I made a short platformer! I was reading about how UFO 50 was made in GameMaker and realized I should stop being an elitist about it and just try the thing out.
Turns out its... alright! Not bad! Definitely geared towards just getting something done, with a built-in IDE & sprite editor/animator. I liked that it directed me towards writing scripts that live directly on game objects, and provides a bunch of script contexts that make it clear when a script will run (Create, Begin Step, Step, End Step, the alarms, etc). It did drive me towards every object being kind of bespoke, where the scripts I wrote weren't readily reusable. There's definitely ways around this if you set up objects as parents and children, with children inheriting scripts and variables and so on, but planning my code like that has always been where I run into all kinds of trouble. I just don't have the head for that kind of structured, hierarchical execution.
So in the end, I didn't mind copy and pasting some redundant code. I knew I wasn't going to make anything that had a complicated code base, so I didn't stress about it.
Anyways, it was pretty fun to work with. I followed a basic tutorial to set up the player and platform interactions, and then extended from there. Honestly, most of the dev time was spent on trying to get the font I used to display right. That's the one thing I definitely dislike about GameMaker: the UI stuff is so fiddly and is fundamentally code-driven. Granted, it's not like I watched a tutorial for that, so there very well may be some nice GUI way of doing backgrounds and outlines, and getting fonts to scale and position correctly. It felt a lot like coding a web page, where you have to code all of the relative positions, alignments, and values (or algos for values) to get anything to look right. Otherwise, putting together actual game behaviors, interactions, and levels was fun and fairly manageable. Not sure if I'll keep on with it or try Godot again. The last time I tried Godot, I was coming from Unity and the inability to have more than one script per node drove me insane. But maybe it'll make more sense after GameMaker? At the very least, it has collision boxes that are easier to tune, which I would need if I want to do all of the levels in Inkscape. I dunno, just spitballin.
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