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[ClintB]

So you want to make your first game? Sweet! So did I about a year or so ago, and I felt like I should share some of the lessons I learned along the way. There are many many well written tutorials on getting started in programming your first game, but I don't recall running across any "building your toolbox" or "having reasonable expectations" kind of tutorials, which is what I will try to accomplish here. First, I want to share my project with you, hopefully you can learn a bit from it:

Game, source code: https://sites.google.com/site/outputredirectionfilehosting/e384.7z?attredirects=0&d=1
SVN repository: https://csb-gm8-sidescroller.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

Music in the Game was created by George Buzinkai http://buzinkai.net/index.php?page=music and used with permission.

TLDR takeaways:

• Don't be afraid to spend a *little* money on tools that work for *you*
• Art is hard.  Unless you're a pretty good pixel artist (or are *really* good friends with one), keep your graphics simple.  Don't expect your first animated sprite to look like Ryu from Street Fighter 3!
• Color is hard! Once again, unless you are an artist (or genuinely want to focus on graphics) - stick to simple stuff.  Monochrome or 8 shades of one or two colors. Keep it simple or plan on spending a lot of time working on art. Really... a lot. If I had had any idea just how much time I would spend doing tile & sprite work because it was completely new to me I wouldn't have messed with color at all.
• Music is hard! My advice: Find some music, ask permission to use it, and just use it. Or, since this is your first game ever - forget about music and focus on mechanics.
• Keep your first game simple, have a plan, don't get (too) discouraged, and learn learn learn!

So, first things first, you have Game Maker (http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker) installed right? This is just my opinion: Do yourself a favor and just fork over the cash and get the pro edition. It's only like $25 or so (though I think they're planning on upping the entry fee to $40 something for 8.1, greedy buggers) and unlocks some really handy functionality, like image_angle.

Next up - how to make the graphics? If you choose to keep things *really* simple the sprite editor in GM8 may be all that you need, so don't go out a drop $500+ on Photoshop cause your buddy told you to! There are a *lot* of image editing programs, some free, some not so much, and I won't presume to declare any one better than another for this purpose. What I will do is simply recommend that you try before you buy anything. After a few weeks of fiddling with numerous different image editing programs, I settled on Cosmigo's Pro Motion (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php). After looking up some tutorials and figuring out the keyboard shortcuts I found that it did what I wanted almost how I wanted it to, and I was feeling a bit flush so the $80 didn't sting too bad. If you need a place to start try this wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spriting#Tools

What about sound?  Your game will be awfully quiet without some sound effects. Go get SFXR (http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html) and start making some sfx! There's a more feature rich program dubbed BFXR (http://www.bfxr.net/), but it comes with an increase in complexity and a slightly steeper learning curve.

OK then, we've got an IDE tool (Game Maker), some kind of image editor (remember to try different programs until you find one that works for *you*), and a sound effect generator (SFXR/BFXR). Time for possibly the *most important tool of all*, backups! If you're a seasoned coder you probably already have a favorite method for source control.  If not, however, do yourself a favor and install TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html). A proper discussion of source control methods is well beyond the scope of this 'from a beginner to other beginners' tutorial, but suffice it to say that source control is essentially a method of keeping versions of your project that you can go back to if you royally screw something up! Here's a nice quick start tutorial for getting your source control project up and running: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~vailen/svn_howto.htm.  A decent free SVN host: https://www.assembla.com/.  For a more comprehensive list: http://www.svnhostingcomparison.com/.  Now, unless your hosting your SVN repository on a separate computer (which you should be), just having source control setup doesn't keep all your hard work from evaporating if your computer craps out on you. So don't forget to have multiple copies of your work and back it up regularly.

Alright, that's a good start on building our game programming toolbox. It's certainly not complete yet, but it's a good place to begin.  So now, check out my game if you feel like it, and get started making your own! A great place to start reading up on the actual programming part: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3142.0

[Desert Dog]

Good post, I'd been thinking about starting a similar one.

Two GM specific tools that I'd like to highly recommend are the

Lithium Particle Designer by Sulfuric

And Particle Designer by Alert Games

Why do I post both? Because both of them are excellent.

The Lithium Particle Designer has a much better user interface, it's the simplist to use, everything is smoother, etc. Using it is very natural, and easy.

However, Alert Games Particle Designer does seem to have more functuallity, and once you get use to it's much clumsier interface, it's much more flexible for creating particles.

[ClintB]

Thanks for the feedback, and good call on the particle designers.  I used the Alert Games Particle Designer for a few of the effects in the game, but haven't seen the Lithium Designer program yet.  I'll have to check it out, thanks!

[Juggale]

hey whats your idea of Unity 3D, me and a few friends are working with it, it requires coding and all but maybe not the best first choice. ive made a few games before in classes but still. do you recommend anything other then yoyogames.

