Random Update: new downloads available, and a quick Game Maker review

Well, just for fun, I decided to try out Game Maker 7 and see why there were so many resources available on line about this little 'engine'.

I managed to take the Microbe artwork from Artpakz.com and build a Space Invaders 'clone' in just under an hour, with no real previous knowledge of how Game Maker worked (sure, I dabbled with it for an hour here and an hour there a few months back when I was deciding on what engine to go with ... I went with Torque Game Builder, cause it just kicks ass!).

Well, anyhow, I picked up Game Maker again last night, registered it ($20 ... can you beat that?) and whipped together a really quick and dirty prototype of Space Invaders. I mean, real quick and dirty too.

It seems to have an issue understanding transparencies in some PNGs, so the artwork was a bit munged, but overall I managed to get a fairly decent working prototype together and I was quite happy with it. I was also able to build an EXE for my Game, and that took under a minute for it to complete. It packaged all my game art and my game logic into one nice easy to run binary executable for windows. I was really shocked, I sent the file to a friend, and he was able to run it without performing any installs, and he didn't even have to unzip anything since the EXE was already pretty well compressed (so I didnt create a ZIP for it, just uploaded the EXE as is).

You can check out a copy of the prototype I whipped together by going to my Zoul Creations download section under "Public Demos and Betas".

You can also check out some of my other things, such as my quick and dirty Pac-Man style movement and 'pellet eating' prototype (again, using artwork from Artpakz.com), along with my Random Problem Math Game called "It's Math" that I wrote for my 6 year old (she likes Math, so I made her a game).

It's Math and "Lady Bug Run" were both made with Torque Game Builder, It's Math had a total development time so far of about just over an hour (does it show?) and Lady Bug Run has been being worked on here and there for just about over a day (8-10 hours?). The working prototype of Lady Bug Run has about 3 hours of time in it, and the rest of the time has been in experimenting with different ways of implementing pac-man style AI into the game (I have 'ghosts' that walk around ... I've had stupid ghosts and 'hard to beat' ghosts, and I'm just now starting to get to a point where I may have them meet in between for a happy medium)

Anyhow, I think this .plan is about done, didn't really have much to say, just wanted to announce the release of the new downloads.