Introduction

My interest in GameMaker: Studio started in the summer of 2013. I was scrolling through Twitter when a buddy of mine mentioned using GameMaker to make a game. So, of course, I had to check it out. I was immediately hooked on the idea of creating games without needing to know how to code. I read through some of the tutorials and got a couple of basic games to work, and soon enough I found myself coding. From there, it was only a matter of time before I realized that I wanted to write a book on GameMaker: Studio.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about creating video games. This book provides a ton of procedures on how to do everything from creating basic movements to creating some very special effects. I also provide overview concepts on how different parts of the game fit together. My hope is that you take the concepts you learn here and apply them to your own game. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll be playing each other’s games on our favorite consoles and devices.

About This Book

This book shows you how to make video games, quickly and easily. You make games geared toward PC and mobile devices with the possibility of expanding to consoles. You create different effects that you can apply to your own games. You find out all about Events and Actions and Sprites and Objects and Instances and Scripts and Rooms and Targets… . I could go on and on. There is an absolute ton of information packed into these pages.

If you enjoy reading through tutorials, written in a clear manner, full of details, you’ll appreciate GameMaker: Studio For Dummies. Much of the material I present here is stuff I learned from the GameMaker tutorials. But it was slow and hard going and I made a ton of mistakes. That’s where this book comes in to play: I’m sharing with you the secrets and details necessary to make the tutorials work, so that you can use them on your own games.

GameMaker: Studio For Dummies is modular — you don’t have to read straight through the book from Chapter 1 to the end. You can skip around and read the sections you’re most interested in. I include plenty of cross-references, so you won’t feel lost. I explain concepts a couple times in a couple different ways. That way, you can apply lessons learned in different situations. That should provide a solid foundation from which you can use GameMaker: Studio.

Foolish Assumptions

In writing this book, I made a few assumptions about you as the reader:

• You’ve probably been playing video games your entire life and now you want to make games. You want to make shooters, roguelike, and scrolling platform games.
• You want to play games on your iOS and Android devices.
• You may be envisioning getting your own Sony Developers License so that you can make games for the PS4 and Vita using GameMaker: Studio. Before you hit the big time, you need to start off slow, and that’s why you most likely already downloaded the free version of GameMaker, if not the paid edition.
• You may or may not know the first thing about code, but if you do, you’re one step ahead of the game. If you don’t know how to code, you want to learn.
• You’ve already gone through some of the in-software tutorials. The first couple of tutorials were easy enough, but when you tried some of the more complex tutorials, well, that’s when things got messy fast. At least, that’s what happened to me. And that’s why I wrote this book. Much of this book has you opening the in-software tutorial files, but I provide you the missing information, the step-by-step instructions that you want and deserve.

Basically, I’m envisioning you to be a go-getter who’s ready to make and play some games.

Icons Used in This Book

I use several icons throughout this book to help you understand GameMaker: Studio. The following is an explanation of each of the icons.

Whenever I provide information that’ll help you do something easier, faster, or better, I mark it with the Tip icon.

I still want to write a For Dummies book in which I can write a warning as to when pirates are about to attack, but that hasn’t happened yet. Instead, anything marked with the Warning icon has to do with your game crashing — as in, make sure to do or not to do something, so that your game doesn’t crash.

Whenever I remind you of something that I’ve already covered elsewhere, or tell you about something you should commit to memory, I mark it with the Remember icon.

The Technical Stuff icon mainly refers to details on code. You can skip anything marked with this icon, but I hope you read this stuff because it can help you grow as a developer.

Beyond This Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/gamemakerstudio for helpful information, all provided in a concise, quick-access format. You can also find articles online that build on the material you find in this book. Go to www.dummies.com/extras/gamemakerstudio for these informative articles.

I could have written a 700-page book to cover everything that you can do with GameMaker: Studio. In fact, I’ve written several extra tutorials, which you can find at www.gamemaker-tutorials.com.

On the YoYo Games website (http://www.yoyogames.com), you can find developer resources, support, and forums where you can ask and answer questions. You can also find a showcase of games that people have made using GameMaker. There’s a lot of cool stuff there — I recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.

Where to Go from Here

Like all authors, I would love it if you read this book from cover to cover, writing notes in the margins, highlighting passages, and dog-earing pages for quick reference later. Alas, you probably just want to know how to add virtual keys for mobile devices (see Chapter 13), or how to make an explosion look really cool (see Chapters 8 and 9). In that case, you can jump to those chapters. But if you get lost, you can start from the beginning to get the core concepts of what it takes to make a GameMaker game.

You may be tempted to skip Chapter 1, thinking it’s all fluff, but it’s not. In Chapter 1, I provide a procedure on how to choose a Target for a game. That’s very important information, especially if you want to play your game in a browser and not on Windows.

See how I did that? I included a reference in the Intro, to get you reading Chapter 1, and now you’ve taken the next step to create, publish, and play your video games.