GameMaker Games

19th December 2010

Redmisser Description: In the game you have to miss all of the red enemies and collect the hearts for more health.Hearts with a green plus sign on gives 50 health.Normal hearts give 20 health.Bonus gives 50 points.

21st December 2010

Redmisser 2 Description: Much better than red misser ,it has a menu and three levels and even includes a cursor.

23rd December 2010

Redmisser 3 Description: Way much better graffics than 2 or 1.

Now, what the hell was this Redmisser trilogy? Well, it was essentially the same game released 3 times but with additional improvements. You can see by one of the screenshots that it had a blue background, you played as this yellow smiley face and it was just a platformer where you had to avoid these red enemies. Basically, red misser, you have to MISS the red (enemies).

The player seems to have a huge green health bar and I believe those green / grey boxes are meant to be ladders? Not sure why there are some sets of 1 single ladder randomly though. There also appears to be some pick ups (the yellow blobs in the screenshot). One of them seems to be outside of the playable area! You started in the top left and you had to follow the path to the top right where there seems to be a grey circle thing? That might have taken you to the next level, though I'm not even sure that there was more than one level.

When I originally got GameMaker 8.0 I had no clue how to use it. Obviously, I was about 8 years old, maybe even 7 years old. I had never used a program that allowed you to actually develop games before. I had used one or two online game makers which let you basically use preset player movement and you just build the walls and place enemies. But that wasn't a game maker, that was just a level editor that they labelled a game maker.

So I downloaded GameMaker 8.0, sounded simple enough? A game maker. Of course there is far more to this program than I originally anticipated.

I quickly figured out the "Rooms" folder and created a ROOM! I then got a bit confused, but I clicked somewhere inside the room and it made a small blue circle with a question mark in the middle of it. That was it! I decided in my head that that blue circle was a WALL.

(for context, these blue circles were objects with no sprite. They did not have any code attached to them and they would appear invisible in game)

Then, I made a room shape with these blue circles. I made corners of rooms, corridoors and everything! Now, I needed a character. Well, I had played Half Life 2 and knew of Gordon Freeman, and he was awesome! So, I searched up an image of Gordon on Google, saved the image and went over to the sprite section. I imported the image and attached him to an object. Then I placed Gordon Freeman in my level. In my head, it should just work, right? I placed a character in my level.

This was all the way my thought process worked. I thought that if I had a picture of a character then it would behave like a character! It doesn't, of course. But I was proud of myself still! Even if it was just empty objects dotted around a room and a sprite of Gordon Freeman, I saw it as a victory. I'm not sure if I managed to program him to walk around or not...