This event runs every game frame and in it we are going to check for a player instance in the room, and if one is found we'll move towards it. The first is dropping it onanother rom (the room being dropped on is highlighted), which means that you want the selected room to become a "child" of the other room, and the other is dropping it over a room (where a bar is highlighted above the room), which will place it in the room order. This provides you with something you can actually see: real results. Objects And if you rotate your player, they will rotate around this point. In the previous 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. 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. The page you start on is the To fix this, we need to add events to our player. To add the event, click the Add Eventbutton and select Createfrom the event list: Adding the event will chain an Action Editor window to the Event Editor ready for use. You'll see that the image now appears in the top left corner of our room as a background, but that's not exactly what we want we want it to tile across the screen. Then import a tile set image. This will take us back to our main workspace and focus it on the object we want to edit. Were going to use the one we just made. Some of the best advice Ive ever received as an indie developer is to start your project right away. Youll now be able to drag and resize the box as needed. section, we are going to show you how to set up a basic title screen for your game using a new room and with some extra graphics. GameMaker Language vs Drag and Drop GML, or GameMaker Language, is GameMaker's proprietary programming language. Let's just pass over the core concepts and things that you should know after completing this tutorial: Our project is still not quite a game, as it's missing a few important things One of which is an enemy to shoot at! With that done, you can go back to the game room and on the new EnemyLayerlayer add five or six instances of the object (click on the obj_enemyspawnobject in the resource tree and then drag it into the editor window and release the mouse button). Return to the workspace and click to open the file explorer where you can browse for an appropriate image, which must be either PNG, GIF, or JPG format. Im using sprites from an old greenscreen style game I made. Click we'll expand on what you've learned here by adding bullets and other world items into our Arena Shooter game. This software have it's own language GML which is REALLY powerful too and easy to learn. Next, we need to add our tiles. , and make sure the Game frames per second is set to 60. Step You can change this manually by clicking on the preview. If youd like to see your game (again just a black screen), press The full action list now looks like this: You should open the Room Editor now on our game room and add a few instances of this enemy object into it (click and drag from the resource tree into the room area), and then test the game: At the moment, the enemies just follow the player around and don't actually do or react to anything else. So, open this object now for editing and go to the Step event and add this action just before the Destroy Objectaction : With that added all you need to do is select the sound to be played from the menu (there will only be the one sound that we have added), and there is no need to check the "Loop" checkbox, as that will make the sound loop continuously until the game ends or we call an action to stop it. Edit Image So we need to add another Assign Variableaction after all the others and outsideof the "if" checks: Note that we have checked the "relative" checkbox. Youre also going to drag and drop your invisible ground layer a few times and resize it to perfectly match wherever you drew your tiles. . If you select it then you'll see the event added into the Event Editor window and a new window chained to it: The new window is the DnD Editorand is split into three parts: The idea of Drag and Drop is simple - you select an action from the toolbox and drag then drop it onto the action workspace. Drag and Drop is simply more work for less functionality, so well be sticking with GML for this tutorial. Rooms So, the next We could use the movementactions for this, but to give you a better idea of how GameMaker Studio 2does things we are going to set the built in variable "x" to move and use the action Assign Variable: We want to set the value of "x" to 4 relativeto its previous value, so we set the action to look like this: Note that now in the list view on the left of the editor, we have the action written as plain text: So what does this do then? Read tutorials from experienced game developers and GameMaker experts. For that we'll use the following image in this tutorial, but you can create your own if you want: You need to click on the button The actions will be like this: Let's just go through the actions here one at a time so you can see what is happening: So, if there is an instance of the player, we then tell the enemy to move at the speed of the "spd" variable towards it. The only resource that is created for you by default when you create a new project is the Room Resource. To get our score to go up as we play, we need to add some extra actions into the Step Eventof the object obj_enemy, so open that now if it is not open already. The final thing we need to do is set the Object Following. (for the object) and Drag & drop is meh but you can use it anyway. No matter how you set things up, if you don't enable views then nothing will change, so this is very important! section section Right-click the section . That "do something" is create our bullet instance and then set the variable cooldown to 3 (using the actions Assign Variable), which