Introducing Towering Tom: Toilet Defender

For those of you who know me as a wanna-be video game developer, you may know that I have been documenting my journey learning various game engines and coding languages at my Game Dev Log page. For the rest of you, well, I guess I’m sorry you weren’t let in to that part of my life. But in my defense, you could have asked. I mean, how much do you really care about me if you don’t even ask about my passions. What a jerk you are.

Anyway, I recently completed my first GameMaker Studio course. I took to GameMaker faster than I thought I would. Compared to my first game engine attempt, Unity3D, GameMaker is so much simpler. However, it’s only because I’ve attempted to learn programming–and had become familiar with programming at a conceptual level (knowing about loops, statements, functions, etc)–that GameMaker came as easy as it did. That being said, I still spent way too much time on my very first game, Towering Tom: Toilet Defender.

Towering Tom: Toilet Defender is a simple single-screen point-attack game. I would be scared to let a true developer look at my source code, as it’s certainly bloated with if statements and redundant code and the executable file is full of unused assets (there’s no reason it should be 57mb to download), but still I’m proud of the results.

Download and install Towering Tom: Toilet Defender here.

As for what I learned:

How to make terrible pixel art
How to use countdown variables (I’ll never figure out how to use alarms properly)
How to spawn enemies
How to implement a very non-graceful series of triggers to guide enemy behavior
How to stay motivated by making a game that’s designed for a very specific group of people (my day job coworkers who know the real life inspiration behind Towering Tom, and Towering Tom himself, whom I hope sees this game as nothing more than the laugh it is supposed to be).