Introduction to Game Maker - @jessefreeman. For the past week I have been digging into Game Maker. It has always been on my list of cross- platform game development tools to try out, and now with Yo. Yo Game. I thought that one of the best ways to test it out would be to port one of my old Flash games, Code Bummer, over to Game Maker and talk a little bit about what I learned. I plan on following up with a much more in- depth tutorial on how to build Code Bummer in Game Maker as well as how to get it running on Win. WP8. Here are a few of the things I learned during this process. Managing Sprites in Game Maker. Game Maker has its own asset pipeline and management system. Just like most other 2. D game engines, Game Maker uses sprites for displaying images. You will need to manually set up all of your sprites in the Sprites folder of your project. Creating a sprite is really easy. You can click on the green Pac- Man looking icon in the toolbar or right- click on the Sprites folder and select Create Sprite. Here you will see some straightforward options such as name and origin (the center point of the sprite) as well as some more advanced options to handle optimization and performance. There are two kinds of sprites you can make: a single image or an animation from a sprite sheet. To add a single image, just select Load Sprite and pick your graphic from the system. Setting up animations requires a few more steps. Select Edit Sprite to get started. This is the Sprite Editor screen. If you already have a sprite, you can actually modify it or open up the built- in painting app. So, to load up a sprite sheet, you will need to go to File - > Create From Strip (Ctrl+I) and select a sprite sheet from your computer. As you can see, I am setting up an animation with 1. I also defined each sprite as being 4. ![]() Clicking OK will set up my sprite in Game Maker. And, once you have that set up, you can name your sprite and use it in your game. Here is the final setting I used: It. Working with Objects. Objects represent anything in the game. It took me some time to wrap my head around how to use them correctly. From the start, it made sense to create objects for all of my game. ![]() Loading Sprites In this section of. As such, a sprite is either a.Setting up an object is broken up into two parts. The left- hand side is focused on configuration and the right- hand side is focused on scripting. You can easily give your object a name, which you use to reference it in code, and a sprite. You can select any of your currently existing sprite from a pick list or click New and create one from scratch. Some other important things to bring up are the options to make your object solid and persistent from room to room (which I. Depth is important if you want your object to be drawn above other elements. I set the player to - 1, which makes him always stay on top. The last important option I want to talk about is parent. This allows you to set up inheritance relationships between objects. Free game sprites and sprite tools and resources to make games. SpriteLand is a resource for your graphic projects. The Sprite Sheet can be separated into 8 different animations. Sprite Database is your #1 source for 2D video game graphics & resources! Featuring 18,000+ files from 2,500+ games. Editing Sprites This section. Free Sprites; Free Tiles; About. GameMaker 8: Image and Sprite editor version 0.9. There are other free stand-alone image editors. It was at this point that I started realizing that objects in Game Maker are more like traditional objects in programming languages. You can create an object with base code in it and have other objects extend and inherit from it. Here is an example of how I set up the core objects in my game: As you can see in my game, I have a folder of base. I consider these like abstract classes. For example, all game objects use the obj. This object sets up some core values like speed, logic for how to move, and what to do when the object goes off screen, which is referred to as outside room. From here, I can continue to build off of the obj. ![]() For vehicles, I want them to randomly change sprites when they go off screen, so you can see that I am adding a little extra logic to the outside room code in the obj. Here is an example of my truck class that now builds off of the obj. This will allow you to override the parent object. Game Maker is incredibly powerful, but for someone who has been coding for years, I found the drag- and- drop interface clunky and it slowed me down. Game Maker also offers the option to just attach code directly to an object. At first I only used the drag- and- drop options, then I slowly started porting the code over to scripts once I got a better handle of Game Maker Language (GML). Freeware: Sprite Strip. SpriteCraft is a sprite game engine for quick and easy development of. Is a free sprite sheet slicer. Introduction to Game Maker. Clicking OK will set up my sprite in Game Maker. It was surprisingly easy to create an HTML5 build of my game. Download Spriter; Spriter Features; Art Packs. It doesn’t matter whether you are an experienced game design artist or an aspiring game maker. ![]() First off, everything is event- based. Once you pick an event you can attach code to it. Here are some of the more popular options: Create . You can also add your own custom create script to an object in the editor as well. Destroy . You have the options for before, during, and after a step. Collision . You define the relationship. Keyboard and Mouse . You can choose between up and down key presses, and mouse has a few standard options as well. Other . Most of the advanced stuff you would need is in here. Draw . It would take some time to go through all of the options, but for the most part they are self- explanatory. It just requires a lot of hunting and testing to figure out what you need. I never had a moment where I didn. Anything you can do with the above event actions you can do by hand. As you can see, this gets hard to manage quickly if you are dealing with a lot of code. That is why Game Maker also allows you to attach blocks of code written in GML to any object event. Here is an example of how you can attach code to an object. Once you have an event set up, you can