GameMaker: Studio GMDE Shmup [DevLog 001]

The Beginning

I’ve been working on a Touhou-like Shmup game for some time now. I started it as a kind of adventure to learn how to program games with a relatively simple language (GML) as my first choice. I got GameMaker: Studio at the end of December 2014 and periodically uploaded videos showing what I have made (see playlist below). More recently I’ve learnt some C, Python and found once you learn your first language, others are very easy to pick up.

The Game Plan

I’ve recently started trying to shift away from the Touhou setting in order to make my own game. In order to do this I’ve been cleaning up a lot of old “poor quality” code that I wrote early on, deleting all assets related to Touhou and also planning out whats to come. It’s clear that it’s going to be a lot of work to create a full ~7 stage game but I’m looking forward to the challenge. If you would like to contribute assets of any kind please contact me through the contact form or on YouTube and we can talk.

What’s coming?

In the new year (q1, 2017) I’m going to do some tutorials/conceptual overviews of systems in the game such as the replay system, command line interpreter, 3D backgrounds, surface usage, laser code etc. I’ll also do some simple “getting started” content for people new to GameMaker. My hope is that someone else can learn something from the solutions I’ve come up with. For example when I did the replay system I couldn’t find much information online on how to go about designing it and struggled for quite some time.

If you want a tutorial on anything in particular let me know in the comments.

Some older Demos are available here.