My First Game - Intro to GameMaker - Space Rocks (Part 1)

hello and welcome to our series on making space rocks in gaming a studio - if you're relatively new to the world of programming then this series should be a great introduction for you I think one of the hardest parts are tackling a new skill can just be knowing where to start and then setting achievable goals to make progress when you're starting out I've found motivation comes easily if you keep things simple fun and rewarding and that's why we're going to be making space rocks it's a great game for beginners to make practically a rite of passage for new game developers it's simple but it's going to teach you the fundamentals of logic and game design so if you're dreaming of one day building an RPG you like undertale or even working on something massive like Skyrim know that the concepts we cover in this series will set the foundations for your game development journey in this first video I'm going to take you through the game maker interface so if you just download a game maker and opened it up you're probably going to see a window just like this at the very top is our tools menu here is some recent promotional news from your games over here we've got recent projects this will probably be blank for you but as you start to make projects they'll appear here and over here we have getting started where we can start load and import projects down here is the explore section where you can download some resources so for example we can click here and bring up a tab for at the market place and this is where you can download assets that other developers have created these can be really helpful if you're a small or independent developer or just looking for some tools to make your development process a bit faster over here are some tutorials that are a really great introduction to the game maker interface from your games themselves so definitely consider taking a look at these if you're not sure about anything in the interface and finally here are some demos so these are some games that come packaged with game maker and you can take a look at these if you want to explore what a more developed project would look like you might look a little bit overwhelming especially for a beginner but they do contain some great examples of how to implement game mechanics and how to use the game maker engine alright moving on let's go ahead and create our project so let's click new here and now we have two options we can either make a game in drag-and-drop or game make a language so these will just change the way that we go about making our games using either a visual scripting language which is drag-and-drop or using coding which is game make a language or GML so if you use drag-and-drop you don't actually have to be typing any code at all behind the scenes it still is actually using code but it's represented in blocks of actions rather than code text so your project is going to end up looking like a bunch of these blocks here chained together to create the logic of your game and if you want at any time you can actually bring up how those blocks are represented in code as it might look if you had coded it yourself on the other hand if we make a game make a language projects we will be using game makers scripting language GML to write the code for our games there are going to be two different streams of this series that will cover making space rocks in both drag and drop and GML so you can choose whichever you like if you're not sure what to choose know that both options are completely viable in short if you're an artist or a game designer and not very experienced with programming you might find that the drag-and-drop visual scripting is easier on the other hand if you are interested in learning to code perhaps even moving on to a language like C sharp or C++ at some point then GML may be for you I'm going to be leaving a more extensive comment on the pros and cons of using GML and drag and drop so if you're having trouble deciding feel free to have a read of that and reply with your own thoughts and questions for now though let's just click on either of these to open up a project and have a look at the interface so this is a fresh new project right in the middle here is our workspace this is where all of the editors are going to pop up and where we're gonna do all of our work and you can actually make multiple workspaces by just clicking this little plus up here so you can have different editors up at one time which might be helpful for example if you've got two monitors and you want to have two different displays of your project so you can play around with these Docs and put them wherever you like and if you like the layout you have you can come over to the tools up here layouts and save the layout you can also load and reset your layout to default here if you've messed around with it too much and want to restore it to the default now down the bottom here we have a few Docs windows and we can just open and close these here and just note that if you quit any of these you can bring them up again from the windows tool up here and just pull them down into the dock you're probably not going to be looking at this too much when we're first starting out with the exception of the output here which is going to show up whenever you run and test your game and basically it just shows what's happening when your game is compiling and it might also tell you if there is a problem compiling as for the rest of the tools up here we have file which has as normal options for opening and saving our projects you can also open a new IDE here so you can have two projects open at once and also preferences which you might want to check out as you can actually customize a lot of the game maker interface here so for example you can change the language the IDE skin the background and also changed the colors of things like the resources as well as the font at anytime we can also restore back to default there are also some quick buttons here you can just hover over these to see what they do this one opens the start page new projects open and save we can create an executable here which is what you'll be doing when you finish your game this play button will run your game for testing though you can also just press f5 clicking this bug one here or pressing f6 will run your game in debug mode which is basically a mode that can help you solve bugs and errors this one stops the game this one will clear the asset cache next we have game options which you can also access down here in the options tab and this is where you can set some important options for your game project like setting your game frames per second which you might know as FPS by default gaming starts this out as 30 so you might want to change this in your project whenever you start one you can also enable source control here it will also show you when you first created your project and also how long you've been working on it as you can see you can also toggle drag and drop here next is the help icon which will open up the game maker documentation you can also just press f1 to open this as well