The Programming Journey

The Coding Incentive

Gloops was my first game I developed with GameMaker and it was the game that gave me incentive to learn how to code. At first, when I started developing Gloops, I was using the drag-and-drop (DND) feature of GameMaker. However, I had to teach myself how to write code as the game became more complex and the source code became too cumbersome to manage.

Some of the features in the game became too convoluted to develop with the drag-and-drop feature, as it required a large amount of visiual space for code blocks. One of these features, for example, was to allow the player to utilize multiple types of berries with different properties. Originally I had the player only use one type of berry, this made the code simple and small to manage. However, after realizing that having only one type of berry caused the game to have a linear play style, I decided to introduce new types of berries to give the player variety in play style. When I started to add the second type of berry, then the third type of berry, I quickly realized that the amount of DND code blocks I would need to add would make the project unmanageable. This is when I decided that it was time to learn the programming language in GameMaker called GML.

After learning some code syntax like variables, references, and loops, I started to refactor Gloops’ whole code base, converting the DND into GML code. It was a real challenge because not only was there plently of DND code blocks to replace, but I had to translate the blocks into GML code, which required me to look through GameMaker’s documentation and find tutorials online. Upon completing the refactoring my source code become more manageable and the quantity of code was reduced significantly.

When the refactoring was completed, I continued to increase my knowledge about programming and applied the newfound knowledge to improve my game.