GameMaker Game Programming with GML

Learn GameMaker Language programming concepts and script integration with GameMaker: Studio through handson, playable examples

About This Book

• 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

Who This Book Is For

If you are a GameMaker: Studio developer, having little experience with writing scripts and are looking to expand that skill set, this is the book for you. It is assumed that you can already navigate GameMaker: Studio to some degree. Because this book focuses on the scripting and integration of scripts to aid in the production of a game, instead of game design, it would also be useful for you to have access (or have the ability) to create the visual and audio assets that are presented in the examples throughout this book.

What You Will Learn

• 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

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.