and this is actually really important this documentation is a resource that you should come to rely on and pretty much be using daily especially as you're starting out it will have information about anything in game maker from the interface itself to any function or block that you might want to use in your game for both GML and drag and drop these three buttons here are for zooming in and out of the workspace if we just open that options tab back up here you can see I can zoom in and out using these this middle one will reset it to normal note that you can also just use control and scroll to zoom in and out as well or the command key if you're on a Mac scrolling normally will move up and down the workspace you can also middle click and drag to move around finally this last button will dock and undock all of the dock panels you can also press f12 for this another couple handy shortcuts that you might want to use in your project are ctrl shift F which will allow you to search for any piece of text in the entire project and you can also use this to replace any word for another which can be really handy for renaming variables or functions ctrl T is also a really great one because it allows you to move to any resource quickly which can be great when you have large projects with lots of folders you can check out a list of the other shortcuts in the documentation page for shortcuts alright so that's it for the interface let's move on to the resources panel and this is the real heart of the project's everything that you work on is going to be stored here so if you think about all of the elements that make a game sounds objects fonts images these are all going to be a different type of resource that is going to be stored in each of these sections depending on its type three of the most important ones are going to be your sprites objects and rooms and we'll go into these in more detail in the coming tutorials but for now I'll just introduce them to you so a sprite is going to be any image that is in your game so all your characters all of your backgrounds or the tiles those are going to be represented and GameMaker as a sprite so let's go ahead and create a new sprite by right-clicking here and hitting creates right so the new editor is going to pop up here and it's going to prompt you to also name your sprite so you can call it whatever you like but the convention here is to put some sort of prefix to indicate that it is a sprite and we do this for a couple of reasons so one if we ever refer to this resource we know what it is because of its prefix so it helps us with organization and the other reason is that you can't call two different resources the same thing so for example if I had an object called a cat and I also wanted to create a sprite for it I can't call both of them cat game area isn't going to let me do that they have to be unique names so I'll have to call the sprite something like SPR cat and the object obj cat alright so just hit enter when you've decided what to name it so if you want to load in a sprite from an image you saved on your computer you can just hit import here but you can also create an image from scratch in game maker by clicking edit image or by double clicking here on the frame so this will bring up the sprite editor which is a lot of the functionality of other drawing programs so you can see that our picture is showing up in the preview now here we can change the size of the image over here and we can also set multiple frames for the image so that it is animated we can preview the animation and also change the speed all right let's move on to objects so now objects in programming are where all of the magic happens essentially they're the same thing is what objects are in your mind so think of an object say a cat your brain stores a bunch of information about what a cat is it has properties like has a tail has good balance has four legs and is a feline and it also has behaviors like purr and meow and this is exactly what objects are in programming except we get to make them up so I can create an object such as obj bowl and then give it certain properties I can also outline behaviors for it to perform and these behaviors will all be dictated by specifying an event and then in action and in fact we can boil almost all logic and programming down to this sort of description if this then that and this is exactly how K Maker has structured objects we get them to do things by adding events to them so if we click on an event here these are sort of like the triggers for behaviors to happen so for example let's choose the create event so now anything that we put in this create event is going to be run when the object gets created we've kind of said if created then do this code will be going into this editor in a lot more detail in a coming tutorial all right finally let's talk about rooms by default game maker has already created a room for you so let's just double click on it and open it up so this will bring up the room editor and a room is kind of like a level in your game world so this is where everything will need to be placed to make up your game so we can move around the room just like we can move around the interface so scrolling normally will move up and down we can middle click and drag to move around and also use the ctrl or command and scrolling to zoom in and out over here is the properties dock for the room so we can set some basic properties of the room here such as its width and height at the top here is the different layers in our room so in game maker just like there are different resources there are different corresponding layers that are going to hold those resources so as you can see by default we start off with an instances layer and a background layer we can also create other layers here including other layer types such as tile layers path layers asset layers and folders to help us organize a layers in the background layer you can make this just one solid color or you can assign a sprite to the lair and have it display that image and even tile it so the instances Leia is where we're going to be placing all of our objects and now let's just think about that word instances for a moment so remember my example about the idea of what an objects like a cat is in your mind if you think about it that concept of the cat is abstract it doesn't exist in the real world but instances of cats do it's the same with objects in programming when we drag an object into the room we are actually creating an instance of that object and those individual instances will perform the same code and have the same properties that you outline in your object but you can also assign them unique variables just like how instances of cat in our world have unique properties to them as well so that's it for now in the coming tutorials we're going to be jumping in and starting to make our space rocks game thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: GameMaker

Views: 501,726

Keywords: YoYo, Games, YoYo Games, GameMaker, Game Maker Studio, GameMaker Studio, game, maker

Id: raGK_j1NVdE

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018