Greetings, Game Maker - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 3

C H A P T E R 1

Greetings, Game Maker

So here we are, about to embark on another journey into the world of game development. You
may have joined us last time in The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners
(Apress, 2006), or perhaps you taught yourself the basics of Game Maker under your own steam.
Either way, we invite you to dust off your trusty keyboard and loosen up your mouse-arm as you
join us in The Game Maker's Companion .
The path ahead is an exciting one and we have a host of new challenges in store to enhance
your skills as a game developer. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to undertake such a journey
without making suitable preparations first. Each of you will bring your own unique skills to the
journey ahead, but you won't get very far without some level of background knowledge. This
chapter will equip you with that knowledge, so please make sure you are familiar with it before
continuing. The majority of this information was covered in our first topic, so this chapter simply
summarizes the important facts as a reminder. It won't take long to cover the essentials, so let's
make a start. This chapter will also serve as a handy reference if you need to check back on
something later on in the topic.

Resources
Video games are made up of different kinds of digital resources such as animations, sounds,
music, and backgrounds. Game Maker lists all of its resources down the left-hand side of the
main window (see Figure 1-1). These are grouped together into folders according to the different
kinds of resources that Game Maker supports. You don't need to know every detail of every kind
of resource, but you should be generally aware of what each type of resource is for.
• Sprites : Sprite resources are the digital images that you use to represent foreground

objects in your games. Game Maker supports loading sprite images from .bmp , .jpg ,
and .gif file formats and now in Game Maker 8, .png and .gmspr as well. You can load
animated images using the .gif and .gmspr formats, or by treating .png files as
sequential strips of images by using _stripXX at the end of the file name (where XX =
the number of frames in the image).

• Sounds: Sound resources include both sound effects and music for your games. Game

Maker supports .wav , .mid (MIDI), and .mp3 formats, but .mp3 music can take up a lot
of space and often contributes to the large size of finished games.

• Backgrounds: Background resources are digital images that you use to represent the

background scene of your game. Backgrounds can only contain single images and
Game Maker can load these images from .bmp , .jpg , .gif , and .png formats.