Friendly GameMaker lessons

GM Grove

Welcome to GM Grove, a free beginner learning site for GameMaker! Earn XP, watch flowers bloom as you complete lessons, and relax in a friendly learning environment as you build your skills one step at a time.

Click the "Start Learning" button directly below to jump straight into the beginner path, or scroll down to view all the paths and courses currently available.

Example code

Tweak the movement

Switch between wrap and bounce, change the speed, and watch the code and preview update together.

// Step Event
			var _speed = 3;
			
			x += _speed;
			
			if (x > room_width) {
				x = 0;
			}

This is a simple example of how some actual GML code works.

Beginner Path

Learn how to use GameMaker from the bottom up and build a solid foundation of knowledge to help kickstart your game development journey!

6 lessons

Monthly

Your First Hour With GM

A friendly first course through projects, rooms, objects, events, sprites, and running your first tiny GameMaker project.

Open course

7 lessons

General

Fundamentals of Code I

Variables, conditions, comparisons, functions, and the core GML ideas beginners need to complete their first few simple GameMaker projects.

Open course

5 lessons

Monthly

Let's Make Click the Clown

Build a complete tiny clown clicking game in GameMaker. Play the finished version in-lesson first and then build your own copy!

Open course

7 lessons

General

Saving Your Work Properly

Learn how to save your GameMaker projects effectively to avoid losing your progress.

Open course

More courses coming

The path keeps growing

New courses will be added here as this learning path expands.

Helpful Resources

A repository for all the software, asset sites, audio tools, documentation, and helpful GameMaker links that I recommend.

I've dogfooded pretty much every resource on the list, and they're all free or cheap to use. Check it out and bookmark your favorites!

Open resources

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Help GM Grove keep growing

GM Grove is free, made by me (RefresherTowel) in my spare time, and still growing. Support helps me spend more time writing lessons, improving the site, and helps pay for any hosting costs associated with the site. So if the content helps you, please consider a small donation or a small monthly subscription if you want to see more lessons come out quicker!

Support

GM Grove is totally free, but donations or subs help me spend more dedicated time writing and planning lessons, work on general improvements to the site and help offset any server costs I accrue.

Support GM Grove

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