Garry Kitchen's GameMaker
Garry Kitchen's GameMaker is an integrated development environment for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC compatibles, created by Garry Kitchen and released by Activision in 1985. It is one of the earliest all-in-one game design products aimed at the general consumer, preceded by Broderbund's The Arcade Machine in 1982. Several sample files are included: a demo sequence featuring animated sprites and music, a recreation of Pitfall!, and a birthday greeting.
Two add-on disks are available for the Commodore 64 version: Sports, and Science Fiction. These include sprites, music, and background elements for loading into GameMaker.
Construction
GameMaker is divided into five tools, each of which consists of a graphical interface controlled with the joystick:SceneMaker - for creating background graphicsSpriteMaker - for creating movable objects MusicMaker - for composing musical scoresSoundMaker - for creating sound effectsThe Editor - for programming the actual gameThe programming language used by GameMaker is reminiscent of other early programming languages like BASIC, but with several proprietary and tightly integrated graphics and sound facilities.
Rather than enter the language via keyboard, GameMaker uses a novel contextual menu-based system. The user selects possible instructions, and then customizes the active objects of the instruction, such as variable names or numbers.
Limitations
Some limitations of Gamemaker are imposed by the Commodore 64 architecture, and some by the software itself:- Only eight sprites may be displayed at once
- Each sprite and background may have a maximum of four colors, out of a palette of sixteen
- Only two stationary background screens may be employed per game
- Only 3553 total bytes are available for game resources — including sounds, music, sprites, and code
- The games themselves may not access the disk