Game 3: Space Rocks

After completing my last two game tutorials, I began to feel like I had enough knowledge to add in my own touch. I decided that I wanted to still follow another tutorial, but all of my own art assets. Unfortunately, my first attempt at this (Fly Flit) didn't go very well and I ended up losing motivation before completing the game. My second attempt was Space Rocks, a project I picked up 3 months after retiring the first attempt. I'll share more about the first in another post.

For this game, I wanted to try out a new game engine, GameMaker Studio 2, published by YoYo Games. I heard it was great for beginners and especially good for creating 2D video games. Having only successfully completed games in 3D unity before and failing at 2D Unity, I wanted to give something new a try. After registering for an account with YoYo Games, I started to receive daily emails on how to get started. One of their emails included the introduction of a video game tutorial - Space Rocks - an arcade style top-down shooter. It ended up taking me around 7 hours to make the whole game including creating the pixel art and sounds.

Here's the gameplay of my completed arcade game:

What Went Well

I was very happy with the way this game ended up looking. After having drawn the pixel art myself and generating the sound effects online using Chiptone, I felt like what I had created genuinely had a piece of me in it. Overall, creating this game was a great introduction to GameMaker Studio 2 and I will definetely be using it for most (if not all) of my 2D games in the future.

What Went Wrong

Really not much went wrong at all! There was one part of the tutorial where I had some strange boxes appearing in my text (as indicated by the red arrows) and I wasn't able to figure out why.

Luckily, I was able to reach out to some GameMaker Studio 2 volunteer mentors through a Discord chat group and ask for help. I was able to resolve my problem easily after I received their advice.

What I Learned

I learned how to use GameMaker Studio 2 and how accessible it is to learn for beginners. I learned some basic GameMaker Language (GML) in order to write the scripts for my game. I was also able to figure out how to use all of my own game assets. I made my own pixel art using Pixel Art Studio on the Microsoft App Store. I also generated all of my own sound effects using ChipTone. Rather than make the background music myself, I downloaded it off freesound.org under the Creative Commons.

The game art I made on my own

What to Come Back To

I created my video game using the free trial version of GameMaker Studio 2. Due to this, I can't export my game to any platforms right now. I would love to put the game on itch.io and make it playable for my friends to try so I plan to purchase the desktop license soon.

This game is pretty basic so a lot of features could be added to improve it. For example, I could add enemy ships, multiple levels, upgrades, a leaderboard, a timer, achievements, etc. I definitely will be using GameMaker Studio 2 again soon since I had so much fun using it.