Game Maker – First attempt at game design

I’ve always fancied designing and writting a PC game but I dont really have the required skills. Sure, I can develop in PHP with my eyes closed – same with MySQL and other related languages, but games development is a totally different dicipline.

Game Maker
That’s where Game Maker 7 comes in, I discovered this little gem while trying to find good XNA 3 tutorials and after only 2 – 3 days of light reading and playing around with it I already have some decent results. Game Maker takes a WYSIWYG approach, anyone who has spent some time using Flash and action scripting will feel right at home with the Game Maker interface. Developing a game centres around a number of Objects and other items such as sprites, backgrounds, fonts, sounds effects etc and rooms. A room is a playing field for your game to play out on. You place objects in the rooms and set actions and events on each object, these events can be predefined items or you can simply script them using whats known as GML (Game Maker Language).

Far Trader – my game in progress
The games ive always fancied putting together always seem to centre around space and sci-fi. As a kid I used to play a lot of pen and paper RPG’s like Megatraveller, Space Master and other sci-fi games. Megatraveller always appealed to me due to its hard fiction approach rather than the space opera of star wars. So there it is, I now have something to base my game on, Megatraveller the game of intergalactic trading and warfare. I do not wish to infringe on any copyright’s with this game so it wont be directly based on Megatraveller, just loosly influenced by its setting and attitude to sci-fi.

A lot of planning has and will go into this game and I plan to document it here, but for now I will show some images from the planning of the game and a couple of mini screen grabs from what I have so far, but before the images here is a VERY brief overview of the game:

Far Trader will be a top down 2D space trading and combat game, with an emphasis on the trading. As the player you will be able to trade goods by travelling from one system to another. Trading goods will net you profit, with this profit you will be able to purchase different ships, some ships will be more combat oriented, some more biased towards trading. The initial aim of the game will be to make xxx money in yyy time frame, more of a sandbox challenge initially, but over time i would like to add other ways of making money; pirate bounties, people courier tasks etc, then finally I would like to add some kind of over-arching storyline which would bring you to end game.

A small selection of the ship design templates

Some sample in game shots of the first ship moving

I will give more details in another post.

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