GameMaker Studio is one of the most popular game-creation tools when it comes to active support forums and the community. The tool was created by Mark Overmars in 1999 and developed by YoYo loaGames in 2007.
GameMaker Studio 2 is the latest iteration which was released in 2017. It supports game building for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, HTML5, Android, iOS, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Microsoft UWP, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
GameMaker Studio is good for quick prototypes and has lots of tutorials, which is suitable for non-programmers.
Advantages:
- GameMaker Studio is a free game development software.
- It’s easy to use, with drag-and-drop functionality.
- You can create games without any programming knowledge.
- The interface is intuitive for beginners and more advanced users alike.
- With the help of tutorials from YouTube or other sources, you can learn how to make your own games in no time at all!
- There are plenty of resources available on the internet that will teach you how to improve your skills as a game maker.
Disadvantages:
- GameMaker Studio is not designed for more than one person to work on the same project.
- The program can be difficult to use, especially for beginners.
- There are a lot of bugs and errors that need to be fixed before it can run smoothly.
- It’s expensive – several hundred per year if you want any updates or new features.
- You have limited options in terms of platforms and devices depending on the version you buy.
Table of Contents
Tutorials and Courses
- Yoyo Games Tutorials – This section contains a huge wealth of information and tutorials available from Yoyo Games and the best from their community. There are many tutorials on how to make a specific type of game.
- Be a Game Maker with GameMaker Studio 2 – Participants will learn how to use GameMaker UI functions such as adding assets to a Game Maker project, and creating beautiful visual effects. Furthermore, you will learn how to write code for different game objects including players, enemies, and bosses.
- Making an Action-Adventure Game Using GameMaker Studio 2 – This course is all about creating a 2D action-adventure game with GameMaker Studio 2, from the ground up. The tutorials cover Data structures, Auto-tiling and tile collisions, Finite state machines, NPC movement, and textboxes, Making houses and going inside them, Saving your game and loading it, A day-night cycle using blend modes, and much more!
- How to Make Tile Based Platform Games in Gamemaker Studio 2 – This course will teach you many tricks and techniques that can then be applied to making a very polished and professional-looking platformer game. You will learn to develop a player with movement and attack, a room with obstacles and traps, and an enemy.
- Building a Crafting Game – This course is all about developing a crafting game, where players collect resources and create new things. You will learn about GameMaker Language basics, player movement with a pickaxe, resolution handling, breaking objects with a pickaxe, setting up data with arrays and enums, stacking inventory using data structures, user interfaces, crafting systems, and more!
Top Extensions
- TweenGMS – TweenGMS Pro is a feature-rich tweening engine that is both flexible and easy to use. It features fire-and-forget tweening, step and seconds(delta) timing, time scale control (global and per-tween), play modes (once, bounce, patrol, loop, repeat), state control (pause, resume, stop, finish, reverse), automatic memory and persistence management, advanced callback system, custom variable easing, path resource tweening, data structure support, delayed tweens, control groups, heavily optimized, and more…
- Draw Text Outline – This allows you to draw text with an automatic outline. Arguments let you define the standard stuff (x and y coordinates, string) as well as the outline color, outline thickness, and outline fidelity (accuracy – performance vs looks)
- Share – Mobile – Share text, screenshots, surfaces, included files (images, gifs, videos, music, etc.), and more, designating which social network to use or opening the system pop-up with all supported apps.
- Beat’em Up Engine – Create your own beat’em up games with the most complete Beat’em Up Engine in the marketplace.
- Input Dog – Makes it easy to handle gamepad and keyboard controls.
- GMLive.gml – GMLive is an extension that introduces live coding / interactive programming into GameMaker.
- Socket.IO – It enables real-time, bidirectional, and event-based communication.
- Pop-up Text Box – Dynamic Size – These are pop-up text dialog boxes that show up above an object depending on the condition you set. Size is auto-adjusted to fit into the space taken by the text, without any loss in image quality.
- Turn Based Framework – This framework takes the hardest part of the turn-based game out such as the Skill System, Varied Tile Types, Turn Order System, Simple Turn Based AI, and Damage Types and makes you make the game faster.
- PostFx Pack 2 – Inside this package, you’ll find all the necessary assets to use this professional pack of high-quality image post-processing effects (aka PostFx). it supports Thermal vision, Dual tone, Blur, Outliner, and Bloom.
