Flash Player

This site makes use of the Macromedia Flash plugin to display videos.

Click here to download the Macromedia Flash player.

Before you can start designing games, you need to understand what the following words used in Game Maker mean:

rooms, backgrounds, objects, instances, actions, events, sprites, scripts

Game Maker games take place in rooms.  Think of a room as a level or scene for your game. Rooms have a background. This could be a plain colour or an image. You can move from room to room during your game.

In your room you put objects.  Objects are the things in your game such as balls, walls, characters etc.  Some objects just sit (like walls) and other objects move around and react to things that happen. There can be more than one instance of an object in a game.  For example we might have multiple instances (lots of monsters) of a monster object in a game.  When we talk about the monster object we mean all the instances of the monster in the game.  When we talk about the instance we mean one particular instance of the monster.

Things that happen are called events. An event could be the player pressing a key on the keyboard or it could be your game character colliding with a wall. When events happen, your objects can take actions.  The actions that could happen might be that an object bounces, the score is increased, a sound plays etc.

If you want to see the objects in your game, (and mostly you do) you need something to make them visible on the screen.  For this you need sprites. A sprite is an image that represents an object.  (Think of objects as being invisible like ghosts, and sprites are the clothing you put on them to be able to see them.)  You can used the sprites built into Game Maker or you can design your own.

You can add sounds into your game, either as background music or as effects.

If you want to extend the things your game can do then you will want scripts in your game.  Scripts are small pieces of code.

So remember, these are the main things in your game:

Before you get started with GameMaker, do this activity to make sure you understand the words you need to know.

Up

Next

This page has been produced by Margaret Meijers.  Questions concerning its content may be directed by email to margaret.meijers@education.tas.gov.au.  This page was last modified on Sunday, 22 June 2008. The URL for this page is http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/gamemaker/intro.htm .

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Attribution should include the statement: "This has been adapted from a resource originally created by Margaret Meijers at http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au"