Game maker studio is cool enough in its own right, but its very visual. I used to use it a while ago, and it works by giving you the ability to drag and drop actions onto objects. I'll try to explain. If you wanted to navigate a ball through a maze, you'd need a room, this is what game maker calls whatever environment you happen to be playing in. You can have a lot of rooms, each one could be a different level in your game. Next, you need a sprite. sprites are 2D images with an optional transparency layer that make up the visual appearance of objects. Once you have that stuff, you create an object. You then select from your palette of sprites that you imported / created. One of these will be the sprite that represents your ball. Game maker studio comes with some sprites, and there is a red ball in there, so you would use that. Now, what you have is a room, i.e. a level, you have a sprite that you bound to an object, and you have an object. If you go into your first room, you could click to place the ball, you could then click play, and your game would be compiled and you would be looking at whatever background you chose for your room, with your ball in it, but nothing would happen, because your ball, while an active object in the game, has no actions bound to it.

This is where the action / event mechanism comes into play. You have a lot of different possibilities, but to move the ball, you'd want to use a key on the keyboard, so you'd click the events thing and pick one of the keyboard choices, as I remember, you have key, and then key press and key release. You'd probably want key press, since if you want to add a sort of physics to your ball's movement, you would then want to use key release. Anyway, once you have that event on the screen, it shows up in two windows, the left is all your events, and when you click on one, it becomes selected and on the right, all your actions you've assigned to that event are shown. Since you have none, you then come to the pane on the right. This is like a side bar, and it contains actions, it also contains vertical tabs for different categories of actions. Pick something from that list, say, move, now you get to map out what happens when the ball moves, so you drag the move action from that sidebar at the right to the window to the left of it, and it becomes populated for the event you've selected. Then you double click to set the properties, i.e. speed and direction. You'd need to do the same for all the arrows, and the key releases for all the arrows, and on key release, you could ramp the friction up. You also have collision events, there's a crap ton of stuff to choose from.

It also transitions you into coding, because while you can make a game just by clicking and dragging, and filling values in, that's somewhat limiting, so you have scripts as one of the actions. You also have initiation code you can put in each room. The language is called GML, game maker language, and I don't really know what it is comparable to these days as i didn't use it much back then. I started to, but then I got away from it. So, you could start out making games that are just click and drag events, and you can be clever with it and it can be decent, but you can get more powerful results with coding.

I had a few prototype games, one of which was a game that you played as a white rabbit. You had to go around crapping at enemies, your rabbit poop pellets were your defense, and since you crapped out your butt, you would have to turn and face away from the enemies to hit them. You also had poop bombs that could destroy parts of the map to let you get through obstructions. You were healed by standing in litterboxes scattered about the level, and when your health hit full, you'd just jump up and down until you left the area. The second prototype was really cool, and I miss it actually. It was a space game, sort of like space invaders, but better. You had classes of enemies, from single ships, that shot like one bullet a second, to bigger ships that took more hits to destroy, and even a kamikaze class that would latch onto you. These never shot, but tried to kill you by ramming you and were very difficult to evade. You had to make a split second decision whether you were lines up to make a shot on it, or if you couldn't, and had to evade. Your ship was marginally faster, but only just enough to give you time to react, if you screwed up, it would hit you. It had a score system, a health system, and the start to a powerup system. You also had thruster fuel, this would let you hit the up arrow to dodge, and I don't even remember why I did it, but it would send you up the screen. I think at that point I just wanted more to do, because it really wasn't useful, but one of the powerups you could get was a canister to refill it. You got powerups by random chance if an enemy exploded, but it as more than that, first off, you had to not shoot the powerup, or it would blow up and be destroyed, and second, any ships on the screen would change their targeting to shoot the powerfup. Thinking about it, this is probably what I designed the dodge thrusters for, because you would have to have the powerup touch your ship in order to receive it. Most un-space invaders like, you didn't die or get affected when ships touched the bottom of the screen, they just left the area. The scenario was that you were piloting an experimental ship, and it was launched early due to a threat against Earth. the enemies decimated the planetary defenses, and your ship was the only and last line of defense. I had plans to make it more difficult later on if you let ships by you. This was the most complete, and leaned heavily on code. It also had a health system, so it wasn't like a one hit destroyed.