So you want to be a Game Designer

What Makes a Great Game? Conflict - For a game to be interesting, there should be some sort of conflict to present a challenge for the player to overcome. Aesthetics. Visuals are a powerful means of engaging players and helping them immerse into the game experience. Theme and story. A theme can add interest and create engagement within a learning game. The Story is built with Characters, Setting and Events. The story is the reason WHY the player plays the game. The Game is created with a clear Goal and a set of Rules Rewards. Rewards are things or keepsakes that players earn through game play.

Gamemaker Introduction

First Game: Moving Bear Objective Introduction to GameMaker Create Sprites Create Objects Create a Room Attach Keyboard events to Objects Download Maze resources from my site: techsk.weebly.com

Create a sprite (just a picture)

What’s in a name? sp01, obj02, snd03 vs. spBear, spWall, objClown, sndPlane Coding Convention – how to name your variables? Pick one and be consistent. spBear & sprGoodClown spr_bear & spr_bad_clown

Attach an image to a sprite

Create another sprite & attach image to it

Create a bear object and attach a sprite to it

Create a Wall object and attach a sprite to it

Create a Room and add wall objects to the room (select object and left click to add to room)

Add a bear to the room

Events and Objects GameMaker uses event-driven programming To get any object to do anything in GameMaker, it must respond to an event. In our example, we want the bear to start moving around when an arrow key is pressed. Not all objects have to respond to all events, for instance, the wall object doesn’t have to respond to arrow keys or any other key. Events and Actions are attached to the objects that care about the events.

Keyboard Events for Bear To move our bear around in the room, we need to define 5 Keyboard events <left> - left arrow key on the keyboard <right> - right arrow key on the keyboard <top> - top arrow key on the keyboard <bottom> - bottom arrow key on the keyboard

To define an event for an object Open the object properties window by double clicking on the object in the list. Click on Add Event to select the types of events for the object. Drag actions from the actions palette on the right to the actions box for the object. First Event for Bear: Select Keyboard <left> key event Add a Movement action to move the bear to the left Set the speed to 1 (1 pixel per step)

Add actions to Bear

Movement Actions

Incremental Development & Testing Run it! Test the left arrow key first before defining the other directions

Ghost Bears Notice that the bear is going through walls. To stop the bear from going through walls, we need to add a new event – Collision event. When a bear collides with the wall, we want the bear to bounce off.

Ghost Bear?

Bear colliding with the wall

Ghost Bear? Notice that even with the Collision event, the bear might still be going through walls. One thing to check is the properties of the wall object. Make sure it’s solid as the action requires the bear to bounce off solid objects.

Solid wall?

Finish all directions

Congratulations! You just created your first GameMaker game.

Bonus!! Go to the Room properties and change the background color. Add more walls to make the room into a maze. Add a sound every time the bear bounces off the wall. Add a background image to the room. What else could you change or add?