From June 4^th to 9^th, I worked on my first real game. It started as a burning desire to make a game, and then transformed into something I can say I’m actually quite proud of.

For some background, while I was enrolled in the Game Development program at Algonquin College for 2 terms, I did not complete it and dropped out before ever getting to the real “game development” aspects. That is to say, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with this game.

The idea starting out was to make a spaceship shooter game, one very reminiscent of the classic arcade game “Galaga”. My choice of engine was originally going to be a rising power called Godot, but I decided against it when I realised how bad the tutorials online were for it. I pivoted to an engine I have some minor experience with: GameMaker Studio. It’s a very basic engine/IDE, but it’s gotten the job done for many, many people before, and has been used to make some very popular and renowned games, such as Undertale.

Starting the game

To start, I made these sprites for the player and enemies:

After that I followed these steps when making pretty much any part of the game:

1. Create sprite (if needed)
2. Code functionality (e.g. Player can move and shoot)
3. Code death
4. Add sound effect(s)
5. Bug fixing

By the end, I had a game I could be proud of. It has many features to enhance gameplay and replayability, just like classic arcade games. These features include, but are not limited to:

• Multiple levels, increasing in difficulty as time goes on
• Multiple enemy variants
• Powerups
• Randomness (Enemy paths, types, timings, etc.), changing each run (as shown by the seed on the title screen)

Here are some images of the game in action:

I would have uploaded a copy of the game if I could have. Oh well.