Game Maker Practice

So I picked up the Game Maker bundle this week and have been spending a lot of time learning it's language.
My problem is that in every tutorial or guide, I'm told that "your first game will suck, don't worry about it" ect ect.
I only have really one idea of what I wanted to make, so whats something I can do to practice and not fuck up? Or do I just wing it with my original idea and do my best to refine it and go from there? Ideas?

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Fucking why ask here? Literally so many other channels better suited for gamedev questions.

Just do the idea you want. Your going to fail hard at it, it's going to suck but you will have learned something.

Take that experience, start over either with a new game or redesign your idea once again. Keep at it!

Anything really basic. Make Pong. Make a scrolling shooter that spawns one of a few enemies in random intervals. My personal favorite practice project is a basic top-down shooter where enemies spawn stronger and stronger from the sides.

You shouldn't think of your practice projects as anything that need to be good, they're only being made for you to learn. Going in expecting your first handful of projects to actually be something that go anywhere is a great way to waste a lot of time and not accomplish anything. You'll want to keep starting over as you learn more and more things, so trying to make a real game as your first project really isn't possible.

Here's a really simple idea I made to learn pygame:

Spawn the player (you) and a gold coin each in a random location
WASD moves the character around
When you touch a gold coin, add a point to your score and spawn a coin somewhere else
After collecting 5 coins, add a hazard about the size of the coin and spawn it somewhere random
Every 5 coins after that, add another hazard
When the player touches a hazard, they die

people are lying
its possible to make the game you want to make on your first try
you just have to be a genius
if you aren't a genius follow this guys advice
it's good advice

>Great game on your first try
LIterally who? Fucking c'man now, don't be shy! Link me! ONE developer!

Stop spreading misinformation you asshole!

Like everyone else said, just do super simple projects to get a feel for how the process works. If you start with doing your dream game you'll just ruin it for yourself and probably get discouraged.

They say it for two reasons:

> It relieves "masterpiece syndrome" for newbies

There are people who would otherwise spend months making something they didn't have the skill to make yet.

Telling them not to encourages them to attempt the tutorials and a few quick small projects and will get them to the point they can make their cool thing faster.

>You probably do suck right now and sucky skills likely mean sucky game

Pretty likely and obvious desu.

As for how to profress? Go "remake" a few arcade games. Recommended: snake, a shmup, pac man, and one level of metal slug, then you'll be ready.

They're all nontrivial, require very different subsets of game maker, will force you to learn spriting, animating, GML (because you will not probably not be capable of doing pac-man, for example, in drag and drops), user input, and building up your workflow for how to build your own shit.

Divide your idea in a small parts, and make every part a small game. Try this.

>wanting to be a game dev
>industry filled with sjw pandering
>paid dog shit and work over time
>you will never make the game you want

What do I win?

He started out doing flash point and clicks and they were good.

Hnnngggg... that pic.

Well I'll never love again
Because nothing will compare to her.

There was 2D Duke Nukem, just remake the same game until it matches your vision.
I mean, it worked for Lucas

Appreciate the advice, without any sort of direction I get lost and would have likely given up. Re-creating arcade games using my own code seems like the best idea I think, as far as learning the ropes. Thanks friendos.

exhentai.org/g/967766/852a9c1d56/ I gotchu

is game maker just for crap 2d sprite indie games?

is it basically just rpg maker redux?

It's just a general 2D engine.
RPGmaker is an RPG engine.

>Game Maker

>Implying game maker is bad

gamasutra.com/view/feature/134717/postmortem_team_meats_super_meat_.php

Team meat.

They have both made games before though?

pic related

Pic related. Game Maker is such a good tool for game developers that if you're making something that could've been handled in it without it, you are objectively fucking up.

I'm doing graphics for a game.

Programmer sends me the GM project file.

>try running it without changing a single parameter
Yeah, this looks lovely.

>Extensive documentation for every single function, categorized by type and use case in a game
Unless Game Maker has considerably changed in the past years, this is bullshit. Game Maker's documentation used to be absolutely awful, community forum is pretty bad as well.
Game Maker games' (and the editor's) performance is also worse than it has any right to be.
There's really no reason to use Game Maker these days. Just use Unity, it has all of the features except graphic programming; if you desperately need that feature, you can use Unreal which is also better.
GM used to be the fastest to support new platforms but even in this area has been overtaken by Unity. I know one of Germany's biggest mobile devs worked with Game Maker for more than a decade but are now abandoning the program as well.

>There's really no reason to use Game Maker these days. Just use Unity
Unity is awful for sprite-based 2D.

>Game Maker games' (and the editor's) performance is also worse than it has any right to be.
>Just use Unity
Hurrdurrdurrpleaserapemyface.jpg

At least as of 8.1, the documentation was clear enough that the F1 help files were more than sufficient to make all the games from without leaving the editor.

The editor's admittedly not very punchy, but the time save of not having to do the other things mentioned in the post waaaay more than makes up for it in any case that's not "Game maker or Unity?". The latter is an okay substitute, but not for beginners because graphic programming DOES matter.

Unity, to be useful, basically requires C# experience. Game maker's advantage is that for absolute beginners you can mix graphical programming with GML code and slowly transition from one to the other as it suits your needs.

If one is using the F1 documentation, this will likely happen the moment one runs into problems like "How do I make a character or item face the mouse?", which is so common a problem I would be stunned if a beginner wasn't forced to confront it within a week or two of picking up GM.

Experienced devs /can/ get more value from programs like Unity, but anyone even considering GM versus Unity or enginedev probably will get the most value from GM.

I really like the middle click help popups since a lot of the video tutorials only give a cursory explanation of what the functions do