Howdy folks, it’s you’re best friend, robert.
Today’s old game maker apprentice game is none other than fly.
FLY
“Fly”, was the first arcade shoot-em-up tutorial game I made based on Game Maker’s Apprentice tutorials.
Game Maker’s Apprentice taught me to make a Classic shoot-em-up game. Keep in mind, that GMA taught even someone like me, who had no experience with game maker or programming to make a game like this. Of course, I’m not asking for you to be wowed by this game, but just to keep in mind how you can learn to make games even if you don’t think you can.
The game utilized the timeline feature in Game Maker 8.1, basically you would set the length of the timeline, and then could plug in a number within that timeline to do something, like create an enemy. I would spawn the enemies in various formations and directions and boom, enemy spawning was done.
What is kind of funny to me is how this game in a way was the predecessor to Drone Strike (a more recent Shoot-em-up I made a while ago).
Drone Strike is the more recent shoot-em-up game I made. It features more mechanics like a charge shot and deflection-evade ability.
Timed spawning in “shmup” games is tricky, since iterating and making adjustments can be a real pain since I didn’t have any tools for real-time testing. Basically, when a change was needed, it involved having to constantly close the game, change all the values, then re-run and test again.
Drone strike doesn’t use the timeline feature, instead I made a script and would manually plug in code to spawn enemies. In a way, I did base Drone Strike’s spawning system off of Fly‘s timeline system from 8.1. If I ever did do a sequel to Drone Strike (which would be pretty cool, but unlikely), I would probably look into finding a way to design the levels in real-time (while the game is running) instead of having to re-run and wait around for the game to load my changes.
(sound of people snoozing)
Uh, anyways feel free to try out “FLY” below:
Arrow Keys – Move
Z – shoot
Esc – exit game
It does not contain viruses, it was made in Game Maker 8.1.
There’s only 1 level.
The music is from call of duty: modern warfare 2…
…
Okay not funny, the tunes are from vectorman and phoenix wright.
enjoy,
-Brandon