Around 5th grade or so, after a few years of messing with tools like Liberty Basic and “The Games Factory”, I discovered Game Maker.

Game Maker had all the tools you needed to craft fairly sophisticated 2D games. In addition to tools for creating and managing assets like sprites, tile maps, and sounds, it also provided a simple scripting language called GML that allowed you to write intricate logic to run your game. Instead of writing code, GML could also be generated using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

If you wanted to get really advanced, Game Maker even had an interface to allow you to import DLLs and call out to native code.

I used Game Maker for the next several years to create dozens of projects, most of them unfinished. Though I didn’t posess much skill in art or game design, the experience taught me a lot about programming, and even provided me a good excuse to venture into more advanced concepts like networking.

Here are some examples of the more notable projects.

Tank Shooter

Circa 5th grade

The first game I remember making in Game Maker, a fairly simple shoot-em-up game using assets and code from some examples I found. And a shamelessly stolen Halo soundtrack MIDI.

Defend The City

Circa 6th grade

I was always a fan of the classic arcade game missile command and its DOS cousin Rocket Raid. The goal was to shoot down an incoming barrage of missiles that slowly descended from the top of the screen before they reached your city.

“Defend The City” was a spin on the formula that allowed you to fortify your defenses with shields and automated gun turrets.

This was the first game that I was able to convince my friends to play and compete for the best score. I managed to stand up an internet high score board, thought it was quickly reverse engineered by the same group of friends.

Multiplayer Experiments

Circa 8th grade

One of my goals was to eventually craft a multiplayer game I could play with my friends. This was more of an undertaking than I realized, but I did manage to put together some experiments that taught me the essentials of TCP/UDP networking.

I started to grok the compexity of game state synchronization when I started trying to write a multiplayer shooter game. This prototype features a good number of synchronization errors.

Mouse Puzzle Experiment

Circa 9th grade

I remember being fascinated with how Nintendo was able to leverage new input modalities (the Wii Remote, the Stylus on the DS, the Balance Board) in simple ways to create interesting puzzle gameplay.

I put together a little experiment to see if I could do something similar with the mouse. It didn’t go very far, but it was interesting nonetheless.

And I found some really groovy tunes on modarchive to go with it.

Meteor Shower

Circa 10th grade

This was essentially a remake of my “Defend The City” game, but much more polished after a few years of Game Maker experience.

In addition to the myriad gameplay improvements it also featured a fully modular menu system, positional audio, and integrated online leaderboard (not shown as the service is no longer online).

Screenshot of the online high score board back when it still functioned:

Zombie Shooter Prototype

Circa 10th grade

I really loved the idea of a multiplayer, co-op, top-down zombie shooter with vehicles. I started prototyping the idea and immediately got lost in the details around the driving, weapons, and UI.

This was among the last Game Maker experiments I remember building before I moved on to other types of projects.