Ike and Spence getting started with Game Maker 8

Isaac and Spencer have been playing Club Penguin and Build-A-Bear-Workshop a lot lately. One day Spencer decided that it is time for him to write his own game and he started sending me ideas in IM. I asked around and looked around and decided that Game Maker 8 looks like a good tool for Spencer to use. I had the boys read through a tutorial on their own and then yesterday we went through a tutorial together and created a simple game.

Isaac and Spencer working hard. They each liked different speeds, sounds, and backgrounds but ended up with basically the same game.


Asher was pretty impatient with us working on the games. Asher loves playing Club Penguin so not only were we not playing with him - he couldn't use a computer while we worked. He went around taking picture of just about everything in the house. Here's the only decent one though :)


So for a simple game, you pick out sprites and sounds and identify them as resources. Then you set up objects and boards using the sprites and sounds. The objects are given events and actions associated with the events. For example, a create event is used to start some objects moving around on the board. A collision event just gets a bounce in our game. There are more events and actions than I could ever have imagined.

I hope the boys continue forward and do more playing. I imagine I'll have to work with them some more but I think they could do some more simple stuff on their own.