Learning Game Development

Sep 23

My Learning adventure - Part one

A Natural Start

I mentioned in my first blog post that the game engine that really got me started in my journey was GameMaker 8.1. With that being the case, the earliest memory I have of ever successfully making something. was actually from GameMaker 8.1’s first built-in tutorial simply called “Your First Game”. It takes you through the steps of creating an extremely basic game where the entire gameplay loop consists of trying to click and collect fruit that bounces around the screen while also trying to avoid clicking bombs that start to spawn in over time. This familiarized me with the object events and drag-n-drop systems of GameMaker (which I’ll refer to from now on as GM).

**Fruit Clicker**

I imagine so many people in the GM community that used 8.1 have also made this game following the same tutorial. It brings me a lot of nostalgia to see this old image I found of it online.

After having completed that tutorial there aren’t alot of screenshots, or old project files lying around for anything I made around this time. I can however say that I definitely followed the “Game Maker Tutorial: Build Your First Platform Game!” video and a few episodes of the “[Game Maker Tutorial] Build an RPG” video series by Heartbeast. I don’t recall ever straying far from the tutorials beyond maybe modifying the provided sprites. At this point I was still limited to following step-by-step guides such as those great videos.

Making something new

Eventually I shifted over to GM 1.4 and had worked up the confidence to try and combine some of the knowledge I had built up. For the setting I chose Hell, of all places. I had this vision of a unique Hell-scape with some Greek-mythology themes mixed in. It was a 2D platformer where you played as a centaur and a floating eyeball. Story would’ve been simple, a demon and his little buddy would try to escape hell. Gameplay-wise you’d use WASD to walk around while using the mouse to aim and fire the flying eyeball which would then fire a laser, using up a slowly rebuilding charge. There was a melee attack the centaur could do as a last backup using a little sword, but the main offense would be firing eyeball lasers at the various demons you’d have to fight off as you made your way. I even wanted to add gore and using some old asset I found online the enemies would explode blood that would stick to and paint the level. Looking at the project you can tell I was trying to learn pixel art and animation. While the project files are lost, I still have an old compiled version of the game that I load up every now and then. It even has a menu with graphics settings! I’ve included a short video of the project below.

Demon Bound

It wasn't much, but it was pretty cool for my first attempt to really make something. I vaguely remember making those tiles in Paint.NET, and spending so long getting the slope movement to work right. 2D platformers are pretty common to spend time making while learning to make your own games, and this was true for me too. If I ever find the asset or video I based the blood splatter off of, I'll post a link here.

Trying Different Things

We’re quickly catching up to the present. Due to the busy and stressful life style I had as a teenager, and the lack of inspiration I had to make something unique, It wouldn’t be often that I’d spend any significant time on game development. I think it was honestly less than 5 years ago (at the time of this blog post) that I spent a few months on “Untitled Robber Game”. The compiled version of it I have is dated March 21st of 2021, but this was likely well after I stopped messing with this project. The idea was that you played as three different robbers with different abilities, and you would have to navigate a home using the limitations and abilities of each character to collect all of the loot without alarming the residents of the home. This game was definitely a result of my slow but steady rise in skill level. I had learned about particles, surfaces, and more complex gameplay concepts. I also had plenty of time between this and Demon Bound to get even better at pixel art, though I wouldn’t call it great, just better than before.

Untitled Robber Game

Oh man, this is probably one of the more charming things I made while learning. I was getting so into pixel art and trying to animate. Later in the video when I control the rotund character you can even notice some screen shake when he jumps. Eventually accessing the computer would've disabled or erased the cameras. Looking back I can tell that I was struggling to make things make sense, and even now I don't understand why only the tall skinny guy can open doors, and while I never ended up implementing it, I recall the plan for the big guy was for him to carry heavy objects to the van. In the video the NPC just wanders back and forth but the plan was that you would have to avoid and sneak around sleepy people wandering their home or investigating noise from the player. Interestingly, in the files for this game I found an old PDF that tells me that I must've been using a lighting asset, though I've been unable to find it online. I also noticed that I put some cute little references in the paintings on the wall, which also appeared to be randomly selected on each game start.

But that wasn’t even the only thing I made at the time! Even though I was still pretty limited on time to learn I was slowly reallocating my free time towards watching more tutorials, trying more ideas, and reading more pages from the GameMaker manual. This next game was compiled on March 17th of 2021, just a few days before the robber game, so I’m inclined to believe I compiled these to try and show them to someone online while I still had the project files. That said I believe this had also been scrapped for a while at that point.

Raptured (Space-Shooter)

A neat little idea for an arcade style game I might revisit one day. As visible in the video there's not a lot that got put into this project before it got scrapped. The only semblance I could find of a title for this one was "Raptured" and it took me a while to figure out where that came from. Eventually I remembered and found the sketch that prompted me to make this. The sketch depicted a large devil character hovering menacingly behind the earth. Looking back its kind of funny how eager I was to make something with an edgy theme, yet the best I could come up with was hellish imagery such as devils and demons. Though at some point I must've decided to go with a more simple concept, and scrapped the demon stuff.