Lesson 1
What is GameMaker?
Learn what GameMaker is and what you can build.
GameMaker is where your game pieces live
GameMaker is a game engine. That means it gives you a place to make rooms, create objects, add sprites, write code, and run the game.
The big beginner idea is this: your code usually lives inside objects, and those objects run code through events.
For this first path:
You do not need to understand everything GameMaker can do. You only need to understand
where code goes, when it runs, and how it changes what happens on screen.
The tiny mental model
A project contains rooms. Rooms contain instances. Instances are created from objects. Objects have events. Events contain code.
Project Room Instance Object Event Code
What you should remember
- A sprite is the image.
- An object is the thing with behavior.
- An instance is a copy of an object placed in the game.
- An event is when GameMaker runs a particular chunk of code.
That is enough for now. The next lesson starts using that model properly by looking at objects and events.