My First Game Maker Experiment

I’m working on a small game at the moment in Game Maker, in terms of mechanics its similar to asteroids, however the goal is to capture and protect space stations from enemy ships. Its all quite simple at present as I've stripped back most of my features and mechanics to just the core concepts in the hopes of being better able to adapt the game based off player feedback.

I started with a software prototype in Game Maker, the purpose of the prototype wasn't so much to test game features but rather to test myself. I've only ever done small amounts of coding so for the software prototype I set a number of criteria I wanted for the game and tried to implement these in Game Maker. Luckily for me the combination Drag and Drop and Game Maker Language meant that it was quite easy to make my prototype, Game Maker takes a lot of the back-end steps out of programming to allow a designer focus on actual front end features and content.

Having proven that I could make a game with the aid of Game Maker and having a good idea of how I wanted the game to play out I set about building a paper prototype. Soon after starting the paper prototype I realised the my idea of a space exploration game with stealth, trading, mining and dynamic story elements was a bit ambitious. The prototype in particular showed that the game had no goals or objectives, essentially I had hoped the player would spend time exploring and expanding the map just for fun. I decided that for now the game needed goals. Each level will now present the player with a number of space stations which they must capture and defend, once the player controls all the stations in a level they win that level and can move on. Once I have this up an running I think it might be interesting to try stealth missions, a nebula or two and some escort missions if the game as it stands is fun and engaging.