Saturday, July 2, 2011

The main idea of GameMaker

Before we progress with our work in the creation of video games, we must first know the general idea of GameMaker.
With this simple and practical idea more clearly in mind  our work in  this blog allows us to overcome the mystery of video games.
Many people consider this mystery as the sorcery reserved for professionals and for large video game companies  , but our blog will prove otherwise .

GameMaker's approach is based on the following principles:

Rooms:
rooms are the space or the scene in which the game takes place.
In these rooms we can place monsters ,wals , etc.we can fill the room with nice backgrounds.

Objects
There are two types of objects :
a- static objects such as walls, trees, houses etc. These objects do not move in general, and are not controlled by the player.
b- dynamic objects such as airplanes, cars, bombs. These objects in motion interacts with the player that means these dynamic objects are controlled by the player according to their behavior on the scene (room).
the player uses the mouse, keyboard or joystick to control such objects.

Sprites:
A sprite is the visual representation of an  object in the game ,it is a picture or animated graphics associated with an object(see animated sprite on the right).  Objects can not be displayed without sprites .The difference between sprites and objects is that a sprite is just a picture, but an object is something that can react with the game world .
In the coming posts we will explain the difference between the two through examples.

Events
Whenever something happens in the game the object get event (kind of message telling that something has happened). The object can then react to these message by executing certain behavior.

Actions
Actions indicate the things that happen in a game . Actions are placed in events of objects. Whenever the event takes place these actions are performed, resulting in certain behavior for the object.
An event is the occasion where an object would perform a set of actions. Otherwise, the Object wouldn't know when show these actions be performed.

In the coming posts we will be able to master these principles and we will learn how to put them into practice .