Gamemaker – an Overview

In the point, click and drag way of using Gamemaker, the main things to consider are:

Objects:           the main entities that interact. Characters, walls, balls, ghosts, …

Rooms:           the fields where the objects move, or sit fixed. They may have levels of complexity.

Sprites:           the image an object uses to display itself.

Sounds:          such as theme music or sound effects for collisions, deaths, explosions

Backgrounds:   the image used as backdrop scenery for a room.

Events & actions     the ways objects interact, and what an object does in response to an interaction.

Games in Gamemaker take place in the rooms. Rooms are typically the sky for an aeroplane game, the roadway for a car game, the walls of a maze, or that sort of thing. They have background pictures are essentially static scenery. There are some backgrounds predefined in the programs’ resources. Rooms have the main players, objects placed in them. Objects are the things that interact in the game. They might be moving things such as: balls, planes, cars, ghosts, Pac-man, monsters, or they might be just sitting there and not actually moving: like walls, fences, holes ponds and secret trapdoors. The moving objects can react to player directions from the keyboard, mouse or joysticks. Objects are really the main conceptual tools that Gamemaker operates with.

Rooms can be used for levels in your game or to move to different scenes. One room might be a splash screen. There could be goals to achieve to move from one room to another, such as capturing all the diamonds in a room, or pressing on the secret door. Rooms all have a background. This can be a simple colour, texture or a picture. These background images can be created in Gamemaker or they can loaded from files. The background can do other things too but in this introduction, just consider it as something for aesthetic appeal.

An object usually has an image that represents it. These images are known as sprites. Sprites can be single images, or different series of images. The character moving to the left or the right or up for instance, or the way a plane rotates, or a bomb explodes. Sprites be can created in Gamemaker or imported from files likes gif, jpg bmp or animated gif. They are some in the programs resources.

During the game things will happen to objects, these are called events. When an event occurs an object may react with an action. For example when a ball hits a solid wall, it may rebound. The event is a collision between the ball object and the wall object, the rebound is the action that the ball does.

These events are predefined in the game and are selected from pop up selections and are represented graphically by an icon in an event list. The event that an action causes is selected from a list of icons and dragged over to match the event. A creation event when the object gets created, such when the game starts. For example, when a ball object gets created it might be rolling slowly to the right at a certain height on the screen. When two objects meet you get a collision event. This might cause the action of the ball stopping or reversing direction. Another action at the same time might be a  sound effect like a boing being heard. Pressing a key on the keyboard causes a keyboard event. If the key is a cursor key the object might respond with an appropriate action, like moving in the direction of that cursor key.

There is another level at which Gamemaker can be used using scripting (or program code.) This uses other type of resource: scripts. Using these small pieces of code expands the dimensions of Gamemaker greatly, but they are not treated here.