want to code it's it's difficult um especially artists as well a lot of them tend to think like oh you know i have an artist's brain i can't do programming if i can learn how to code you can probably learn how to code okay it's not that difficult the key difference um is that whether you learn how to code which is just writing script like this that's a bit like free form and telling um the game what to do um it's a little bit harder at first because um there's just quite a there's a few walls to sort of get over and just sort of learning how it works uh to begin with um but it gets easier as you go on with drag and drop it'll start quite easy like you saw there just sort of dragging a face left and move at that speed um thing and it worked but it will get harder as you go on and you're trying to do more complex things it won't ever become impossible the the two different ways of doing a logically drag and drop and cody have a relative parity and that you can basically do anything you can do in one with the other um but it gets much more harder much more difficult to manage drag and drop as you go along and work out weird kind of esoteric ways of doing things that um would be much much simpler to do in code and think you could probably write even that there was like when i do set direction there and move that way just trying to work out i was trying to work out my head with drag and drop how to make something move left in code i can just write x equals x minus five okay and that means while we're holding the left uh arrow key down our x coordinate because in 2d space we have an x coordinate which is horizontal and a y coordinate which is up and down our x coordinate is the horizontal one so by reducing it by five uh we go left okay and that's that's doing the same thing and also it's just doing it once like we're not setting a permanent speed so it's it's already better right um million one resources to go and learn about code in fact all of the resources out there pretty much 99 of tutorial content is going to use gml code so um that's already a positive in wanting to learn it as i said the main difference is like dragon drop has its place definitely i think for people who don't really want to do a whole like if you just want to use this tool to make a quick prototype for an idea you have maybe to show something at work if you're a game developer um or something like that and you're not really going to spend a whole lot of time in this tool you just want to get the thing going um then dragon drop might be for you or especially for very very young people um but the vast majority of cases i would recommend doing the code because let's say the main difference is that drag and drop is easier right away but gets harder code is harder right away but gets easier and gets the simpler the more more time you spend with it and gml the language that you use in game maker i don't like comparing it to other languages a lot but it's i suppose it shares the most in common with javascript and it's it's very very forgiving okay it's one of the most forgiving programming languages that exists um i've put a semicolon on the end of here because it's like a good programming practice to analyze you don't have to do that in game maker you don't have to worry about what that means um you just do x equals x minus five it'll work exactly the same way and like gaming gives a lot of stuff like that where it will just kind of forgive a lot of your mistakes um and it's as i say it's it's quite easy to get into and surprisingly a decent foundation if you want to go on from there to learn another programming language um actually like most programming languages in general are quite similar and you can learn a lot from just gml as a foundation to then go on to learn other things especially javascript as i've discovered quite recently okay so that's game maker that's how a project exists in game maker and that's how you the basics of how you start putting together a game in it where do i go from here i want to make a undertale like rpg or i want to make an action rpg or i want to make a platform game or i want to make a 3d fps or whatever it is you want to make in gamemaker where do you go from here right i've only show you how to make a thing move left well good news for you as i was saying there's tons of resources out there um i myself have this channel um where i make uh tons of different videos showing people how to make all kinds of stuff i can't i recommend this complete uh platformer tutorial that i have up here um it's quite dense like it like we go from absolutely nothing to making a complete platform game with like a menu and like an ending and all kinds of fun stuff um in between lots of little cool game field things and we assume no knowledge so it's teaching you all the code what every line does how it all works um bit by bit okay each episode like some of them are longer than others um you don't have to finish the series just if you if you go into it for a bit and get what you can out of it or what you need out of it even if you're not trying to make a platformer you know you're still going to learn the code right and that's what it's all about with game development is learning tools in your head and then learning how to repurpose those tools to do different things okay but i say i don't just have that i have a lot of general other stuff um various tutorials on like net stuff with game maker um like uh tips and tricks other nelly attacks as you can see just here i i have a lot of videos okay you