Turn your game ideas into reality! This book is a hands-on guide to using GameMaker and its scripting language (GML). It is tailored for classroom use, suitable for both educators and students.

We will start with essentials such as installing GameMaker, navigating the IDE, and organizing your projects for success. You will learn of sprites, objects, events, variables, collisions, audio, and GUI design. We will also cover implementing AI, alarms, loops, arrays, and state control to create dynamic gameplay. The book also covers how to publish your game. Each chapter ends with a quiz to reinforce what has been covered.

With clear explanations, hands-on examples, and over 50 mini-game ideas, this book transforms beginners into confident developers. By the end, you’ll have the skills to design, prototype, and publish polished games using GameMaker.

You Will

• Create, name, and organize assets such as sprites, sounds, fonts, and rooms
• Gain skills in input handling, state control, movement, and collision detection
• Explore effect layers, camera control, and resource optimization

Who This Book Is For
This book is suitable for teachers and students learning GML in a classroom environment as well as self-study.

Ben Tyers is an expert GameMaker user, developer, coder, and trainer. He has authored several books on GameMaker for game application developers. He has been using GameMaker for over 20 years, enjoying the changes that have happened during this period. During this time, he has made over 200 mini game projects covering a range of genres, including remakes of retro games he played as a child in the 1980s. He loves finding simple solutions to challenging coding concepts. He is an active member of GameMaker’s community, helping new coders with programming issues. Outside of programming, Ben enjoys vintage horror and science fiction films.

Dickson Law is a GameMaker commentator and extension developer with 15 years of community experience. In his spare time, he enjoys writing general-purpose libraries, tools and articles covering basic techniques for GameMaker. As a web and metadata programmer by day, his main areas of interest include user-side workflow automation, server-side scripting, and API integrations. He lives in Toronto, Canada.