Gamemaker

Last week I discovered GameMaker. Ever since I installed it on my computer, I've been having a blast playing with it. I normally don't play computer games, but GameMaker isn't a computer game. It's a program for making computer games.

I wanted to make a game where the player moves tiles around a board for my homeschool. One of GameMaker's strengths is that a novice with no programming experience can make a game without typing any code, simply by dragging and dropping actions on game elements. I started out using the drag-and-drop actions; however, I quickly abandoned the point and click interface in favor of using the built in scripting language.

I'm no computer programmer, but I enjoy writing computer scripts, and I'm a decent script writer. Back when I was a productive member of society I dabbled with writing macros and scripts whenever I could find an excuse. GameMaker has brought that back to me.

I started building arrays and using pointers. I created a for loop and a switch statement. I searched the web for examples that I could learn from and effortlessly read = and == and != and += and knew what they meant and how they were different. I refused to use global variables. I created my own function that received arguments and returned a value. I tried out my game in debug mode and when things didn't happen as expected, I learned about GameMakers unique quirks (like how an object could think that I clicked it even though I had really clicked an object on the other side of the screen). I thought how my brothers would probably laugh at me because all that stuff is child's play to them, but I still took pride in my simple creation.

I wish that GameMaker had better support for handling text (both input and output), but other than that the amount of functionality is awesome for a free program.

A complete novice to computer programming might be better off starting with something like Scratch, but I'm very happy with GameMaker.