The Game Maker's Companion [Paperback]

The Game Maker's Companion is the long-awaited sequel to The Game Maker's Apprentice. This book picks up where the last book left off, advancing your game development journey with some seriously impressive gaming projects. This time you'll learn how to make professional-quality platform games with solid collision detection and slick control mechanisms and you'll get acquainted with a long-lost icon of platform gaming history on the way.

You'll go on to discover techniques to add depth and believability to the characters and stories in your games, including The Monomyth, cut scene storyboarding, and character archetypes. This culminates in the creation of an original atmospheric platform-adventure which will take your GML programming skills to new heights. There's even a handy reference section at the back of the book which will be invaluable for adding common features to your own games.

With contributions from four games industry professionals and a highly respected member of the Game Maker community, The Game Maker's Companion is another labor of love that will give you even more hours of enjoyment than the original. If you already own Game Maker, then you really must own this book as well.When I created the first version of Game Maker in 1999, I naturally had no idea that it would achieve its current status of the most-used game-creation package in the world. The program was still rather limited. You could only create very simple games with it and the package was downloaded only a few hundred times per month. A lot has changed over the past ten years. New versions of Game Maker were released that made it possible to create sophisticated stand-alone games. The number of downloads rose to over 150,000 per month, and the company YoYo Games was formed that now develops and distributes the program. The site of YoYo Games (www.yoyogames.com) has already collected close to 100,000 games madelĂB