The Game Maker's Companion is the long-awaited sequel to The Game Maker's Apprentice. This book picks up where the last book left off, advancing your game development journey with some seriously impressive gaming projects. This time you'll learn how to make professional-quality platform games with solid collision detection and slick control mechanisms and you'll get acquainted with a long-lost icon of platform gaming history on the way. You'll go on to discover techniques to add depth and believability to the characters and stories in your games, including The Monomyth, cut scene storyboarding, and character archetypes. This culminates in the creation of an original atmospheric platform-adventure which will take your GML programming skills to new heights. There's even a handy reference section at the back of the book which will be invaluable for adding common features to your own games. With contributions from four games industry professionals and a highly respected member of the Game Maker community, The Game Maker's Companion is another labor of love that will give you even more hours of enjoyment than the original. If you already own Game Maker, then you really must own this book as well.

Computer game creation is a fascinating but very complex subject, and this complexity can be off -putting to many. However, you shouldn't lose heart if you want to learn how to create great games; all you need is this book, some enthusiasm, and a good imagination. The Game Maker's Apprentice shows you how to create 9 complete, exciting games of different types (action, adventure, puzzle, and more) using the wildly popular Game Maker game creation tool, complete with professional quality sounds and visuals. It also teaches you all you need to know about game design theory (challenges, learning curves, level design etc) and programming to give you a solid grounding in game design. Game Maker uses an easy drag-and-drop interface for the most part, so you don't need to have any coding experience to start creating games. It also features a built-in programming language to allow you to add advanced features to your games. You can progress to using this when you are ready. Go to http: //www.gamemaker.nl/ for more information.