can go and see them and i'm not the only person who has videos we have there's loads of other people who do really cool stuff i'll just recommend like a handful of other people here as well we've got heartbeast a lot of people like his stuff um he's super popular he's also got some really cool like he does really nice picks a lot like um like he's not like a you know specialist pixel artist by trade but he he gets by really really well and does some really good tutorials that are great great for hobbyist game developers i think i think this stuff is really good to look at if you just want to be able to quickly make stuff that looks good um but isn't going to like you know you don't need 10 years of mastering the actual art of pixel art because pixel goes pretty deep um but if you want to learn like quick um and really effective like look at this stuff like harvey's stuff looks super nice um so i really recommend checking him out if you want to learn that stuff and he also does like uh good oh tutorials and a bunch of other stuff cool guy in general nice guy heart beast recommend his work a lot of people like him uh friendly commodore uh is another really good one um she's really good she has uh she has a lot of stuff she has this great farming rpg and other stuff that's kind of largely oriented around like rpg type of things so if you're maybe if you're looking at making something like an undertale like rpg that kind of thing um her content is going to be great for you you know things like you know state machines and text boxes uh eight directional movement and all the sort of stuff that would go into like a farmville game and those kind of things all that sort of stuff she's got a lot of really good videos for um another one uh pixelated pope i don't think he's actively making videos at the moment but the ones he's had are stalwart solid uh videos that like you put put a lot of time and effort into um generally if you get anything out of this videos you can you can be fairly sure it's good like it's uh it's good content and um well researched one of his particular like 15 commandments of game maker maybe for people a little bit more experienced in fact a few of his videos in general are probably like sort of not necessarily like dead beginner level but sort of like intermediate level kind of pushing on advanced um he's got a lot of cool stuff just a little um a lot of like uh good tips and tricks and uh more sort of advanced uses game maker and things like that so i recommend all of those guys um another place i highly recommend is r game maker also the community forums i forgot to bring them up on here but um that's a good place as well um the problem with the community forums is sometimes you find data that's out of uh sometimes you'll find information that's a bit out of date um but it's more or less the game maker community forums is more or less the stack overflow equivalent for game maker you know you google a problem you're probably going to find a thread about it on the gamemaker community forums and um there's usually other people having similar issues to you you'll be able to um find a lot of information that way but also um the gamemaker subreddit very similar in that regard a lot of google searches will bring you here um loads of people looking for help a lot of people are writing answers and providing that help a lot of tutorials a lot of great content in general very very cool place run by very cool people um speaking of those people i highly also recommend the uh gamemaker discord um that i have uh up here um let's move it because i need to so you can kind of see the channels because i'm noticing i'm in the way uh we have like a whole bunch of like different channels we've got four separate help channels they are all currently busy as people go oh wow that's one of my tutorials there someone apparently struggling with or something but you can just ask questions in here and people will help you out um assuming and they have like bots to mark them busy and unbusy and that kind of thing um but i hang out here a lot and just talk about um different things in game maker a lot of different people with a lot of experience with game maker hang out here um it's one of the best places to go um just one of the best places just to be in general um if you want to learn stuff about game maker um one of the main reasons for that is that as i said with sometimes when you google things you're going to find information that might be a little bit out of date if you want to stay like really current on what's going on with game maker and especially some of the new changes coming out with 2.3 is a bunch of exciting stuff um i really recommend being part of that discord because it's going to be full of all the people who are experimenting and learning with that stuff in real time and it's where i go to get a lot of research for a lot of my videos and be like hey i'm thinking of doing a video about this and i'm doing it in this way can anyone think of a better way of doing this and that kind of thing it's really great place um as i say a lot of the sort of modern experts in game maker a lot of them hang out in that discord it's a great place to go if you do go there i am in there please don't dm me about my tutorials and ask for help with my videos and stuff in that discord it's not what it's for it's literally against the server rules please don't do that anyway moving on um so yeah the discord's really great um the manual how do we forget the manual ah this is probably one of the