Operation: Martian Clone

Some Background:

I had played around in GameMaker 8 previously, but never got to in to it – mainly because I was inexperienced with game development at the time. But I always followed the GameMaker community – notably this subreddit and occasionally checking the forums. Despite my fascination with GameMaker, eventually I would go on to teach myself Unity and C#, so upon revisiting GameMaker (giving in to the temptation of the Humble Bundle this past summer), I felt infinitely more comfortable with it than my time with it before. The ease of picking up GML after doing everything in C# for the past few years astonished me; and it seemed like they had a function for everything. Now armed with knowledge, I created a game by building on an existing “engine”. While this helped get a basic understanding of GML and how to work with GameMaker, I never feel as comfortable building on someone elses codebase. So I set out to create my own from the ground up…

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Venturing out of my Unity Comfort Zone

besusplatformer_3For over the last 3 years, I have exclusively worked in Unity 3D for all of my indie game creations, but a few years ago before I learned to use it, I had begun a project in Gamemaker 8 (which eventually got ported to Unity after I had become increasingly familiar with Unity). In August of 2016, I would again revisit Gamemaker: Studio by downloading the free version and after playing around (translation: getting lost) in it for a bit, I had gotten my fill. Enter the insane deal on the Gamemaker Humble Bundle and the itch to explore Gamemaker would show-up again. After a couple of days contemplating the purchase, I bit the bullet and went for it (the included source code files were the tipping point since they would serve as examples for me to see how the engine was structured).

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