drag over the . Here is what the code looks like: //target values. Platform =false; As you can see, it. It reminded me a little bit of JS since it isn. For variables, you don. The only thing that you can. This is where scripts come into play. You can create scripts just like our other project assets. Simply right- click on the Scripts folder and select New Script. From here you can set up reusable chunks of code. Here is an example of a simple script I wrote for my game: // This sets a random frame based on the total number of subsprites that have been set up. As you can see, image. I subtract 1 from the value since image. Simply create a new event and drag over the . What is interesting about this is that scripts in essence act like functions. You can pass values or variables as arguments. In your script you can reference these via the argument. The other key thing to consider is how to create and use objects. So far I have only shown off objects that were part of the game such as the player and base sprites that help lay the foundation for more complex things like cars and platforms. The other way to think of objects in Game Maker is that these are simply classes. This was the hardest thing to wrap my head around since Game Maker is so visual by nature. Once you understand that objects are classes and scripts are functions that can be attached to classes you should have an easier time picking up how to structure your game logic. Now that I have gone over how objects work in the game, let. One thing to note is that the order of rooms in this directory is important. Game Maker will automatically start with the first room in the folder. There are also helper methods in GML to move from level to level via next, previous, or a specific room by name. Here is what a room looks like once you have created it: There is no way I could go over everything that makes up a room, but I wanted to highlight a few key features. First off, you can use tiles to create maps or use background images. Both are set up via sprites, so they are easy to set up. Here is what the tile panel looks like after I create a sprite from a tile sheet: As you can see, I have a simple tile set for my game. You can also create layers, which is important for more complex game art. You simply select the tile you want to use and can paint it to the display on the right. Settings are where you give your room. You set up an area to display and what that view will follow. You can also set up multiple views and switch between them on the fly in your game, which is helpful when you are working with different screen resolutions such as desktop to mobile. Finally, there is a tab for setting up objects. As you can see, you simply select the type of object you want to add to the display, and you can also select objects in your map and customize them on an instance- by- instance basis. Rooms are not just for game levels, they are also the best and only way to create game screens. Here is the main screen for my game: As you can see, this is just like my level. I even have objects that represent non- game elements such as text and game configuration. We can add any installed system font to our game project by right- clicking on the Fonts folder and selecting Create Font. Once you create a new font you will need to configure it. Here you can see I am using a font called Nokia Cellphone FC, which I started using back when I was making Flixel games. As you can see, setting up a font should be straightforward. Some important things to note: The name you give a font is how you can reference it via code, which I will show in a little bit. For pixel fonts, make sure you turn off anti- aliasing. Here you see I am using 1. You will also need to make different fonts for each size. The last thing I wanted to highlight is how character sets work. Similar to how you would do it in Flash, you will need to define the character range you want to include in your font. So if you only include numbers, you can. You can manually enter in the character range you want or use one of the presets to filter it for you. Here are the values for your reference: Normal: 3. Also, pay attention to memory. The larger your character set is the bigger the font will be in memory, especially if you have lots of fonts for different size text on the screen. Once you have a font defined, you can draw it to display the text inside of an object. In my game, I created a simple text area with the following GML: draw. Here is what it looks like in my game. The key ones I have been testing out are HTML5, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8. It was surprisingly easy to create an HTML5 build of my game. Game Maker offers a target. Basic Sprite Sheet Creator - Home. Project Description. A basic c# program to create sprite sheets. Website. Seven Part tutorial available on my blog here. Original Post. Part 1: The Basics. Part 2: Sprite Manager. Part 3: Frame Animation. Part 4: Sprite Animation. Part 5: Multiple Animations. Part 6: Custom Animations. Part 7: Using Custom Animations. Copy from blog post. The next program I would like to share is my sprite sheet creator. Using sprite sheets is, for the most part, pretty tedious especially to the new programmer. First, this sprite sheet creator is only meant for simple sprite sheets such as dice, loading animations. This post will just be an introduction with a brief introduction on how to use the tool with a screenshot, and latter I will explain step- by- step the code in the creator plus code that will take your sprite sheet and allow you. The Sprite Sheet can be separated into 8 different animations, more than that and I suggest using more than one sheet. To add a new animation click the browse button for animation 1, triple dot is browse. This will open the browse for files dialog, navigate. Repeat this until you have all the animations you want completed. Note make sure that your images are all the. Again just a basic tool nothing super fancy. After you do that you can opt to have a one pixel border, sometimes this will make the image look nicer. A progress window will show the current process and status and when it is completed just close the window and you are done.
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