Note that even if the image you supply has non-transparent pixels in this first grid cell, they will not be drawn, so when making tile sets keep this in mind and just leave this first tile blank. You'll notice that our object has another window chainedto it, the Event Editor. event will run only once, right when the object is created. Its also useful if you want to name two different things the same name, like Connect BAPI using Action Group with SAP Build Process Automation automatic . Now you should be able to slow time by pressing A and speed it up by pressing D. Congrats! However that won't work in this case, as there are multiple enemy instances within the room and GameMaker Studio 2doesn't know which one you actually want to affect. This should be dragged and added to the right of the "if" action to show that it should only be run if the condition returns true: To keep things simple for now, the arguments we are going to use in this argument are as follows: The last argument can be kept blank for now as it's not required, but for future reference, the Target argument permits you to assign a variable to hold the unique instance ID of the instance being created, which permits you to change things on that instance later as well as many other things. So if you have grass on top of your platforms and dirt on the sides, youre covered! So we can't write: That code will subtract 1 from ANY of the instances of "obj_enemy" in the room, and so is best used when we know that there is only one unique instance to be accessed. Right now, unfortunately, our player object looks like nothing. You will then be presented with two options: New Drag and Drop Project; New GameMaker Language Project; Drag and Drop is the powerful visual scripting language that permits you to code a project using chained action blocks, while the GameMaker Language (GML) is the propriety . The action can be found in the Mouse and Keyboardsection of the action toolbox and you should drag it into the action workspace abovethe Assign Variable action: Note that when you drag it near the existing action an area will be highlighted indicating that it can be placed either above or below the action in the chain (in the image above we place it above), and once you drop it you will see that it is connected to the Assign Variable action like this: That square chain on the left means that the "if" action will be called and thenthe Assign Variable action, but that they are independent of each other. We will use the same approach to scaling that we used previously for the image_alpha, so add the Set Instance Scaleaction and then we'll do an If Variablecheck on it: This will scale up the image xscale and image yscale by 0.02 every game frame (note that the relativecheck-box is marked) and then it will check the value of the image_xscale variable to see if it is greater than 1 and if it is it sets the scale to 1. statement: To break down the code a little, first we check if time is below 1. This name will be the uniqueidentifier for the sprite throughout your game and can be anything you wish, although we recommend that you use some kind of identifier prefix like "spr" or simply "s", as, when you get multiple resource types in your game code, it makes everything far easier to read. we are going to look at an important aspect of any game keeping score. Go ahead and play the game and see what happens if you touch the red box. under section. The final game will look something like this: We will be keeping the tutorial as simple as possible, with the idea being to give enough of an overview of how things work for you to get stuck in and making your own games as quick as possible. The final action block should look like this: You can hit the Run button now and see what happens Before continuing, we should look at the concept of layersin a bit more depth. In this case we are going to change the alpha to make the sprite "invisible" at the start of the room. obj_world Basically, some tile set images may be created with "empty" areas around each tile and so you can set the pixels or cells between each individual part of the image here. However it's missing one or two things to take it from a prototype to a finished game, one of which is a scoring system which is what we'll cover in the next In most arcade games, the collision mask is kept smaller than the sprite to give the player a bit more room for error, and in this game we will do the same. Dont worry too much about the origin, and the bounding box should be all of the image now (which we want). Now we have to make the time variable do something. of this tutorial You've made it to the Scoring Section of the "My First Game" tutorial and in this Often, the best first step after coming up with an idea for a game is to put the most base or core mechanic into code. top left Note that actions are added in a linear fashion, so each subsequent action that you add will be added afterthe previous. https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/featuresGameMaker Studio 2 is the latest and greatest incarnation of GameMaker! Collision Mask But you can change it to We are going to use alarmsin this object to create instances of our enemy spawn object within the room, so to start with add the following Actions into the Create Event: The first action sets a variable to control the speed at which enemies will spawn. With them all selected simply press the key to delete them. However, if you have zero coding experience, you should still be able to follow along. You can actually delete this and type in any text to get a preview of how it will look in the game. GML Visual - 8 Direction movement and importing sprites - Drag and drop Make sure that the original sprite is 3232 pixels, or change the dimensions by