Vera's Blog

Today we were given an hour or more to work on our own game. Today all I accomplished was making two sprites, a grassy platform and some texture. I will have to finish the rest of the sprites some other time, since I work really slowly apparently. But at least I’ve done a little bit this class! Sorry, this is a late post. I finished typing it but I only realized now that it was actually a draft and that I forgot to post… -___- This was actually on February Tuesday 1,2011.

On Thursday, we were instructed to write a full description of our own game and to draw a few pictures of what it would look like. On that day, all I pretty much finished was the instructions for my platformer and drew a few quick scribbles of how it would look like. Finally, on Monday I will begin the creation process of my game. Briefly what my game is about is Merlin, the wizard, who has to save the king from the hands of the evil ward. Can’t wait to start on it 😀

There are several different steps to making even a simple game in Game Maker 8. The game that we made in class was a simple game of clicking on fruits that bounce off of walls and getting points for each one we clicked.

The first that we did was open up the program and check out the tutorial. Based on the tutorial we created a new file. From there we clicked on the Pac Man icon. That icon is used to create sprites . We uploaded a sprite of an apple, that was already in the tutorial folder, and renamed the sprite as spr_apple. That name is nothing special, just another way to say apple sprite.

What is a sprite?

 A sprite is a small graphic that can be inputted into the program. Sprites are imported into the game usually to be used later on as an object. Objects and sprites make up a game.

Once you have inputted all your sprites into the program, you can do several things with them such as creating an object.

What is an object?

An object is most of the time either made from sprites, or just blank. When you’ve created an object, you have several different actions and events that you can assign it. You can assign the object for the event of right mouse click to play a sound, and etc. Most objects are created from sprites, for example a ball object, or a blank object to play a loop of music.

When creating an object, a very simple way to name the objects is obj_apple or obj_banana. For my game, I created all the fruits into objects and assigned them various actions and events. These range from playing a sound, to adding a non-relative score, or jumping in random directions with a certain speed set. All of these components were used to get the final product.

But of course, just because you’ve finished creating all the objects doesn’t mean you’re fully there. The question is how can you play a game with no room? You really can’t. So after finishing all the object and sprites for the game, it was finally time to create the room in which the objects will roam. There are features such as adding a background and changing the size of the game itself (32 by 32 pixels, was it?) After adding walls for the fruits to bounce off of, and setting a background of a wood texture, I placed the fruits in random places.

Now that the room is finished, it is almost finished.

Every game needs an obstacle, something to make it challenging and entertaining. And the answer in my game was making the bomb. This was probably the most difficult part so far but interesting. The bomb functioned differently than the fruits, it only stood in place and if you clicked on it you didnt gain points. You pretty much lost the whole game if you clicked on one. THE END. The actions mostly used are the delay of 30 seconds, restarting the game, adding a sound, and the interesting high score list.

After accomplishing everything above, it was finally time to get to write a thing about your game in the game information. Game information is very important as it tells the user how to win the game and what they must do to accomplish that. I pretty much wrote how many points each fruit was worth and went to the testing stage.

The final result was an interesting game where you click on the fruits and avoid clicking on the bomb. And it was simple and very straightforward. I will post the game at school though, as I didn’t bring the file home with me.