Dodgeball Tutorial: Getting Started

On this chapter of the tutorial we will explain where to get game maker and how we can create the project to start building our game, so let's get started! Also the assets needeed for this tutorial can be downloaded from here.

Download and Install Game Maker

You can download Game Maker from here if you don’t have it. The trial version should be fine to make this game. You only have to register at the web and download and install the lastet version of Game Maker Studio 2 which is 2.3 right now.

Creating the project

After opening Game Maker, we will have several options as we can see in the following image.

We select "new" and then we will select "GameMaker Language".

Then we have to select the folder were we want to store our project and write the project name, on this case we will call it "Dodgeball Tutorial". After that, we will have our new project open and ready to start creating content.

Setting up the project

Before starting creating content in our project, first we will set up a few things. Go to "file > preferences" to open a window that allow us to edit the settings of our project.

Now click on "General Settings" and make sure that the property "Maximum framerate of the GameMakerStudio 2 editor" is set to 60. This will be the target framerate for our game and most of games target this framerate as 60 it's quite common.

Now go to "Sprite Editor" and set the "Default sprite origin" to "Middle Center". The sprite origin represents the position of the sprite when it's placed in the game. We set middle center by default because most of objects in our game will use that configuration.

Now we can click on apply to save the changes made and then, on the Assets tab at the right, open the folder Rooms and double click on Room1 to open the room editor.

Think of a room as a game container where we will put the elements of our game there. What we are going to do here is to set the size of the room. We can do this on the room properties section at the bottom left, set the width to 1280 and the height to 720.

Now with this basic settings we should be ready to go and start creating content for our project! On the next chapter of the tutorial we will create the player!