- Little Town provides an introduction to the principles of game development using GameMaker to college and university students. By building a game to control a child in an idyllic small town, players learn how to design games and develop key coding skills
- The interactive game-building tutorial provides a robust framework for educators with teaching guidelines and assessment criteria with which colleges and universities can effectively start teaching game design to their students.
10th May 2021, Edinburgh: YoYo Games today announced the launch of Little Town – a major new game-making tutorial which teaches students and hobbyists game development with GameMaker Studio 2, the world’s leading 2D game development engine.
Developed in collaboration with award-winning game developer and university lecturer, Benjamin Rivers, Little Town has been designed to help new game designers quickly learn the core functionality of GameMaker Studio 2 in a natural, fun way.
Little Town is an adventure game in which players control a child in an idyllic small town. By following clues players must find the right items and bring them to one of the town’s three characters – the Baker, Teacher and Grocer.
The tutorial enables students, hobbyists and new game designers to create their own layout for Little Town and use code to bring it and its people to life. Users will also be able to choose where to hide each item, as well as writing their own hints and dialogue.
With over eight hours of video tutorials as well as a wealth of supporting materials, Little Town provides a robust framework for educators with teaching guidelines and assessment criteria with which colleges and universities can effectively start teaching game design to their students.
The Little Town tutorial teaches many core skills from creating vibrant animations using GameMaker’s powerful Sequences tool to controlling sprites, sounds and laying-out the playing area – providing the perfect introduction to GameMaker Studio 2 and the fundamental principles of game design.
Stuart Poole, General Manager, YoYo Games, said: “We’re extremely pleased to release Little Town, our most comprehensive GameMaker tutorial to date and the first in a series of high-quality tutorials which are currently under development.
Poole continued:“While we’re constantly striving to make GameMaker as easy to use and accessible as possible, quality tutorials like Little Town are essential as they provide a practical framework to enable users to quickly get up-to-speed with the core functionality of GameMaker so they can start making their own amazing games.”
Benjamin Rivers, Little Town’s creator, added: “While Little Town is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to understand the basics of game making, the tutorial has been developed specifically to support students in higher education who are learning game design”.
The tutorial features six sections and has been designed to allow for both synchronous and asynchronous participation for in-class and remote learning.
“Little Town has been structured to encourage self-driven learning and experimentation, which we hope will inspire a new generation of game developers,” added Rivers
About YoYo Games
YoYo Games is the home of GameMaker, the fastest and friendliest cross-platform game development technology out there. GameMaker Studio 2 has been completely redeveloped with usability and efficiency at its core, allowing developers to create games within a single code base and then publish them to run natively across multiple platforms including Android, iOS, HTML5, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows Desktop, OS X, Ubuntu, Windows UWP.
The GameMaker Studio family of products has been downloaded more than 10 million times since 2012. YoYo Games is based in Dundee, Scotland and was acquired by Opera in January 2021.
About Opera and Opera GX
Opera is a global web innovator. Opera’s browsers, news products and fintech solutions are the trusted choice of hundreds of millions of MAU worldwide. Opera is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (OPRA). https://opera.com
In 2019 Opera launched Opera GX, a browser built for gamers with features that include countless customization options, sound effects, background music, a gaming-inspired design, as well as CPU, RAM and Network Bandwidth limiters that make the browser less resource-hungry and leave more of the computer’s resources for gaming. Opera GX has seen tremendous growth over the past year with a user base of more than 8 million highly engaged monthly active gamers. Opera GX’s user base grew 350% between 2019 and December 2020 and it continues to grow at a fast pace. Opera GX continues to receive high ratings (4.84 out of 5.0). It also recently launched Discord server which quickly became number one in the Science & Tech community with more than 285K members.