clicking edit sprite. The collision box should generally be the same size and shape as the sprite. Rooms Why? Now, as shown before, we couldpull in the Applies toaction here, but for a single action like this it's not necessary as we can change the scope of any action by clicking the little arrow at the top right, like this: Note how the action now has a different coloured outline? section The first event were going to add is called a Step event. We wont make a sprite for this one; we dont want to see it. To get started with GameMaker Studio 2, first create a new project. Instance don't justget placed in the room editor, they can also be created (and destroyed) at runtime using certain actions, as we'll see. Clicking on that section will expand the different properties: The first thing to do here is to check the box beside Enable Views. Let's quickly run through what you should have learned from this With that done, the full action list for the general Draw Event should now look like this: You can now run the game again and you should see that the score is much more visible, maintains it's position and goes up when an enemy is destroyed: In this While normally proprietary languages are a bad thing, GML is really close to JavaScript as its dynamically typed and high level. The layer has been created abovethe player layer, which means that anything assigned to it will be drawn afterthe player, which we don't want. Per the box Ill name this What does this mean? In the previous Jump is slightly different. While this isnt a full game, its enough to get a good feel for how GameMaker Studio works, and whether it clicks for you. These functions will return the (x/y) position of the view and store each one in the temporary variables "cx" and "cy", and note how we use the previously declared temporary variable here. Instances are copies of the initial object placed within the game room. Now set the tile width and height to 32.. section. Note that this will set it for the whole gameand all subsequent text will be drawn using this font even if you don't use this action anywhere else, so if you want to use various fonts in a game you must call this action before every item that needs drawing, but if your game only needs one font then you can call this action in a controller at the start of the game once only. section Osomething Now, go ahead and press In this way we can ensure that the image alpha will increment until it reaches 1 and go no higher (this is important, as while you can set the image alpha value to more than 1 - or even negative numbers - this will have different effects on different platforms and the recommended value for this variable is always between 0 and 1). View Tutorial. obj_player For that we drag the action Declare Tempfrom the "Common" action library, and add the function like this: A local (temporary) variable is one that is only valid for the event that it is used in, so it's like a "use and throw away" variable - we only need to get the direction once in this step so there is no need to make it an instance or global variable. Your full action list should now look like this: If you test the game again now, you can see that the bullets fire a bit slower, but for our purposes it still seems too fast. . The next step in our GameMaker Studio 2 tutorial is where things start getting really fun. To actually scale it up we need to use the Step Event, so add that now. Now that our object has a gorgeous new stand in graphic to display, go to the room tab, then drag and drop Now that its the right size, lets draw on it. You can close the Sound Editor now as we are finished with the resource and are ready to add it to our game. So, in our actions we are setting the alarm[0] to 60, meaning that it will subtract 1 from 60 every game frame until it reaches 0 at which point any code in the alarm[0] event will run. In this case we want to assign the dark tile sprite we added, so click on the section marked and select the sprite spr_darktile. If the game detects that youre pressing left on the keyboard, it will run the code in the curly braces. You can change this value if you wish, but by default it's locked and handled by GameMaker Studio 2automatically. By doing this we are adding -1 relative to the current value, ie: subtracting 1 from the current value. Remember, everything that goes in a game room gets placed on a layer, and in the room editor we can name our layers to anything we require. If you run the game now you can see how this all works to make the camera follow the player while they explore a larger room and shoot the enemies Getting to grips with the room editor is essential if you want to get the most out of GameMaker Studio 2, and there are many, many features to it. The next action sets the alarm [0] to the value of spawn_rate. Once you have named the resource and added the file, you can use the audio preview buttons in the editor to listen to the sound and set its volume: The rest of the options here we can leave at their default values, but if you want to find out more about them then hit to open the manual and go to the section on the Sound Editor. This software have it's own language GML which is REALLY powerful too and easy to learn. Well, not yet but it will be when we make our player instance actually do something. This will make sense in a moment! Objects As usual, name your sprite something appropriate like "spr_darktile" and then close the sprite editor. Now, on with the GameMaker Studio tutorial! We're going to create a score for the player to use as a measure of how well they are doing in the game, and not only will we be keeping score, but we'll be using the different functions for drawing text to show it to the player as well. For this tutorial we are going to use