GameMaker: Day 1 - Why the hell am I doing this?

TL;DR

I'm trying out GameMaker Studio for a week, to see if I can be more efficient at creating games with it. By the end of the week I want to have re-made my LD27 entry, with MORE features.

Preface

What?! Nick wants to use GameMaker? Doesn't he know how to program? Is he crazy?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Despite the fact that I know multiple programming languages, I've decided to try using a game engine, specifically GameMaker Studio, for future game prototypes and projects.

Reasoning/Backstory

I've been (kinda) programming for over a decade, doing it seriously for about 5-6 years. I've been seriously making games (as a hobby) for about 2-3 years. It's something I've always done in my spare time.

Recently though, I've been losing more and more of my free time normally for gamedev, due to my life actually getting together, and being accepted to a hackerschool/developer bootcamp (App Academy, if anyone is wondering. Go check it out, it's awesome!). Because of this, during the Ludum Dare 27 game competition, I had a realization near the end.

I didn't get a LOT of the polish features into the game. There isn't even a score. The enemy path finding is non-existent. The enemies can only shoot straight. There's no story or end. While I WAS able to get the "reincarnated" clone to follow your actions and shots, with a 10 second lag (which is AWESOME, if I say so.) , I just couldn't get anything else done ( By the way, my entry is Samsara, play it for 30 seconds? ).

I decided that even though I consider myself a damn fine programmer (no expert, yet!), and I know multiple languages, I'm just not efficient at creating games with my current flow. This is a problem. I don't have globs of time just lying around for me to piddle away. I need every second to matter. Because of this I decided that I would give game making engines another try.

Why GameMaker

 This isn't my first foray into using game creation engines. I've messed with Unity, not extensively, but enough to realize that it was still to cumbersome for simple game dev. A lot of the engines like Game Salad were too focused on non-programmers. I was looking for a middle-man between taking some of the boilerplate work off of me, but still giving me a lot of control over whats going on. Being able to script almost everything I want is a MUST. It came down to 2,

Construct 2, and GameMaker Studio

After some deliberation, I decided to go with GameMaker. After watching lots of videos on both, and doing tons of reading, GameMaker appealed to me more. I'm NOT saying Construct is a bad choice. I'm just saying that it doesn't appeal to me as much as GM does. Both platforms can push to multiple other platforms (including mobile!), but it seems like GameMaker has less problems pushing to other platforms, but don't let me mislead you, GM DOES have bugs. No program is perfect. But I was also swayed by seeing the breadth of products that have been made with GameMaker ( I had no clue Hotline Miami was made in GameMaker! ).

GameMaker it is!

Whats Going to Happen

I've decided to see what I can get done and learn with GameMaker in a week. That's it. I've looked, and I can give at LEAST 1 hour a day to GameMaker this next week, and possibly up to 3 hours on 1 or 2 days. By the end of the week, I want to have a re-made, and more complete version, of Samsara. If I can learn enough about GameMaker and GML(GameMaker scripting Language) to create 

What I Did Today

I started today by downloading GM Studio, and picking a tutorial to get up and running. I ended up at Wizirdi's Youtube series. Not bad at all. Some of it felt too slow, but I attribute that to the fact that I already know how to program. Even with that, his videos are short and concise, I definitely recommend checking his videos out if you're looking to get into GameMaker.

I spent somewhere right around 2 hours watching his videos. I didn't do the exact code he did, and I experimented some, pausing the video to brush off my Google-fu. I did pay attention to what he was saying and typing, but I was changing it to what I was doing, which was just trying to get many different ideas incorporated into one "game".

I ended up with a neat little keep-away game. It's nowhere close to being anything substantial,  but it shows off what 2 hours of GM videos and tinkering can teach you.

You basically move the penguin around with W, A, S, and D. The sprite is constrained to the dimensions of the window. By pressing the space bar the game creates enemies that move towards you, and you can destroy them by left clicking them.

I also learned about drawing text, and concatenating strings(text) with variables(values in the computers memory for things I need it to remember). Your penguin has health, and it is depleted by being touched by one of the enemy angry-faces. If your health hits 0, the user is prompted about the game being over, and it restarts!

Here are some screenshots

Source Code

The source code/GM Project file is zipped and available HERE, from my website.

Conclusion

For spending 2 hours with GM, I feel like I learned a HELL of a lot. I'm not messing with any of the drag-n-drop scripting things, I'm doing all events with code. Which is nice because GML seems to be the love child of C++/Ruby/JavaScript, all languages that I know, and the last 2 are languages I know pretty darn well.

Lets see how far this goes guys, I'm hoping it pans out. If not, I've only wasted 7-14 hours.

Also, check out the GameMaker sub-reddit!