most important things um hopefully you didn't stop watching before this point because this is very important um the manual it exists uh you just press f1 or you go to uh you press f1 in here and you you'll get the manual up um i recommend reading some quick start guides and all this stuff and just like that'll familiarize yourself with a lot of the other stuff that i've not had time to go into in this video um but then also the just the the code reference um like the gml references like this is all going to be your best friend right um yeah i'm kind of getting lost in the manual myself here but just like the the scripting section and these like this index um a lot of how i originally learned game maker with one point x was literally just reading the manual whenever i wanted to know how to do a new thing right i'm sure there was articles and things i was reading but um typically like if i wanted to know how to do something um game maker has more or less has a lot of functions designed to do most of the common tasks involved in making a video game um so i'm like okay i want to learn how to make something collide with another thing okay there's a section called movement and collision let's go let's go to collisions and find a function that sounds vaguely like something i might need collision rectangle or how does that work and then i can just read and it'll tell me how it works how to use it i'll give a little example the documentation is not always super well maintained and some of it can sometimes be a little bit out of date and tricksy but for the most part it's really solid and it'll get you a really really long way and you'll always have to keep referring to it okay uh never worry about that a lot of people ask like i've been using gamemaker for a long time but i still have to keep referring to the manual all the time how do you get it to the point where you just know all this stuff you never do okay never happens you will always be referring to the manual um there are three things certain in life death taxes and needing to check the documentation of your programming language okay you you you're just going to have to do it so get used to doing it another quick tip when you're when you've got code and you've written a function say place meeting it's a common function um if you if you have a function like that and it's yellow you can middle click on it um and it will bring the manual up at the exact page of that function very very useful and then you can read it learn how to learn how it works there you go golden okay so i mean i i really could go on for hours uh but that's the very basics of game maker and making games with it and also places to go if you want to learn more if you liked this video you can do all the various youtube things that you do to express that you like the video that are useful for me algorithmically you can like the video you can subscribe it share it with somebody who you think might want to get in the game development or has picked up a copy of gamemaker and doesn't know what what the hell to do now um i also have patreon and those are the those people on patreon who support me are the only reason i get to do any of this i'm pretty much supported entirely by them yes there's ads on my videos but you know my patreon is the vast bulk of what keeps me doing um all of this work so if you want to be one of those guys because you think that the work i do is kind of important i want other people to be able to want more guides like this to exist um there's a link in the description um they also get some of the bonus goodies too um you can go check that out all the information is there and with that i'm gonna say thanks for watching thanks for sticking around to the end guys a huge special shout out in no particular order to the following patrons mr oars jordan hake dalvore vacants george bailey phil keane andrew gilbert casa ho carter green justin nadega alex schenkel goose troy mara euron peter john harwood zach culler figgy relentless rex cabbage pants tyler hubble leo scott matthews mark burgess samia and yaya like aglow rene dam zephia flame rupinder hair darkrider0318 jason james l anderson james siggins do what doobie hyung jin bertie tt daca dondego robert churches bowser the dog and max him and of course thanks again to you for watching catch you all next time

Channel: Shaun Spalding

Views: 186,387

Keywords: Game Maker (Video Game Engine), Tutorial, GameMaker Tutorial, GameMaker, Game Development, Indie Games, Tutorial Series, Game Maker Studio, Making Games, How to make games, GameMaker Studio 2, GMS, GMS2

Id: nBCDzE9MDbk

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ShaunJS]

Turns out I didn't really have one of these since 1.x, so I thought I'd put together a general purpose guide to GMS2.

• What a project looks like/how it works
• Sprites, Objects, Rooms. The beginner trio of resource types.
• Logic, GML vs DnD etc.
• Where to go to learn more! Various YouTubers, this reddit, the discord and so on.

Different style to my usual tutorials, but I think it works well. I know 2.3 is around the corner and I might remake this later but the fundamentals are obv gonna stay the same.

-S

[u/one_mind_]

Get out of my head Shaun. I have your video open in another tab right now... Love your Friday streams by the way! Always nice to see what the community are coming up with and hearing your valuable feedback. Maybe I'll submit my project at some point ;)

[u/CyanMuffin]

Really enjoyed the video, thank you.

[u/newObsolete]

Love your videos dude!