Mark Overmars

The Game Maker’s Apprentice

Make your games more fun! T he Game Makers Apprentice shows you how to create nine exciting games using the wildly popular game Maker game creation tool. This book covers a range of genres, including action, adventure, and puzzle games complete with professional quality sound effects and visuals. it discusses game design theory and features practical examples of how this can be applied to making games that are more fun to play. game Maker allows games to be created using a simple drag-and-drop interface, so you don’t need to have any prior coding experience. it includes an optional programming language for adding advanced features to your games, when you feel ready to do so. you can obtain more information by visiting book.gamemaker.nl. The authors include the creator of the game Maker tool and a former professional game programmer, so you’ll glean understanding from their expertise. The book also includes supplementary material (on Apress.com) containing game Maker software and all of the game projects that are created in the book—plus a host of professional-quality graphics and sound effects that you can use in your own games. The Game Maker’s Apprentice Game Development for Beginners

Clever Computers: Playing Tic-Tac-Toe

In this chapter we are going to create a version of the game tic-tac-toe in which you are pitted against an intelligent computer opponent. This opponent must have a strategy that will regularly beat the player to keep it challenging, but the computer opponent must not be too strong; otherwise the player has no chance of winning, and will quickly become frustrated and give up. We will also show how the computer can adapt its play to the level of the player. The game will be almost completely written using the GML programming language, so make sure you read and understood Chapter 12 on GML before starting this chapter.

Finishing the Game

In this chapter, we will finish the Painter game by adding a few extra features, such as motion effects, sounds and music, and maintaining and displaying a score. In order to do the latter, we introduce the string and char types.

More Actions: A Galaxy of Possibilities

We hope you enjoyed making Evil Clutches and that it gave you a sense of how easy Game Maker is to use. However, you can achieve so much with a bit more knowledge, so let’s move on to our second project and do something a little more adventurous.

Cooperative Games: Flying Planes

Up to now we’ve only created single-player games, but for the next two chapters we’ll be creating games that are played with a friend. This chapter’s game will require players to cooperate in order to succeed, while the next will make players compete against one another for ultimate supremacy. Cooperative multiplayer games challenge players to work together and sometimes even make sacrifices for each other in order to succeed in their common goals.

Inheriting Events: Mother of Pearl

These days, some of the most inventive games come out of Japan. Japanese designers have a history of taking crazy design scenarios and turning them into brilliantly addictive games (e.g., Puzzle-Bobble, Pikmin, Gitaroo Man). Japanese games also have their own distinctive look derived from manga comics. In this chapter we’ll make our own game in this style, based around the classic game of Breakout. In doing so, we’ll learn how to use parent objects, one of Game Maker’s most powerful features. As always, though, we’ll need to start by writing a quick description of our game design.

GML: Become a Programmer

So far we’ve controlled the behavior of the different objects in our games using events and actions. These actions let the instances of the object perform tasks when certain events occur in the game. In this chapter we are going to define those tasks in an alternative way: by using programs. Programs define tasks through lines of text called code that use functions instead of actions. This extends the scope of Game Maker considerably as there are only about 150 different actions but close to a thousand functions. These functions give you much more control than actions, allowing you to define precisely how tasks should be performed in different circumstances.

Target the Player: It’s Fun Being Squished

Our third game will be an action game that challenges players to make quick decisions under pressure—and if they’re not fast enough then they’ll get squished! We’ll introduce some new techniques for putting character animation into the game, and show how a controller object can be used to help to manage the game.

Game Design: Interactive Challenges

Once you’ve caught the game-making bug, then it’s only a matter of time before you’ll want to start designing your own games. There’s nothing more satisfying than realizing your creative ideas and seeing other people enjoy them, and that’s precisely what making games is all about. We don’t want you to feel that you have to finish this book before trying out your own ideas—have a go whenever you feel ready, as you can always come back for more knowledge and ideas when you need them. Nonetheless, there is more to designing a good game than having a cool idea for a character or story, so these design chapters are here to provide some helpful advice for designing your own projects.

Game Design: Balance in Multiplayer Games

Multiplayer games offer game designers many additional ways to create playing experiences that are fun. Even games that are not very enjoyable on your own can be very addictive when playing with or against other human players. Harnessing this power requires designing games that treat all players fairly but still allow them to make the kind of meaningful choices that make games interesting to play. In this chapter we’ll discuss some of the strategies you can use to strike the right balance in your own multiplayer games.