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[aku286]

i am a newbie to gamemaker ,have done some tutorials and want to start making my own games. i am trying to make a space shooter where the spaceship can rotate and use its recoil to navigate.

But i cant seem to understand how to implement that stuff. i have been trying to look it up but whenever i do that it takes lot of time to look through all the irrelevant stuff to finally arrive at what i want. Do i just read through all the documentation of gamemaker?
Does that make any sense? It is frustrating.
i know this is not easy, so i wanted to know how you guys did it when you started out.

inb4 i did the tutorials from derek yu and have been playing with grandma engine of matt.

[Barch]

I have been using game maker since 2001 meaning that I have used it as my mental states have changed - it has followed me in my path of religion. My understanding of the world, friends have been made some left some abandoned but along that path when I get home I have always had game maker. It has walked with me for a very long time - I understand a bit she gives me clarity of the movements of myself and the world.
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So if the barch was to apply himself to his life and draw a similar situation of that of you are encountering now then I shall.

read the manual

read it good - print it out in fact.

Think of game development as the union between the Confucius and Taoist. Confucius philosophy is the basis of tradition - honor family. This is what creates the structures of society and allows the man to become a higher self then just thinking about animals and fellow man that will kill him. This is your code. A man who has a good understanding of code should be able to create code as he speaks - like you write text. A programmer knows the manual by heart. meaning that he thinks

I would like to create the tradition of changing the direction of the rocket and he knows the tradition of the language he is using. which in game maker is direction+=1.

this is acquired by practice of drills but by the years of games he has practiced. A unconscious labor of love of tradtion. not by love of drills but by the love of creation. which you have.

The taoist form is the basis of fluidity - when the confucious is enabled man learns how to shape tradition into the form he desires. He states I want to move that rocket into the movement of left. But he knows that he can use ...

direction+=5-speed or direction+=sin(current_time)/4+1 or direction+=3

So to finish this I'll give the advice - read the manual till you understand it by heart. Make the game which reinforces your own understanding of it. Then experiment with it.

I hope you enjoyed my crude form of ruthless truth

[Barch]

<step event>
image_angle=direction

///

<left key event>
direction+=1

<right key event>
direction-=1

<up key event>
speed+=0.1

[s0]

i know this is not easy, so i wanted to know how you guys did it when you started out.

just search the documentation, google, don't be afraid to ask questions if you can't find anything. it's going be a slow, gradual process just like learning anything is.

i didn't start out with GM, but i learned some BASIC from a "how to make games" book that i got for my 12th (i think) birthday. i didn't understand the rest of the book, but it tought me how to print text on screen, how to get the user to input text, how to jump to different points in the program and what variables are. so with that knowledge i made a simple battleship type game, and from then on i just tought myself more programming concepts (as needed for the games i wanted to make) using the "method" i mentioned above.

btw i found that trying to read other peoples code (unless its a tutorial or something) is mostly pretty useless for learning purposes. i always had an easier time figuring things out on my own, but ymmv of course.

[Meatsack]

I'm a GameMaker user too.  The cool thing about it is that it has "drag and drop" commands that will give you the functionality you are looking for.  You still need to understand what code is going on behind the functions so you can set the variables properly, but it's a good place to start. 

Personally, I found GameMaker through an impulse buy of the book "The Game Maker's Apprentice".  That book will hand-hold you through the creation of some starter games and has some good advice chapters on game development in general.

Also, don't ignore the Game Maker Community forums.  There are a ton of guides and Q/A threads that will cover most of your issues.  There's even a "mentor" thread where you can ask for 1 on 1 help on learning GML.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it sounds like you, mentally, have problems breaking down what you want the game to do into GML. i think this is a sign of not knowing how to code / having no experience coding. it's one thing to know the commands, but it's another to know how they work together

for example, when i see a statement like "i am trying to make a space shooter where the spaceship can rotate and use its recoil to navigate" my mind automatically converts that into code. i don't even have to think about it, it's instinctual, because i know what that would look like in terms of code. something like this:

controls: turn and shoot buttons
turning: change direction left and right (direction += value, direction -= value)
shooting: create bullet with a cooldown (instance_create(), alarms or a counting variable)
shooting: push ship back in the opposite direction it's facing (adjust vspeed and hspeed with direction + 180 using lengthdir_x and lengthdir_y)
ship: maybe give it friction and a max speed, so it doesn't feel too much like asteroids
collisions: make it bump away from something when it hits it, and reduce ship speed