GameMaker: Day 7 - Climactic Conclusion of this Changing Climate

TL;DR

I didn't get EVERYTHING finished in my clone, but I did add a feature or 2, and the game looks better! I'm going to stick with it for a while, because it WILL make me faster at game development and prototyping.

What I Did Today

Holy cow, this week has gone by fast! It feels like I just started watching videos on GameMaker Studio. But it's been a whole week, and I've gotten a pretty good impression on what it's all about.

Today was my wrap-up for my week-long GameMaker adventure, and the second day I worked on my GM remake of Samsara, my most recent Ludum Dare entry. Despite my best efforts, I didn't get as much time to work with GM today as I wanted, due to being enrolled at a hacker-school currently, and having projects to finish. (Sorry!)

But I WAS able to make a complete-ish game! My remake has most of the features of the full game, but I'm missing 2 crucial things due to my time constraints. The first is music, I just ran out of time to get it put in. The second thing is the copied 'clone' sidekick. While getting everything put together, I didn't have enough time to fully tackle the "not-having-real-arrays" problem, so I pulled the unfinished code out, as to not confuse people with arbitrary code. This is the first thing I need to investigate now that I'm not on a schedule for learning as much as possible.

But you need to put this in perspective. I only spent 4 hours working on this today. Couple this with yesterdays 2 and a half hours, and I only spent 6.5 (ish!) hours on this projects. That's multiple hours less than I spent coding during the first day of the Ludum Dare 48 hour event. This is why I looked into GameMaker. It's quite the program, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone getting into game development, or wanting to be more productive doing so.

This project was a great warm-up to get into GameMaker. You can move with W, A, S, & D, and press the Spacebar to shoot. The enemies randomly spawn, move at a random angle, and shoot at the player at a certain interval. Enemies take you hits, you take 3, and you lose if you hit an enemy.

Play it, look at the code, and enjoy it!

Here are some screenshots

Time spent coding today was about 4 hours, so the entire project was roughly 6.5 - 7 hours.

Source Code

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

Conclusion

I actually like GameMaker. It has its problems, for sure, but after getting through a few things, it has the ability to really save you time, and make you extremely more productive. Everyone should give it a try, from people who don't know how to program, and will be using the drag-and-drop interface, to people who have programmed or made a game before, and just want something to help with the boring/tedious parts.

Suffice it to say, I'm a fan of GameMaker. They also seem to have a great community too!