kartooner

Not too long ago my brother and I owned a copy of the fan­tas­tic game cre­ation soft­ware Klik and Play by Maxis (cre­ators of the Sim series includ­ing the ever-popular The Sims). When we first installed it on our 486 we were blown away by the fea­tures. Namely a built-in graph­ics and ani­ma­tion edi­tor, a drag and drop inter­face and (for the time any­ways) an inno­v­a­tive pro­gram­ming back­end that was easy for begin­ners to learn and advanced progam­mers to take advan­tage of.

Since that time the Klik and Play series was sold (or pur­chased) by another com­pany called Click­team and they even­tu­ally updated the code and added fea­tures to cre­ate other gen­er­a­tions of the game cre­ation series.

While these pro­grams were inno­v­a­tive for their time the var­i­ous com­po­nents would be out­dated and cum­ber­some by today’s stan­dards . Which brings me to an excel­lent piece of soft­ware writ­ten by Mark Over­mars called Game Maker.

Game Maker is essen­tially “a pro­gram that allows you to make excit­ing com­puter games with­out the need to write a sin­gle line of code. Using easy to learn drag-and-drop actions you can make pro­fes­sional look­ing games in lit­tle time. Games with back­grounds, ani­mated graph­ics, music and sound effects. And once you get more expe­ri­enced there is a built-in pro­gram­ming lan­guage that gives you full flexibility.”

For any­one inter­ested in cre­at­ing their own 2D com­puter games or if you’re not sat­is­fied with the tried and true cookie cut­ter games of today, Game Maker is the per­fect out­let to cre­ate excel­lent 2D games with or with­out the means of know­ing how to program.

Also, for inspi­ra­tion pur­poses please check out seik­lus by cylsm, a adven­ture slash explo­ration game cre­ated entirely in Game Maker.