GameMaker Engine progress: ICON

Hey everyone,

As many of you know from my previous posts - I have been working to learn and use the Game Maker Engine. Ever since I started to put a real effort into learning it - it has grown on me a lot. It opened up a lot of avenues of development that I before didn't have. I can work on more than just a simple RPG or whatever else I could make using RPG Maker Vx Ace; one of the works I had worked on was an Asteroids-like game.

I nicknamed it ICON, I've been using ICON to practice my coding within GameMaker and try different things. Right now I'm working on adding a small mode that allows the player to fly around a small map made from tiles I have shown you in a previous post [Pixel Art 3]. This lets me experiment with views, enemy pathing and much more.

If your an aspiring game developer - which I assume you might be if your reading this blog; I recommend checking out GameMaker because it is definitely a tool that may be worthy of your attention. I would learn the GML coding language if you do get your hands on it because it unlocks a lot more possibilities than if you were to use it's drag and drop commands. It is an engine with a large amount of features and possibilities so I would recommend you check it out yourself to see what you'd like about it. Below is an image of ICON which is my first GameMaker project;

As you can see in the image above - the player controls a space ship and shoots down asteroids which brake down into smaller chunks if their large. The player can also collect ammo for special types of fire modes which he can switch between as shown in the bottom middle of the screen. These drop from asteroids and the player can get WEPAIR-bots to raise their health if they get hit by asteroids. Finally the game difficulty scales up to difficulty 6 with 35 asteroids, then continues scaling higher with asteroids spawning 40 + the difficulty level. So 7 would be 47, 8 would be 48 and so on.

The game also has music as composed and played by Amik Lanfranco, whom I recommend you check out her soundcloud because she has amazing music! The link for her sound cloud can be found here. Check it out and see if her music is something you'd like!

That is all for today, 

I will see you all next time!

Until then,

Dylan