Drag & Drop so you would click that button and then choose a project name to go with the game you want to make. It can become tricky to remember whats what, so this helps with organization. Obviously the first thing we are going to need is a new sprite to represent a bullet. Step engine made for 2D games This means that we now have to re-order the rooms so that the title room is placed before the game room. Before continuing to add these spawner objects, we first of all need to remove the enemies that are currently in the room and prepare a new instance layer, so open the room "rm_game" now. The other options in the Font Editor are outside of the scope of this tutorial, but you can read up on them by pressing to open the manual and going to the section on the Font Editor. sections. , you created a sprite, assigned it to an object and placed an instance of that object in a room. You can have a single room for every aspect of your game, like splash screen, main menu, introduction, level 1, 2, 3, etc or you can have a single room and generate everything using code. obj_damage obj_player The "type" should be set as the direction, as we want to use that rather than the horizontal or vertical component. . Before we begin with the GameMaker Studio tutorial, what exactlyisa GameMaker Studio? But dont be mistaken: this is still a pro-level IDE that powers some highly successful titles. That aspect of the program won't be discussed in this tutorial and we'll be using the default layout, but you can find more information on customisation in the manual (press The final thing we need to do is set the Object Following. Next, we need to add our tiles. GameMaker Studio 2 Tutorial: A Simple 5 Step Guide to GMS 2 It's worth taking a moment to look at all the different draw actions for text that are available to you (press to open the manual) as they permit you to scale the text, or limit it to a specific string width (number of characters) and many other things. As were using Drag and Drop, we can add our game logic simply by choosing commands from a toolbox. If you wish to play around with what you have learned so far, we recommend that you save the project in its current state - so that you can continue from the same point later - then save it again with a different name and edit the renamed project so as not to lose or change anything that is important to future Note that in the Font Editor you have a preview window that by default shows "Hello World". Find a top-rated training program today , Best Coding Bootcamp Scholarships and Grants, Get Your Coding Bootcamp Sponsored by Your Employer, GameMaker Studio 2 Tutorial: A Simple 5 Step Guide to GMS 2, Before We Begin the GameMaker Studio 2 Tutorial, GameMaker Studio 2 Tutorial: Step by Step, Step 1: Project Setup and Learning the Interface, Career Karma matches you with top tech bootcamps, Access exclusive scholarships and prep courses. will be a short one, but what you'll learn can be used anywhere in your own projects. We currently have two instance layers (one for the player and the enemies, one for the bullets) and a background layer. The origin cursor will disappear and a grey box will show up on your sprite. This is a great method to add more life to your games and can be applied to almost any repetitive sound effect to make it more interesting and realistic. Right now everything is looking very empty, so lets get started making our game. If you open the room editor for our game room (double click on the resource in the Resource Tree), you will see that by default the Layer Editoris shown docked to the top left of the Room Editor workspace: Currently we have two layers: "Instances" and "Background". The tiles we are going to use for the game are 128x128 pixels each, all placed on the same image in a grid. The workflow for creating the enemy object is the exact same as that which we used for the player and bullet objects, so we'll simply list the steps here, as you should be familiar with how it goes: If all has gone correctly, your workspace should look like this: We now add a Create Eventfor our enemy object. I'm no programmer at all, so I would need to use the drag & drop mode. Next choose the "Drag and Drop" option, which we will be using for this GameMaker Studio . Where GameMaker differs, however, is in its relative simplicity and target audience. In our Step Eventaction workspace, we need to add the following action at the end of the current list, if mouse down(from the Mouse And Keyboardaction library): This action functions just like the if keyboard downaction and performs a conditional check to see if the left mouse button is being held down (remember, "if" conditionals check for a true or a false return value) and the subsequent blocks we add will be within this conditional and should only be run if the conditional returns true - essentially, the mouse button is being held down so do something. You have 12 alarm events and they can also be accessed using the built in variable array alarm[0 .. 