Not long after getting into Game Maker, my brother Jacob and I wanted to test-drive how easy it was to make our own games. We spent a few game development sessions together in the summer of 2004, whipping out very simple arcade-style games. From those days, we worked on 4 different projects. They are mostly unfinished, but still playable. We don’t intend to actually make arcade games like these, unless as an element within a larger game, but it was fun to create these anyway as sort of a good starting point.
| Space Ace
 
Before we knew there was a game called “Space Ace” already on the market, we came up with this little shooting game. I have to admit, it can be pretty hard due to the randomly-generating enemies. You never know where they’re going to come from, or how many are going to appear. The point of the game is to survive until the time runs out, at which point the boss appears. Then you have to shoot the boss ship until it’s destroyed, avoiding its laser blasts, homing missiles and quicker versions of the level enemies. Whether you win or die, you save your name to a high scores board.
Download Space Ace
Controls:
Arrow Keys – navigate your ship
Mouse cursor – aim your ship and guns
Left click – fire your guns (hold it down for a constant stream of firepower) |
| Bug Chomper
 
I think we created this one in one afternoon. The point of the game is to see how many points you can rack up before the time runs out. The player’s “bug chomper” does so by eating good bugs (different values of points) and resisting the urge to eat the bad bugs (lots of negative points). The bugs momentarily and randomly pop out of logs rolling down a river. As the time goes by, the river current speeds up.
Download Bug Chomper
Controls:
Up & Down Arrows- select main menu items
Enter – Confirm main menu selection
Left & Right Arrows – Navigate your bug chomper back and forth between the two trees
Space Bar – Chomp |
| Leaky Barn
Another couple-hour project. Of these four mini games, this one’s game mechanics feel the least original, but it has a pretty unique setting to make up for it. You are a farmer trying to catch drops of water falling from the roof inside a leaky barn, so they don’t land on and wake three little sleeping pigs. Each drop progresses a pig’s awareness in stages, but over time the pigs slowly fall back asleep. If a pig wakes up all the way, the player looses. If the bucket fills up and you try to catch more water, it will spill over onto the pigs. The solution is to catch the drops, and quickly and constantly empty the water into the stone well/troth on the right side of the barn. As time goes on, the difficulty increases. The water, as in all these games, generates randomly but has a much greater chance of dripping as the difficulty increases. You may find 4 possible to survive, but difficulty 5 is pretty much the end of the game. When you loose, you enter your highscore.
Download Leaky Barn
Controls:
Arrows – select menu option and move farmer
Enter – select menu option |
| Building Blaster
This isn’t so much a game as it is a very primitive prototype of a game element we were planning on building a game around. The furthest we ever took this is a man with a jet pack who can fly around on the screen and shoot little bullets at a wall. The wall is built out of seamless tiles that, when shot with the gun, individually become more and more destroyed. Eventually the wall sections are destroyed and can be passed. I don’t fully remember, but I think the game was going to eventually evolve around a bounty hunter going after bad guys hiding inside, receiving their weapons as power-ups along the way.
Download Building Blaster
Controls:
Mouse Cursor – aim gun arm
Left Mouse Button – fire gun
Up Arrow – jet pack throttle
Left & Right Arrows- guide air-born man |
