Action Game Maker Review

Action Game Maker Review

Overview

There are many gamers who have touched controllers, keyboards and mice, or joysticks who have said, “Man I’d love to be able to create my own game.” For some of these people, they have, and do. There are so many games that come out constantly, so many gamers living their dreams of creating entertainment for others who love the medium.

Are you one of them? Maybe lacking the skill of programming, or the lack of storytelling, or creating graphics? Action Game Maker was basically made for you. More of a tool system than an actual game, which may cause my review structure to change slightly than some of you could be used to. Either way, let’s dive in!

Gameplay

Action Game Maker as I stated above, is most definitely a tool system to create…well action games as the title suggests. How you use it, is completely up to you. You can make it as basic as you please, or deep dive into system and unlock the depth to create the most epic action game ever.

Step one, don’t panic. Yes I am quoting Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but I mean it. Creating something can be very daunting. Believe me I know. I had to go through the tutorial twice to get confident to mess with things myself.

Step two, take small steps, small bites of your game at a time. You cant do it all at once, in one sitting. Prep yourself mentally that this could take longer than you thing, and relax. Any progress is good progress!

Now for the good stuff. Action Game Maker is really simple to use and start getting into building a game out. They have pre-set items for you to start your game. Each of those items from lamps, to terrain, enemies, anything can be modified. Is it breakable, can it damage you, can it move, or what events makes this object do something else?

What’s great is that the tutorial does get you into the editor that looks like and acts like a flow chart. The first thing you set up? A sliding maneuver. You program it to a button, change the speed, what the animation is (which the animation is already set up for you), and how to stop the action so your character isn’t just permanently sliding around your game.

But a word of advice, you really…REALLY need to take your time and be patient with your game. There is a lot to take in. A lot to manage, and if you don’t have any development experience and looking to jump into Action Game Maker, please work in small chunks. You very much can overwhelm yourself and stop your project. Keep your dreams alive! Take your time.

Functionality

As I mentioned above, with this being a tool, I have to change my some of my sections so please bear with me as this may not be our usual format.

The functionality of Action Game Maker is everything a novice or veteran developer may need. There really is so much to start with as a base. Then once you get under the hood, you’re looking at some really in-depth settings that can really take the defaults and make it your own. Every little movement, every object, and anything can be manipulated, adjusted, or modified. It really has so much involved that you can do damn near anything.

With that being said, there also be some limitations with using a tool software. I do not want to make it sound like this is a negative. But for some very detailed individuals or teams, you may mind something that you want to do, and it may not be available without playing around or massaging the tools to do so. But some may never ever hit that wall with everything that Action Game Maker delivers.

Functionality Part II

I struggled for a bit trying to find an extra section to write something I want to say or disclaim or just…express?

Action Game Maker is built on Godot. It is an open-source game engine. If you are unfamiliar with open-source, it is a free, community-based project that allows programmers to contribute to the project for future releases. With Godot being a free system to use, I can see an argument being, why would I pay for basically a Godot addon? That’s not for me to decide for you. There are some great things that Action Game Maker provides. It really does. So the learning curve would be less with Action Game Maker. On the other hand, you can take Godot and do 100% what you want, with a steeper learning curve. Action Game Maker has been receiving updates since I received the game to review. Some back-to-back within days, which is great to know that it is getting good support from the developers which only means more for you to potentially gain with updates and fixes. It also allows for GDScript, which is the scripting language for Godot. So those already familiar with Godot and its GDScript could squeeze more power from the framework of Godot.

Bottom Line

Action Game Maker is a great tool to get you started and has the structure to complete the action game of your dreams. As mentioned above, there are a lot of prebuilt tools and functionality built into the Action Game Maker tool. With Godot as the framework of Action Game Maker, it does unlock some more functionality with GDScript, but it may also cause some hesitation in some gamers.

You can find Action Game Maker here on Steam.

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