I started making my way through The Game Maker’s Apprentice, and finished three chapters. So far, I’m really impressed with how engaging the book is. It teaches basic game design concepts by having you create actual playable games. Seeing three playable (albeit simple) games completed has been a really rewarding start.
Chapter 1 is a Bouncing Balls tutorial that teaches the basic Game Maker environment of sprites, rooms, objects, events, and sound.
Chapter 2 has you playing as a fire breathing dragon shooting down demons to protect her young. It introduces collisions, animation, and score tracking.
Chapter 3 has you delivering mail in a rocketship to moon colonies while avoiding asteroids. It introduces multiple levels (rooms), more advanced sprite manipulation, and executing blocks of instructions.
Everything is really clicking so far, and I’m having a lot of fun. The whole process makes perfect sense and seems natural. I do wonder how far I can push Game Maker though for my own ideas. My understanding is that the advanced scripting opens up a world of possibilities, but it is still a minor concern. I am really looking forward to digging in to the advanced scripting piece since I did a lot of automation scripting with vbscript at my last job. I have a feeling that scripting for game dev would probably be at least 10x more fun than Windows registry manipulation and batch file I/O.
That book sounds interesting! I might have to look into it!
Comment by dougkerr — November 12, 2008 @ 2:15 pm
i bought the book via marktplaats.nl and wen i got the book the cd with it was broken so i was wondering where i good download the cd resources for free
greetz CrazyNit
Comment by CrazyNit — December 9, 2009 @ 1:48 pm