My very first foray into game maker studio

  I've vaguely wanted to make a top down RPG type of game for a while inspired by various RPG horror games, like The Witch's House, Yume Nikki, and Ib. I didn't want to spend money on RPGmaker, because I don't like spending my money on things I'm not sure about. I wanted to have some proficiency before I start throwing money at my ideas.

So instead I tried out a few different free game engines in the past like Unity and Godot. However, I found them really difficult at the time. (It might be different now.) 

  This time, while I was in a bit of a rabbit hole, going back to creepypasta and watching videos about old exe games, and most of these games were originally made in GameMaker. There were so many of these games and they SUCKED. Straight poo poo.

And that's when I realized that if there are so many (terrible) full games that are clearly made by 14 year olds, GameMaker must be super accessible. Lo, and behold, my theory is correct. 

I started watching tutorials to see how the engine worked before I even bothered to download it, and even the coding seemed baby easy. 

Here's an example of what I could make in less than 40 minutes of actual editor time.

• Top down movement
• collision
• auto tile backdrop
• bare minimum sprite creation
• recoloring imported sprites in editor

All off of one tutorial. And it wasn't even the most optimized code either I just followed along with whatever bro was saying.

Some of the stuff I just f*cked around and figured out myself.

That footage is from the day before yesterday. Like Tuesday I think.

Tiles are stolen from this guy.

A little about me, intro no.2

  I've been wanting to make games since like elementary school where I was watching youtubers (and my older brother) play all sorts of cool games on all different consoles and stuff. However, my brain is kind of scuffed so mathematics and computers don't come naturally to me. Not being able to understand basic math until like 6th grade slowed me down massively. I'm still pretty behind on math and logic, which made traditional programming fairly inaccessible, because those are what computers are built on. Me not being able to fathom how computers worked put a huge road block on me learning code. Until recently.

  I spent most of my life so far learning visual art, and I'm really good at it. I thought drawing would be what I based my career and general internet presence around for the rest of my life. I drew for years, posted on DeviantArt and made good friends, but I didn't get anywhere "career-wise" and then DeviantArt started dying off rapidly, then I got burn out and mostly retired from doing digital art. 

I've only drawn/painted a few things this whole year just for the sake of doing it. Something in my brain just switched, and drawing wasn't something I just did naturally for no reason anymore. After a while of just lying around wondering wtf I was going to do with all the time I used to spend drawing. I started trying to make videos (didn't really like that), then blogging, then I started doing some writing, and playing Roblox, and creating on Roblox, and now I've started learning to actually make games in game maker.

I don't know why, but when my brain stopped drawing, I unlocked new abilities. Like being able to actually sit down and write, and the ability to actually comprehend code.

 Now, all the stuff I listed isn't the comprehensive, chronological skill path I've been on throughout my life.

I've dabbled in game making with scratch a few times on and off, but it never really worked out for me. Even though it's supposed to be a simplified version of traditional scripting, I still had an extremely hard time. This was because fundamentally, I couldn't understand. I could copy block by block to make the most mid dress-up known to man, but most of the time, I couldn't tell you what any of the code actually meant, or what it did. That sort of deeper fundamental understanding is what eluded me for most of my life so far. Drawing was intuitive, math was like seeing a 4th color.

Now I've got that 4th color cone and I finally understand that the code is talking to each other. It all makes way more sense. and here I am now.

I 've been dipping my toes in a little, but I want to start writing about the process before I start going in too far. 

Hello Hello! intro no.1

 This is the beginning of my journey making games. This blog is where I'll be documenting my journey to learn game making and the development of  said games. I'll be pretty casual here, so expect to see typos and hastily written posts.
the blog posts are just for archiving and helping people like me. they are not really made to be content in of themselves. This is for fun basically. 

Thank you for reading, stay tuned for my progress.