You just received your first Game Maker sample source code that was meant to teach you a few tricks in light of making something original.

Game Maker’s primary function is to enable people to create rather typical platform games.  Instead of teaching you how to create “yet another Super Mario Bros lookalike”, your first source code teaches you how to integrate game mechanics you’d find in today’s best games. 

Clicking and dragging inventory elements to set up a custom control bar and equip your character makes the game more user-friendly.  This goes a little further, and leaves a better impression than the eternal “hit space to jump, ENTER to shoot”.

Part I:

After unzipping the source code package double-click on it and this will start Game Maker.  Run the game to get a feel of what it does.  To do this, simply click on the green icon that is labelled Run the game.

This will start the game in demonstration mode.  You do this from time to time to check if your game is running correctly.

When your games aren't working properly, and you want to see what's going wrong, you can also run the game in debug mode. 

It does the same as running the game, except you have a small window that gives you info on what is going on as the game runs.  This helps figure out what went wrong.  Debugging will be the object of a later tutorial.

So for now, you're just running the game normally, and this is what you see.  Obviously, we're just starting so it's rather basic.  We'll worry about graphics later.

 Click on the head or bag and rudimentary panels appear, each containing an inactive “square”.  Run your mouse over the square and it changes color, but that’s all for now.

One of these panels is the inventory (bag) and the other is your character panel.

Click on the black top bar and hold the left mouse button down.  Move the mouse around and you see the panel moves accordingly. 

Click on the head or bag button again and the corresponding  panel disappears.

There you have it, the early stages of interactive inventory management.

You might have noticed that below the world view area there are five squares, similar to the ones in the inventory and character panels.  These make up the control bar.

Soon you’ll be able to find items in the room that will automatically appear in your inventory (given there is still space there), click and drag these items to the character panel to equip them, do the same towards the control bar to be able to use them by clicking on it there.

But for now, let’s look at how we’ve gotten these results so far.