The prospect of creating my own video games has always excited me. I remember buying a video game called Video Game Tycoon: Gold Edition at a book fair while I was in Middle School. The selling point of the game was that you could create your own video games using pre-made assets, and then burn them to DVD to share with your friends. Of course, it was targeted at kids, therefore it was purposefully limited, so I never created anything I was really proud of in the brief time I used it. Now ten years later, I have had the opportunity to create something that has filled me with a sense of pride, even if it is just a rough prototype.
The closest game I can compare my prototype to is Flappy Bird, but instead of dodging pipes for points, you dodge buildings, telephone poles, and other birds. While I wasn’t able to implement score yet, the idea was to, uh, “defecate” on unsuspecting people and cars below for points.
To create my prototype, I used GameMaker, which made creating the game much easier than I anticipated. Despite the ease, I felt like the program didn’t limit me in any way. Programming was achieved with the “drag-and-drop” interface, where you could set pre-made triggers and events without having to go to the effort of writing the code yourself, but if you wanted to, you could (which I did for some events).
As far as assets, I used rough stand-ins for most of my sprites (e.g. buildings were literally just a grey rectangle). The pigeon sprite was reused from another GameMaker game I was working on before starting this assignment. The sounds – the background chirping and the fart noise used for poop landing – were public domain sounds from freesound.org. It didn’t take long to “design” the sprites and place them; most of my effort was in programming.
Overall, I am very pleased with the result of my first published video game prototype. I’m considering using GameMaker again for my group project – a twin-stick 2D shoot ’em up – because of its ease-of-use for designing two-dimensional games.
Good to hear that you had great success with GameMaker. I used GameMaker for my game too, but I like to exclusively use code. I love GameMaker because it is very easy to pick up and create games. However, I did run into some limitations of the engine during my individual game prototype. I wrote a lot of code within my wall objects’ draw events. Draw events use a lot of processing power. Since I had a lot of individual wall objects my game began to lag very hard. This was only compounded by the fact that it had to run in an html web browser. All in all I was able to remedy my problem a little bit. Just make sure not to get too complacent with GameMaker!