Day 1: The First Pin is Placed

The first pin is officially on the corkboard!

I have started my deep dive into the GameMaker engine by kicking off the first project of my developer bootcamp: a feature-rich clone of the arcade classic, Asteroids.

My goal with this bootcamp is not just to learn the "how" of a new engine, but the "why." While there are many shorter tutorials out there, I've chosen to follow the comprehensive 15-part masterclass series by Justin Zendt. His style is exactly what I'm looking for; he often presents multiple ways to achieve a goal and goes deeper than surface-level explanations, which is perfect for understanding how the engine truly works.

After the first day and the first three videos, here's where the project stands:

• Player Ship is Flying: The core movement is implemented, including a neat feature to toggle between keyboard or mouse steering with the 'M' key.
• Particle Engine: I learned how to create a simple but effective particle system for the ship's engine thrusters, a new skill for me in GameMaker.
• Custom Art: I told myself I would use the instructor's default sprites... but I couldn't resist. I spent a little extra time creating a custom ship for our duck mascot to pilot, along with a few unique asteroids.

One of my biggest takeaways so far is a deeper understanding of GameMaker's Event system. Justin has the code spread across multiple different Events (Begin Step, Step, End Step, and multiple different Keyboard Presses), and the next lesson focuses on refactoring. This is a critical skill I teach my own students, so I'm very interested to see his approach to organizing and cleaning up code.

So far, the workflow feels more intuitive than my time with Godot, and much closer to the simplicity my students loved in MicroStudio. It's giving me high hopes for using GameMaker in my classroom this year.

I'm off to a great start. This is the first of many pins I'll be adding to the corkboard. I'm ready to place the next one and tie a figurative string to connect today's learning to tomorrow's.