Tutorial:Making_your_first_game

Making your first game can be a daunting task for someone who's never
even seen the interface before. Fortunately, we're here to help, with
tutorials and explanations of the interface.

Before you proceed with this, you need to first ensure that you have
Installed ENIGMA (which
usually comes packaged with LateralGM already).
Don't forget to also follow the instructions for Install#Compiling a
sample game to make sure
that everything works and to get that nasty first-build wait-time out of
the way. Once you have done that, you may either press the New Game
button, or close LateralGM altogether and start it up again later when
you're ready.

Your next step will probably depend on what type of learner you are.

• If you like going by the book or like reading technical manuals,
  jump down to the #Interface section.
• If you like to tinker with examples and try to improve on existing
  engines, the #Examples section is the place
  for you.
• If you want to create a game from scratch via walkthrough or
  tutorial, check out or #Tutorials section.
• As a kind of hybrid between tutorials and existing engines,
  #Staged tutorials provide you with an example
  file every few steps of the way, so you can check your work or start
  up in the middle.

Tutorials

Tutorials are a great way to learn the process of creating a game from
scratch and to take a guided tour of some of the more important features
of the software. The two most common types of tutorials are [#Video]
and [#Text] (which oftentimes show images).

Text

• First game:Balloon pop In the
  genre of Top-Down Side-Scrolling Shooters, we walk you through the
  simple game of popping incoming balloons.

Video

No video tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you should make
your own and contribute back to this wiki!

Staged

There aren't many staged tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you
should make your own and contribute back to this wiki!

• Adding an achievement
  system to your
  games.

Examples

There are two kinds of examples that you can tinker with. The first and
most obvious type is a free-range example, where you're given a
well-documented example file, and then you can modify it in whatever way
you want. Since these are a dime a dozen, instead of listing them all
here, instead you can find them at Examples. The
kind of examples that this section deals with, however, is the more
guided kind of example where you get the example file and a tutorial to
show you some of the things you can do with it.

No guided tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you should make
your own and contribute back to this wiki!

Interface

There's nothing wrong with wanting to read manuals that show you how the
interface works. Some of us don't learn by blindly following a set of
mouse clicks - we want to know "what's that button supposed to do?" and
"What are all these other things for?" and how to navigate the interface
in general.

In fact, you can learn a lot of things about the interface that
tutorials and examples don't mention, like the different ways to do the
same thing, shortcuts, the names of components, and parts of the
interface that you didn't even know existed. With this, you can do more
advanced things, you can do things quicker, and you can become a power
user, fully utilizing every facet of the software. All you have to do is
sit down and read, with plenty of neat pictures and diagrams to help
make the experience more pleasant. With that kind of power, you could
even contribute back by writing your own tutorials, helping answer
people's questions (e.g. on the Forums), finding
bugs, tweaks, or suggestions to improve the program, or better
organizing the wiki and adding missing information.

Speaking of organizing the wiki, we're so disorganized, we don't even
know what pages to recommend you to first!

Maybe start with LateralGM, and Resource
tree.

Category:First game
Category:Tutorials