11]. Just before we continue, it's worth noting that the Draw Events other than the general drawing, will notaffect the instance default drawing, so that you can, for example, have no general Draw Event but have a Draw End Eventand the instance will still default draw the sprite andwhatever you have added into the Draw End Event. Like Unity and Unreal, GameMaker Studio, is a game engine that incorporates a powerful IDE (integrated development environment) for easy development. , then click If both of those are true, then we increase time by 0.05. spr_player Youll now be greeted with a Workspace on the left and an asset browser on the right. Go ahead and drag the Declare Tempaction into the general Draw Event action workspace now and fill in the following: Here we are getting the ID value for the camera assigned to view port[0] using the built-in global scope array view_camera, and then storing it in the temporary variable "vc". Make Your Own . Once youve finished, return to the main workspace. Follow our beginner tutorial series and you'll be making games in no time! If you add in a sprite animation, the top part will show each individual frame and clicking on them would show that frame in the preview window below, but as we only have one image in the sprite it only shows that image. Next we add in the Assign Variableaction just as shown above, only we chain it to the right of the Assign toaction, as we did for an "if": Finally we want to destroy the bullet instance by dropping an Instance Destroyaction after (and outside of) the Applies toaction, so the final Collision Event looks like this: After we take the point of off the "hp" variable, we then call the action to destroy the calling instance (the bullet). First you would open GameMaker Studio 2 , and then click on the New Project button shown on the main Start Page:. Step Create Sprite You can get quite far using the drag and drop system, but really it depends on what you want to do and how complex you want to design your project. Now we have our object we need to name it, so we'll follow the same convention we outlined previously and use a prefix to define what kind of resource it is and give it the unique name "obj_player" to match the sprite "spr_player" that we made previously. Each time the game refreshes, this event is triggered. section Essentially, the general Draw Event defaults to using the Draw Selfaction . Normally you'd have a mix of both things, with some rooms fulfilling multiple purposes (like one room for all your different menus) and other rooms for a single purpose, like an overworld room, or a level room. If you do want to make an idle animation, however, you can simply drag another sprite next to the first one in the timeline and then set the FPS in the top left. Happy developing! This will only run once, and well use it to establish a global variable. For example, a We want to be able to walk left and right and jump up in the air. Lets make sure it all worked and press We then reset the alarm to the spawn_rate value so that it will count down again and spawn another one. With a simple idea in mind, its time to This will trigger whenever the key is down, which also means the player will be able to simply hold left or right (rather than needing to tap the button). Every game needs sprites, so take yours and drop them into the Sprites folder. So, add a Create Eventnow, and in the action editor window that pops up drag the Assign Variableaction and set it to the following: This gives us an instance variable with the name "thescore" and sets its value to 0. This is the equivalent of a scene in Unity. and then add it to the player object. So, if you hold down A for one second time will increase by 0.6. ) and move the instance with the arrow keys: We are almost finished this tutorial, but there is one final thing we want to happen with our player instance We need to make it rotate to always face the mouse while it is being moved around the screen. We can expand the current action list now to cover the remaining three directions of up, left and down. By default a view camera is static, ie: it won't move unless you code it to, but we can set it to follow an instance of an object automatically and without code using this button: Once you've set it to follow the player object, we also need to set the Horizontal Borderand Vertical Bordervalues. So, the player shoots an enemy and "kills" it and the game will award them a certain number of "points" which we'll add to their score. We need to go back to our object "obj_player" and change the creation code to look like this: As mentioned previously, you can use the layer name (in "" as a string) to tell GameMaker Studio 2what layer to use, and now if you test the game again, the bullets will be created below the player object. So, change the "3" in the Step Event Assign Variableaction to 10 and test again. If you look at the Layer Propertieswindow (by default under the Layer Editor) you can see this value shown, and as you change layer order it will change too. I named mine Lets add some finishing touches. We need to fix that, so to start with we need to edit the Step Eventagain. When you drag this into the action workspace you then have to click the little arrow to the right and select a "target". is the exact point that the game considers your player to be. The code we just wrote will constantly check if youre pressing the left arrow key on your keyboard. at the players feet. Here's many tutorials on the internet and amazing manual. , and make sure the Game frames per second is set to 60. In this case we get the direction from the player position to the mouse position, which we get from the two global scopevariables mouse_x and mouse_y (global scope variables are variables that do not "belong" to any instance, but instead belong to the whole game and as such all instances can change them and use them). obj_player In the main editor window, you have a bunch of tools in the top right corner: The one we are interested in here is the Play Animationbutton . Privacy Policy This defines the physical size of your sprite and facilitates interactions with the environment. Notice that it automatically has a collision box; the small grey outline surrounding the image. That brings us to the end of the Shooting Section of the "My First Game" tutorial. This permits users to develop and publish games for Windows and MacOS. About the author: Ethan Scully is a writer, editor, and game developer who manages Career Karma's content partnership initiatives and