First Contact
Background
Since I was little I liked to play video games, I wondered how is it possible that someone has created something like this?
I remember that what I wanted to know the most was how video games and robots were made. I found it interesting how out of "nothing" you could make something move and seem to have life. The first robots I saw were obviously moving toys or remote controlled cars.
I remember that in my childhood I liked to draw a lot of mazes. I did them as a hobby for my family to solve. One day I started to draw and write what a maze video game made by me would be like, it would contain portals to pass between mazes, it would contain enemies and coins in various places and the objective would be to collect all the coins. It could be said that this was my first attempt to make a video game (made on paper) 😄.
When I was 12 years old, I entered middle school, where, in addition to common subjects, you must select a workshop to learn how to do something specific, because it was a thecnical school. Although there was electronics as an option, I chose electricity, since I knew that robots were powered by electricity. Some time later I found out that electronics is closer to robotics since they saw electricity, resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and many more things, while in electricity we only learned to make electrical installations for the home and office (of all kinds), and all the laws and protocols involved in managing electricity on a large scale.
First contact
One day in April 2009 (when I was 13 years old) while I was watching videos on YouTube, I was curious about the subject of video game development, so I started doing a little research, and I came across a video from the YoshiFanGM channel where he explained how to create your first video game. That's where I met Game Maker.
When I saw the video I wanted to try it, so I downloaded the Game Maker program, and after a while I had already made the game from the video.
I was very excited and for the next few days I kept looking for videos about the Game Maker program to learn how to use it correctly.
There came a time when I also started making Tutorials on YouTube on how to do different things in Game Maker. I made a total of about 20 very varied videos. My channel was doing very well, but for very personal reasons, I had to delete each of my videos 😥.
The channels I remember visiting the most about Game Maker are: YoshiFanGM, TheSerglan, gotrunks100 and lakacapodrida. Apparently much of their videos of all of them about Game Maker no longer exist today.
Some of my first projects
Many of the games that appear below were only test, since many only have 1 level or were made to explain a YouTube tutorial or I simply did not put as much effort into them as others.
Making video games (or at least trying to create them) became one of my favorite hobbies back then.
Game Maker was very easy to use since it was not necessary to know any programming language. Game Maker helped me to learn programming later on, because certain functions or ways of programming were already familiar to me.
At some point I also got to use Scratch. I remember that at school a teacher found out that I made video games and made me make a game using Scratch instead of Game Maker. I really didn't like using Scratch very much, because, aside from not knowing it, I felt it was very basic, compared to everything Game Maker offered.