A few years ago in sixth grade, my friend introduced me to a program called Game Maker. I've been making games with it on and off since then. None of them are all that good yet, but I'm hoping to get better.
Playable:
Arrow Pack (OLD)
This was my first attempt at making a game. This has two games in one: Arrow Racing and Arrow Shooting. Arrow Racing is just a run-of-the-mill racing game where you play as arrows. There are boosts that you need to use to defeat the computer player in single player mode, and there's also a multiplayer mode with three courses: a regular one, a snow one that is more challenging for the red arrow, and a lava one that's more challenging for the blue arrow. Arrow Shooting is a very primitive shooting game, which also has single player and multiplayer. In single player, you are on the bottom of the screen and are trying to defeat the green arrow at the top of the screen. In multiplayer, the red arrow is on the top and the blue arrow is on the bottom. In both modes, there are a few different types of weapons: a regular bullet, which does small damage and travels slowly, but lets you fire faster; a laser, which does more damage than the bullet and travels faster, but doesn't fire as fast; and an energy ball which travels extremely fast and does the most damage, but is the slowest to fire. I think it's alright for a first game, but not all that good as a game in general.
WARNING: If you play this game, don't press spacebar. I tried to add a pause feature, but it didn't work, and the game just freezes when you press space. I would go back and fix that and reupload it, but I don't have the file anymore.
Toon Ship (OLD)
This is a shmup. It's slightly less primitive than Arrow Shooting, but still not all that good. You play as a ship that fires ice bullets at fireballs that are trying to destroy earth. The ship is controlled with the mouse. From my perspective, this game is cool because it's the first time I experimented with parallax scrolling to give the game a 3D-ish feel. My friend made some really cool music for this game and also made the star sprites. I made pretty much everything else. This game is really easy, and that was a major complaint from a lot of people. This lead to me making...
Toon Ship Hard Version (OLD)
This is almost exactly the same as Toon Ship. The only things that changed were I added some powerups. Oh, and I made it so every time you kill an enemy, two more appear at the right side of the screen instead of just one more. This game gets hectic, really fast. Especially if you use the powerup that destroys all enemies on the screen, seeing as that number will double and form a line at the right side of the screen that slowly approaches. This one is more fun than the original Toon Ship, but you could still probably better spend your time elsewhere.
The Game Game (OLD)
This game was inspired by two things: my sudden urge to make a text-based game after playing through the first three Zorks and a board game that me and my two friends had to make for an applied tech class. In this game, you work for a board game making company, and your boss says that you need to make a board game that will sell or else he'll fire you. From there, it's a journey to make an amazing board game without dying along the way. Don't worry, as long as you focus on your game you should be fine! ...Maybe. This is an extremely primitive text-based game. The game will give you options in each room of what you can do, and you can only choose one of those options. It's not like Zork where the game describes a room to you and you can use a whole multitude of verbs on any of the nouns mentioned. Everything in this game was made by me except for the story, which was made by one of the friends in my applied tech group for the board game (not the same friend that did the music for Toon Ship).
WARNING: When the game asks if you would like to "work on your game", you have to type "work on game" to do so. Apparently I wasn't thinking so many people would type "work on your game" or "work on my game". I accept full responsibility for this, but similarly to Arrow Pack, I no longer have the file and can't edit it.
Day & Night (incomplete) (OLD)
This was my first attempt to make an actual game instead of a minigame/minigame collection. In this game, you control the sun and the moon as they go through many levels. The gimmick is that the sun can freely move in all directions as if the game was from a top-down perspective, while the moon is affected by gravity as if the game was a sidescrolling platformer. With this gimmick in mind, the levels were supposed to work as both a maze game (for the sun) and a platform game (for the moon), but that wasn't working out, so I decided to eventually bring the sun and the moon together. In these levels, the sun is controlled with WASD, and the moon is controlled with the arrow keys. The sun can "shine", which basically shoots out a beam up, down, left, or right which can kill the enemies. Likewise, the moon can "reflect" this in those directions. The reflection can't kill enemies, but it can hit unreachable switches. I canned this game because it wasn't going in the direction I wanted it to. I may come back to this idea eventually, but for now I'd like to improve my development skills before I take on something like this. This game features very fitting music done by my friend (the same one that did the music for Toon Ship). Everything else was done by me.
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Current Projects*:
Ghost Game:
This is the main project I'm working on right now, and I'm having a ton of fun with it. In this game, you play as a ghost who needs to collect the essence of certain objects to move on in the afterlife. I'll share more info when I'm a little further in development.
Dream Game:
I haven't gotten too far into development with this game yet, it's really only an idea right now. Last time I tried to work on this, Game Maker was being really uncooperative and eventually froze, making me lose all of the progress I had made. I decided to take a break from it after a while.
*I make no guarantee that these games will actually come out; they're just what I'm working on right now. All titles are tentative and may change before release/will definitely change before release if the last word in the title is currently "game". I may or may not share details of the game, depending on how far into development I am with it.
