So, the last Illogistix project of 2009 is going to be Abrogator, a vertical blaster built in Game Maker 8. And just to break with “tradition”, since it was a remarkably short project i’ll go straight from the release announcement into an ad-hoc postmortem straight after this ‘ere screenshot!

What went right?
After the initial difficulty curve of picking up Game Maker i described in the previous post was past, it seemed remarkably friendly overall; because i wanted to approach it as a “newbie”, all of the graphics were created within the editor itself and i didn’t take it out of “simple mode” at any point, instead working within the restrictions it imposed.

The editor itself isn’t perfect, the graphics tools in particular are primitive at best and i’d seriously recommend others to avoid the masochistic approach i took for anything past “programmer graphics” to test things – and if anyone abuses objects in the way i did to simulate time lines, they’ll find that keeping track of what’s going on within the object is rendered more cumbersome by the window’s insistence on resetting the cursor to the top of the current list during test runs. That said, i can’t hold that against the program, after all the time lines in advanced are there for a reason and it was sticking to my “rules” for the project that saw me bouncing off that issue in the first place.

What went wrong?
Well, the game is rather hard because the collisions can’t be tweaked in simple mode to make them more generous; it’s not unplayable for that issue but players will need to take into account how limited the movement can be within the play area.

What was learnt along the way?
The biggie is that GM8 is quite powerful; i have already played with the advanced mode, the time lines and some other GML (this wasn’t the first project started in fact, the other will probably become Abrogator 2 at some point) and right now the idea of paying out for a registration code to get the pro version and the particle engine is proving quite tempting…

Final thoughts
i must admit to being mightily impressed by Game Maker, not just because it allows anybody with time and patience to produce a game but the way it’s almost a “back door” attempt to drag people into programming. Users come to it as a point and click environment and can produce simple games but eventually they’ll bump into limitations which require a fragment of GML to circumvent – the more they use, the more it’s possible to achieve and the braver people may well sit down and attempt to write an entire project with GML.

Yes there’s a lot of shyte out there developed with Game Maker and it has something of a reputation because of that, but the signal/noise ratio is because not every user is going to be able to design a game and there are quite a few pitfalls to be wary of [1] – but for those who persevere and throw some serious time at working on their pride and joy, the results can be superb.

[1] As an example, the “simple” way to make a shooter would be to dump a load of nasties into a room, tell them to reset to a random X and a Y off the top when they leave the room and just let things cycle around, i’ve seen one exactly like that where a smart bomb was included that caused thirty or so nasties to reset to the same Y, making an almost impenetrable wall – i wish i could remember the damned name of the thing!