Overview
Write and utilize scripts to help organize and speed up your game production workflow
Display important user interface components such as score, health, and lives
Play sound effects and music, and create particle effects to add some spice to your projects
Learn how to script common game features: artificial intelligence, collision, reading input, and player feedback
Build your own example match-three puzzle and platform games
In Detail
GameMaker: Studio is a popular game engine used to publish games to a variety of platforms. Although GameMaker: Studio's drag-and-drop functionality makes creating games simple and fast, utilizing scripts can really help organize and speed up GameMaker's workflow exponentially.
This hands-on guide will help you build a strong foundation in programming in GameMaker Language by taking you through several example games. Knowledge gained by the end of the book can be applied so you can build your own line of exciting games.
What you will learn from this book
Create script resources as well as custom scripts for events
Learn how to import, compress, and play sound effects and background music
Build particle effect systems to give games a little extra flare
Track and display user interface elements such as health and scoring
Program and interact with simple yet challenging artificial intelligence
Read player input from a variety of sources
Utilize alarms to create a clean series of events
Establish a finite state machine to track a character's current state
Complete easy and fun games from start to finish
Approach
A step-by-step approach to build your knowledge, starting from a simple "hello world" to discovering arrays, classes, and so on. Each learning point is explained in a practical way, carrying out tasks within the GameMaker development environment.
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