GameMaker: Day 2 - Whats up with that Penguin?

TL;DR

Shaun Spalding has good GM videos. Today's project lets you shoot lasers out of a penguins rump... IN SPACE!

What I Did Today

Today I continued my day old tradition of watching video tutorials on GameMaker Studio. With me having already watched all of Wizirdi's Youtube videos on GM Studio yesterday, I needed something else. Luckily, after wading through some horrible videos, terrible audio quality, and lackluster content, I landed at Shaun Spalding's Youtube videos. VERY good videos.

While I enjoyed the humor from Wizardi's videos, it really didn't serve a purpose, so I'm not disappointed that Shaun doesn't employ the same tactic. However, Shaun does have content of a similar level of quality to Wizardi. Shaun actually has more GM Studio videos (19, compared to 11, though Wizardi has a BAJILLION on GM videos not specifically tied to the new Studio version, like a series dedicated to designing a full game in game maker, and 42 videos on GameMaker Language), and they're a tad longer, but I think I know why.

Shaun explains all of his examples first using the drag-n-drop method (ewwwwwww) and then with the supa-awesome-o GML version. I got through 9 of the 19 videos today, and must say, they're great. After the first video or 2 the way he starts explaining things becomes a little more high-level, showing you what you're doing, and why you need to do it, instead of just telling you to write code, or drag blocks over. This is exactly what a tutorial needs, so that way when the video is over you actually understand the underlying concepts.

I'm pretty pumped to finish Shaun's videos, he's going over platformers next, and I have no clue how to most efficiently do stage collision.

Today's project is a shmup (SHoot-eM-UP), because I'm gearing my learning towards the Samsara remake I hope to have finished after this week with GM. It's looking like I'm going to blow that target out of the water.

With today's project you can move you penguin with W, A, S, D like normal, BUT you can also use the arrow keys to rotate the penguin! This plays into the next thing I added,  bullets! You have two ways of shooting today, the spacebar will let you shoot forward like you would expect, but pressing or holding the ENTER key does something awesome! Instead of shooting in a predefined direction, the bullets shot from pressing enter shoot out at an angle relative to the penguin's rotation.... out of his rump.

Why do the laser bullets shoot out of the penguins rump? Why is the penguin in space?

Because why the hell not? (Also because the "space" is a scrolling, tiling, infinite background! Something else I wanted to do.)

I also got text displaying in a different color, wheeeeeeeeee!

Here are some screenshots

Total time coding was probably less than an hour. I was sporadically coding while watching the videos and a tad afterwards.

Source Code

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

Conclusion

I'm really enjoying GM, but I'm not getting my hopes up yet. I'm seeing a HUGE dropoff in time that I have to spend coding, but I've only worked on 1 type of game so far. With platformers in tomorrows videos, we'll see how it goes!