means that the next game frame, the if variablecondition will failand no bullet will be created because "cooldown" is not less than 1. First But to get into making our prototype, we just need something that tells us where our player is and how big they are. On the left is the space where we can assign the object a name and a sprite, along with some other options. It has everything you need to take your i. In this tutorial we will simply be adding a single sound effect when you destroy the enemy instances, so you can use any sound effect that you have on your hard-drive or you can use the one that we have supplied along with the tutorial, which will be found when you open the file explorer in the TutorialResourcesfolder, in the "Sound" sub-folder (if you have any issues, you can also find the sound here). So, open up the bullet sprite now and click the section labelled Collision Mask: This section of the sprite editor permits you to define the area of the sprite that will be used to detect collisions, where a collision is defined as when two collision masks overlap at any point. 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 We will do this a little later on in the tutorial, so don't worry about it just now and we'll just use the "Instances" layer to start with. section Lets make it a bit bigger. on the "Object" resource folder and select Create: This will create a new, blank, object for us and open the Object Editor: The object editor will be opened within the same workspace as the sprite editor, and it may push the sprite editor out of the visible space. If you try it out, its almost impossible to get past the red box without dying. Large triple-A studios start with a long design, concept, and prototyping process. Of course, you could just use objects with sprites to draw your levels, but this is a more efficient method in terms of the GPU and speed of creating levels. Finally we set the sprite rotation (image_angle) to face the same way as the direction variable. The general Draw Event (and all other draw events) will be performed once for every game frame, much like the Step Event will, and note that you can have unrelated actions in the draw event as well as draw actions (but it is recommended that you keep this to a minimum and use the Step Events instead where possible). This layer will be used to show the background tile sprite that we added previously. In our draw event we want to draw the score text on the screen at the same position at all times. 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". To copy multiple actions, first you have to select them by holding down / and then left clicking on each of the actions we want to copy. under Now you could repeat the whole process and add each action, or you could do what we'll do now, which is to copy and paste the actions we have and then edit them. So, what next? When you start a game, you aren't normally just dropped straight into the action, but instead you are usually presented with some kind of title screen. The code we just wrote will constantly check if youre pressing the left arrow key on your keyboard. When you build a game for real, youll probably want to use multiple sprites to create animations. was equal to the number of pixels on the screen, our object would be at the far left. Youll now be greeted with a Workspace on the left and an asset browser on the right. Therefore, its not hard to transition to another language, like Lua, after learning GML. Create You can have multiple view ports active in a room (up to 8, starting at 0, so it's view_camera[0 7]) and can assign a camera to each one, so referencing (for example) view_camera[3] will mean you are dealing with the camera assigned to view port[3]. Although your preferred engine might be something quite different from the one we will use today, the principles used here are still useful to any fledgling developer. bottom center . yet. section 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. This can be really useful and can give a nice "catchup" effect if the instance being followed moves faster than the values given, but for our game we want the camera to alwaysstay centered on the player, so we leave it at -1, which is essentially telling the camera view to move "instantly" to the instance being followed position every game frame. Instead we need to first of all tell GameMaker Studio 2to change the "scope" of the following actions to affect the "other" instance in the collision using the action Applies To. Again, like the Set Fontaction, this will set all further drawing to use the given colour (and not just for text either, this will affect shapes that are drawn and few other things), and so can be called once at game start if the colour isn't going to change, or once every time that you want to draw with another colour. To resolve this, click on the layer and then drag it down the list until it's under the "Instances" layer, but over the "Background" layer. 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. This won't be the final way we do this, but for testing and to give a feel for how the game will pan out, it is fine. This is necessary because the tiles themselves are in the Tile layer and dont have any impact on our game objects. For now, we can just use a static character that glides around the screen. 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 picks up where the previous 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). In this way, every 60 frames a new enemy will be created for the player to shoot at. If this was not checked then we would be simply setting the cooldown variable to -1. Per the box Ill name this A Note About Game Engines Every game needs sprites, so take yours and drop them into the Sprites folder.