What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting to Know the Studio with Your First Game, will help you in making your own game. You will have an opportunity to explore the GameMaker: Studio interface. In this chapter, we will be creating and implementing every type of resource available while utilizing all the various resource editors.
Chapter 2, Triple 'A' Games: Art and Audio, will help you understand how art and audio work in GameMaker: Studio. It will cover the acceptable image formats and how to import a sprite sheet. In this chapter, we will be creating a tile set that will make better use of computer memory and allow for large unique worlds, and understand how to control sounds and the direction they are heard from.
Chapter 3, Shoot 'em Up: Creating a Side-scrolling Shooter, will help you in creating your first side-scrolling shooter. In this chapter, we will be applying all three methods of movement: manually adjusting the X and Y coordinates, and setting the speed and direction. We will be able to add and remove instances from the game world dynamically.
Chapter 4, The Adventure Begins, simplifies the player controls by placing the keyboard checks and collision forecasting into a single script. It covers several ways to deal with Sprite animation from rotating the image to setting what sprites should be displayed. We will be dealing with artificial intelligence through the use of proximity detection and path finding.
Chapter 5, Platform Fun, delves into systems design and creating some very useful scripts. We will be building an animation system that most objects in the game utilize and forecast for collision, and apply our own custom gravity to the player. Lastly, we will be creating a three-phase Boss fight utilizing all our previous knowledge along with our new systems.
Chapter 6, Toppling Towers, covers the basics of using the Box2D physics system. We will be learning how to assign Fixtures to objects and different properties that can be modified. We will be creating a Chain and Wrecking Ball that utilizes Revolute Joints, so that each piece would rotate with the one preceding it. Also, the chapter covers Draw GUI events and the difference between a Sprite's location as represented in a Room versus the location on the screen.
Chapter 7, Dynamic Front Ends, consists of adding an entire frontend, including a Shop and unlockable levels. We will be dealing with Grids, Maps, and List data structures to hold a variety of information. We will be rebuilding the HUD, so that we could display more buttons, display only the available equipment, and build a basic countdown timer. Lastly, we will add a save system that teaches us about using local storage and allows us to have multiple player saves.
Chapter 8, Playing with Particles, will show you how to add some spit and polish to really make our game shine. We will be delving into the world of particles and create a variety of effects that will add impact to the TNT and Pillar destruction. The game is now complete and ready to be released.
Chapter 9, Get Your Game Out There, will help us in uploading a game to a web server using an FTP client. We will be integrating Facebook into the game, allowing players to log in to their account, and post level scores to their walls. It also covers analytics using Flurry to track how players are playing the game. Finally, we will briefly learn about making money off our games through sponsorship.
Appendix, Drag-and-drop Icons to GameMaker Language Reference, will help us in understanding what each icon does, as each icon is often more than a single function. The appendix provides a thorough reference of the code equivalent to all the drag-and-drop icons.
You can download this Appendix from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/4100OT_Appendix_Drag_and_drop_Icons_to_GameMaker_Language_Reference.pdf.