The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners

super outdated

Examples are not compatible with GM:Studio, so you need to download GM 8.1.

This is a good book to read if you want to get into game development. Game maker 7 is a good program to use if you want to start designing. It could get confusing at times, but this book tells you everything you need to get started.Such as basic codes,sprites,rooms,artificial intelligence,etc.

If you want to learn how to design games without spending a fortune, get this book!

Okay, but it needed some more detail in some areas. A lot of what it was telling me to do got somewhat confusing, especially towards the end. It was helpful overall, though. At least YouTube exists and helped me figure out what dilemmas I had when the book was unclear.

Really useful book for those using Game Maker to develop computer games. Lots of script examples that I was able to use in the game development class that I recently completed.

So you want to make video games and have a few ideas on what sort of games you want to make. You don’t know where to start since you have yet to learn the basics of design and programming. At some point, you have learned about game development software (available for free with paid additional features in a Professional edition) that specializes in making 2D games called GameMaker: Studio. If you found yourself thinking this would be the best software for making the sort of games you have in mind, you decided to download it via the official website or the Steam page. After trying out a few built-in beginner tutorials, you decided to look for more beginner tutorials in order to get more comfortable with the tools that GameMaker: Studio has to offer. The tutorials found throughout YouTube have been good so far, but suppose you wanted a resource that’s a bit more concrete in structure, a set of lessons that do not require an Internet connection. In other words, you thought you could use an offline resource like a textbook to learn more ways to use GameMaker: Studio. That’s where The Game Maker’s Apprentice comes in.

Divided into five parts, much of the book is dedicated to various methods of using GameMaker’s drag-and-drop programming feature designed to enable beginner’s to make various basic games without having to know programming from prior experience or formal training. What this means is that he or she can drag icons representing various functions into any number of event lists added to game objects, like for when an object representing a player character or an enemy is first created upon running a game. Assuming the reader bought it with the accompanying CD, he or she can use the built-in resources consisting of pre-made sprites, sounds, and music while following along each chapter to make games such as a Breakout-clone, a vertical scrolling shoot-‘em-up (shmup, for short), a maze game, or a basic competitive 2-player game. From chapter 2 to chapter 10, the reader is shown how some simple yet fun games can be created using drag-and-drop while going over some basic fundamentals in game design that would be applicable to other games made with other software besides GameMaker.

Upon reaching Part 5 (chapters 12 through 14), readers get introduced to the basics of traditional programming in a manageable learning curve. This is done in the form of GameMaker’s own programming language appropriately called Game Maker Language (GML) which shares similarities to other more common programming languages such as C# and C++. By guiding readers through programming with GML, they get introduced to some methods that extend the use of drag-and-drop in order to make more complex games such as using different sets of scripts to define the playfield and rules of Tic-Tac-Toe and giving an enemy a bit of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) so that it would wander slowly around the maze, chase the player upon spotting him/her at a higher speed, go into alert mode upon losing said player, and resume wandering.

While it’s all well and good for those looking for a solid start in using the software, The Game Maker’s Apprentice was written over 10 years ago for the Game Maker 8 series (aka GM: Legacy) which was retired just a few years earlier by YoYo Games, the company behind the software, in favor of the more advanced GameMaker: Studio. So some of the actions and programming functions that worked in GM: Legacy would no longer work with GM: Studio because they have been either replaced (a GML function called sound_play was replaced by audio_play_sound) or rendered obsolete (the Sleep action in GM: Legacy would briefly pause a game for a number of milliseconds upon completing a goal before restarting or moving on to the next level). In my attempts to make the games featured in this book using GM: Studio, I had to figure out ways to work around obstacles such as those by consulting the GameMaker Community forums in conjunction with my own understanding of the software. But this should not discourage readers who would be using this book in order get familiar with the basics of GM: Studio since most of the content is still applicable with the modern software.

In conclusion, The Game Maker’s Apprentice is a solid introduction to those looking to start making games using GM: Studio that could use a more advanced 2nd edition. While some of the procedures to make the games featured in this book are obsolete by today’s standard software, a good number of them still apply to the process. So I would recommend it to any beginner wanting to experiment with GM: Studio in conjunction with other tutorials available on the Internet.

While this book was written with a previous version of GameMaker in mind (version 6.1 comes on the companion disk), most of it works just fine with GameMaker Studio, and with a little adjustment I was able to get everything working fine.

A good introduction text for getting you started with GameMaker.

This book is a must if you wish to learn how to use game maker, as well as understanding some basic concepts of game design. The book is organized so that each three chapters you'll learn how to use game maker program, the forth all be a game design lesson based on what you did in the previous chapters. It is cleverly organized to help you grasp how to make games.