is currently based in Istanbul. These are the default layers created for any new room, where the background layer permits you to use a colour or a sprite for a single background image, and instances permits you to add instances in to the room. Learn about GameMaker Studio and make your first platform game! Just remember that for now, it will be appearing on a black background, Well, we couldjust use the value 1.5 in all future actions when we deal with the instance speed, but if we want to changethat value, it would mean searching through all the actions and manually fixing it. Being able to access variables in other instances is incredibly useful and very powerful, and it's important to know how and when it can be done. If you want to develop games for Android, Android Studio is not the best choice of tool. . You can also set the the camera view port, which is what defines the area of the screen that will be used to display the camera view. GameMaker Studio 2bases all the scale on factors, where a factor of 1 is 1:1 with the original sprite image, so a factor of 1.5 is 150% bigger and a factor of 0.5 would be 50% smaller. The general draw event is the one that GameMaker Studio 2uses when it default drawsyour instance sprite. Name your project as you please and save it somewhere safe. section It can be a bit tricky to reorganise your actions so the following animation shows you how to add these actions correctly: There is a problem with this however We don't count down the variable cooldown anywhere, which means we will fire one bullet and no more since it will be set to 3 and the subsequent "if" check will fail. We need to create a new object for the spawner so do that now (click on the Object resource folder and select Create), and name this object obj_enemyspawn. You might have to squint a bit though, as it's written rather small and isn't very easy to read, so lets fix that now. Now, create a new object (Ive named mine Terms of Service Create something similar of your own and then drop it into the Sprites folder. . The Each Now your player object is in your room, and therefore part of the game. If you have used your own sprite then click the image where you think would be best place to put the origin for the image. Using that we are telling GameMaker Studio 2that the following action blocks are to be run as if they were part of the otherinstance in the collisions actions - in this case the obj_enemy. Create at the top left of the IDE. The bullet instance we are creating is created using the Instance Createaction , which creates the instance and assigns it to the layer ID that you give, - in this case the default Room Editor layer for instances. It should all now look like this: The conditional we are checking is the value returned by the function "keyboard_check" which returns true if the key (in this case the right arrow) is being held down and false otherwise. Next we need to add a Step Eventwith the following actions: All this action block is going to do is add a small amount to the image_alpha value and then check it to see if it is over 1, and if it is it resets it to 1. In this way, every 60 frames a new enemy will be created for the player to shoot at. You can assign the sprite by either clicking the Select Spritebutton in the Properties window, or the button marked No Spritein the Editor window. The target can be an object, an instance or one of a couple of keywords, which in this case we want to be "other". Let's see how that works in practice by adding an action As mentioned above, the Step Event is run each and every game loop, so anything we put in here will happen once per game frame (30 times in a second for a 30 FPS game, 60 for a 60fps game, etc). It moves 50 pixels every frame, compared to your character that moves 5 pixels every frame. are as follows: It's not much for such an important aspect of any game, but surprisingly those two actions are about all you'll need for adding sound effects into your project. However "other" in that context onlyworks for the collision event, and we want to apply an action to an instance in the Step Event, so we need to change the scopeof the action we are going to use. In the Scoring Sectionwe explained how GameMaker Studio 2default draws the sprite assigned to an instance of an object, and most of the objects in this game have no Draw Event. to open the file explorer where you can browse for an appropriate image, which must be either PNG, GIF, or JPG format. But, before creating our first object, let's quickly run over what an object is conceptually. This is done by checking the box labelled View Visible. With this action we will set the built in direction variable to the direction from the (x / y) position to the (mouse_x / mouse_y) position. Click on the layer and drag it into the position between the Instancesand BulletsLayer. Keep in mind that instance variables need to be initialised before use, and so that is why we have them in the Create Event, as that event is run for every instance the moment it is created in a room and the event only runs onceso the variable is only set once at the start. It just controls some things for us, namely time. For now, lets put the We could do this by changing the values shown for left, top, right and bottom, however you can edit the collision mask directly in the preview window by simply dragging the little box "handles" around: What we want is to achieve is a collision mask that covers only the "head" of the bullet so that the rest won't register, something like this: You now need to open the other two sprites (for the player and for the enemy) and edit their collision masks too, as in the image shown below: Note that we have left the player collision mask a fair bit smaller than the sprite itself.