January 17, 2015 — Renaud D Marshall

Happy Saturday everyone!

This week I’m bursting with a father’s pride. Our son has been taking his first steps on his own. It has been amazing to watch him grow and learn. He has been really getting good with some baby sign language and is able to communicate fairly effectively in his own way now. He loves being read to and even flipping through his books on his own. I am so glad that I can see his growth like this. He’s definitely got his own little personality (that reminds me more and more of his mother, haha), and I can’t wait to see what he will learn and start doing next.

I’ve been fairly busy myself learning new things. I’ve wanted to learn about procedural content generation a lot lately, and this past week I have been working on a project that will help me get started on really understanding how to make game systems with it. I have also been working on developing my coding style to be cleaner, more descriptive, and more portable, which will help me grow a code base to work from as I continue making more games. Slowly but surely my coding and designing skills are getting closer to where I need them to be to make the games that are constantly floating in my mind.

For anyone looking for video tutorials on GameMaker: Studio, there are a number of really good ones out there. If you want a tutorial that gets into the nuts and bolts of every function of the software without being game specific, Let’s Learn GameMaker: Studio is pretty much the only one out there, but his videos are outstanding and detailed. If you want some tutorials that walk you through specific basic games then Shaun Spalding, HeartBeast, rm2kdev, SlasherXGAMES, and RealTutsGML are the best ones to check out currently. There are a number of new channels that have started within the last 4-5 months about this same topic but they don’t have much content yet.

That is it for this week’s update. I hope you all have had a great start to 2015 so far and see you next Saturday!