[TheLastBanana]

If you seriously want to make games, you're going to have to learn some programming. Game Maker isn't a bad place to start, because it takes care of the more complicated engine-side things for you (such as rendering and collision detection) and has a fairly easy-to-use interface. If you want to give Unity a shot, you can, but keep in mind that the addition of the third dimension can make programming things a lot harder.

[gimymblert]

Or you can treat the third dimension as only a visual aspect and keep all calculation in 2D. You gain the graphic Power of vectorial and 3D and keep the easiness of 2D. Unity allow orthographic projection.

[Juggale]

we've been mostly going 2d and were probably gonna be using java for the programing (although we really need to learn C# one of these days) i have a friend who knows how to write in java and im having him teach me how to. and so far my friend has got a small basis world right now with a little shack and a gun that it looks like your holding. but ill take a look into game creator and hopefully that will help to. before i used multimedia fusion when i took a class on how to make games. it wasnt a bad program, theres tons better, but its a nice program to start out with.... although it costs like $100. which is the part that sucks

[TheLastBanana]

Or you can treat the third dimension as only a visual aspect and keep all calculation in 2D. You gain the graphic Power of vectorial and 3D and keep the easiness of 2D. Unity allow orthographic projection.

That's true, and I've been using it that way, actually. That said, for your first game, vectors and raycasting can get a bit confusing, and unless you're very careful, there's almost always an element of the third dimension involved. Also, rotation with quaternions can be difficult.

[ClintB]

I agree with the replies thus far about jumping into Unity3D or any more complex & 3D engines for a first game.  I don't have any relevant experience in those engines other than installing Unity3D & the Torque demo and running through a few tutorials.  While they made some things *much* more straight-forward (like pre-programmed 'behaviors' in the Torque engine), there are additional complexities that I didn't feel like dealing with when just getting my feet wet.

Actually learning a bit of programming is one reason I really like the GM tutorials posted here in the forums, especially Derek's 'Game Maker for Beginners' series, as they focus more on using the language portion of Game Maker instead of the drag-and-drop stuff.  This way you can learn some basic programming principals that you can apply to any other language/engine you choose for later projects.  I wouldn't necessarily discourage anyone from checking out any other tools, as they may find that it fits perfectly for them!  My simple advice is just to keep things simple for your first few games, and try not to get too frustrated with the tools or yourself!

Hopefully that helps a little bit. 

[gimymblert]

Or you can treat the third dimension as only a visual aspect and keep all calculation in 2D. You gain the graphic Power of vectorial and 3D and keep the easiness of 2D. Unity allow orthographic projection.

That's true, and I've been using it that way, actually. That said, for your first game, vectors and raycasting can get a bit confusing, and unless you're very careful, there's almost always an element of the third dimension involved. Also, rotation with quaternions can be difficult.

If you are talking about unity, you can stick to EulersAngles instead of quaternion (like I did so far). And you can stay away from vector and raycasting as unity have build in stuff that handle that. For exemple character controller handle gravity, collision, slope and an bunch of things automatically, setting a basic platformer take nearly 4 line to go, For 2D just ignore the Z dimension (always at zero) and it's fine. + the editor is a big deal really.

But where unity is confusing is that the doc are not gear toward beginner, all the big words and the extra feature are noise to a noob and will confuse him.

So yeah Unity is not for noob unless it's someone already mathematically incline or have some experience with technicalities and can go through the bullshit.

Gm is much more straightforward.

[TheOutlander]

What if your an artist and not a programmer and know diddly squat about programming, how do i get started then? i'm eager to make games so i have some kind of portfolio.

[AirBasher]

For source control I recommend Mercurial ( http://mercurial.selenic.com/ )

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide ( http://hgbook.red-bean.com/ )

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.

[Free project hosting]
https://bitbucket.org/
http://www.codeplex.com/
http://code.google.com/hosting/

[oahda]

What if your an artist and not a programmer and know diddly squat about programming, how do i get started then? i'm eager to make games so i have some kind of portfolio.

You could try the drag and drop interface of Game Maker.

[Attila0413]

What if your an artist and not a programmer and know diddly squat about programming, how do i get started then? i'm eager to make games so i have some kind of portfolio.

Game Maker seems to be the best choice in this case.

Anyway, just keep in mind that Internet is full of people available to help you with scripting and coding. If you're good at art it will be easy to find collaborators.

[AndrewS78]

Good post, I'd been thinking about starting a similar one.

Two GM specific tools that I'd like to highly recommend are the

Lithium Particle Designer by Sulfuric

And Particle Designer by Alert Games

Why do I post both? Because both of them are excellent.

The Lithium Particle Designer has a much better user interface, it's the simplist to use, everything is smoother, etc. Using it is very natural, and easy.

However, Alert Games Particle Designer does seem to have more functuallity, and once you get use to it's much clumsier interface, it's much more flexible for creating particles.

A BIG thank you for these 2 links