Documenting what I'm trying to do in GameMaker was the immediate impetus for setting up this blog. But before I get closer to the present, the "last time on Joshua J. Slone" quick version of what came before.
Got the recent GameMaker bundle from Humble a few weeks ago. I actually got a previous one before, but never really did anything with it. This time I decided not to let it go to waste. I like programming, I like games, I'd like to have the ability to put some simple things together and a way that makes it easier to output for Windows, Android, and various other OSes/machines is pretty appealing. Coming with several Steam games as well as their source code seemed both proof that this could be used for things of decent professional quality, and a good way to peek at how they did so.
After watching the equivalent of a "Hello World" video for setting up a title screen I messed around on my own and made a gamey thing with crazy spinning faces. Got it output as a Windows EXE, HTML5, and with a bit more hassle to Android.
I then followed this video tutorial series for making a simple game start to finish, in this case a simple Asteroids clone.
There are many other video tutorial series from various people showing how to do things for various genres and I'm interested in checking them out, but for now I'm trying to take what I learned from the Asteroids series and making something along the same lines but with a twist.