Designing Games with Game Maker - YoYo Games

http://www.yoyogames.com/upgrade
Here you find instructions. Also you find information about ordering site license and about
discounts. Moreover you find the answers to many questions related to upgrading.
If you have a registration key for version 5 or 6 of Game Maker you can exchange this for a
version 7 activation code. Instructions for this are given on the same webpage.
The global idea
Before delving into the possibilities of Game Maker it is good to get a feeling for the global
idea behind the program. Games created with Game Maker take place in one or more rooms.
(Rooms are flat, not 3D, but they can contain 3D-looking graphics.) In these rooms you place
objects, which you can define in the program. Typical objects are the walls, moving balls, the
main character, monsters, etc. Some objects, like walls, just sit there and don’t do anything.
Other objects, like the main character, will move around and react to input from the player
(keyboard, mouse, and joystick) and to each other. For example, when the main character
meets a monster he might die. Objects are the most important ingredients of games made
with Game Maker, so let us talk a bit more about them.
First of all, most objects need some image to make them visible on the screen. Such images
are called sprites. A sprite is often not a single image but a set of images that are shown one
after the other to create an animation. In this way it looks like the character walks, a ball
rotates, a spaceship explodes, etc. During the game, the sprite for a particular object can
change. (So the character can look different when it walks to the left or to the right.) You can
create you own sprites in Game Maker or load them from files (e.g. animated GIF’s).
Certain things will happen to objects. Such happenings are called events. Objects can take
certain actions when events happen. There are a large number of different events that can
take place and a large number of different actions that you can let your objects take. For
example, there is a creation event when the object gets created. (To be more precise, when
an instance of an object gets created; there can be multiple instances of the same object.) For
example, when a ball object gets created you can give it some motion action so that it starts
moving. When two objects meet, you get a collision event. In such a case you can make the
ball stop or reverse direction. You can also play a sound effect. To this end Game Maker lets
you define sounds. When the player presses a key on the keyboard there is a keyboard event,