--- product_id: 2709841 title: "The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners" price: "€ 44.56" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 8 url: https://www.desertcart.be/products/2709841-the-game-makers-apprentice-game-development-for-beginners store_origin: BE region: Belgium --- # Covers game design & programming basics Includes Game Maker 8 CD 300 pages of step-by-step tutorials The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners **Price:** € 44.56 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 🎯 Level up your game dev skills before everyone else does! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners - **How much does it cost?** € 44.56 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.be](https://www.desertcart.be/products/2709841-the-game-makers-apprentice-game-development-for-beginners) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Bridging Design & Code:** Learn not just programming, but how to enhance player experience and game design. - • **Community & Tools Access:** Discover free tools and join the vibrant YOYO Games community to level up your projects. - • **From Zero to Game Dev Hero:** Master game logic, design, and coding in one comprehensive guide. - • **Hands-On with Game Maker 8:** Includes a CD with Game Maker 8 software to practice as you learn. - • **Step-by-Step Learning Curve:** Progress smoothly with carefully crafted tutorials that build your skills incrementally. ## Overview The Game Maker's Apprentice is a 300-page beginner-friendly book that teaches game development through step-by-step tutorials using Game Maker 8 software (included on CD). It covers programming logic, game design principles, and practical coding techniques, making it ideal for aspiring game developers who want a hands-on, structured learning experience. While based on an older version of Game Maker, it remains a highly praised resource for foundational game creation skills. ## Description The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners [Jacob Habgood, Mark Overmars, Phil Wilson] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners Review: 5 Stars Is Not Enough!!!! - I have been an educator and professional software developer for over 20 years now and can say that this is the most well crafted instructional book of any kind that I have ever read. Taking a reader from zero to being able to create interesting games while understanding the logic, design considerations, and even programming syntax needed in one 300 page book with an easy to master learning rate/curve is an amazing feat. The authors deserve congratulations and they certainly have mine. The book starts with very basic logical programming constructs and builds an initial simple tutorial from these. Through each subsequent tutorial project in the book, additional concepts are introduced while previous concepts are reinforced. The tutorials are carefully crafted such that new material is presented in very step by step detail while previously introduced concepts are referred to in an increasingly shorthand way. This is a great teaching technique and one that doesn't happen without great effort. Along the way, most modern programming concepts and are introduced and explored in an amazingly non-frightening manner. In occasional chapters through the book the authors take a break from the GUI coding and talk about game design in more general terms and through examples from the tutorials and modified versions of the tutorials showing how game design and game player experience can be improved. The final chapters of the book deal with coding games and game features in the programming language that is "behind" the Game Maker graphic user interface. While some have complained that this language is not C++, it is certainly close enough in design and syntax that any concept learned here will be readily transferable to another more common language. The book ends with a discussion of other low and no cost tools that can be used to create graphics and sound files for games or any other software environment, and a discussion of the game design community available at the YOYO Games website. I can also attest to the fact that all example projects in the book work as advertised. That in itself is an amazing feat. Bruce Kirkpatrick MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, MCT, OCP, iNet+, Network+, Security +, A+ ... and so on Review: Great Book, But Needs Updating To GameMaker:Studio - This book bears a notice, "Copyright 2006-2013," so I assume it came out in 2006, long before GameMaker:Studio's 2012 release. As such, it includes Game Maker 8 on its CD, and the text refers to that version. Which would be fine if the only differences were that GameMaker:Studio includes more features than Game Maker 8 did, but that's not the case. The "Sleep" and "Show High Score" actions no longer exist, but are used in the instructional games and text, nonetheless. Now, "sleep" functions of one kind or another have probably been used by generations of programmers who needed their continuous-action, real-time games to present a certain pace or timing to the player. Alas, a lot of those programmers were writing single-threaded, sequential-execution code (you know: FOR X=0 TO 359 STEP 5, and so on). In our current era of event-driven, multi-threaded software, "sleep" functions tend simply to muck things up. What we used to do with sleep, we now do with timers (what Game Maker calls "alarms"). That's a big step forward, but it plays havoc with the learning process when the text you are working from expects you to add a "Sleep" action in the middle of a list of actions, and you don't have that action available, nor do you know how you would get around it with Alarms (since those aren't introduced for another 80 pages and, even then, they are used to invoke the "Show High Scores" action, which, again, no longer exists). So, I hope the authors will update the book to match the current version of the product. That said, let me go on to say that I _really_ hope they will do so, as this is otherwise a very, very good book. If you already know how to program, but find the GM IDE baffling, the examples will help you calm down and get focused. If you already know how to program, but find the immense list of GM functions and the large variety of ways to do things daunting, the examples will help you calm down and feel secure. But, if you don't already know how to program, this book may frustrate you, unless you limit yourself to the GM8 product on the included CD. I wouldn't recommend doing that, however, as you will then be "learning" methods that are already obsolete and simply _will not work_ when you start using GameMaker:Studio. Ignoring the technical details, the book's methodological approach to game programming is very enlightening. I've written, oh, maybe a billion ( 8-) ) lines of code for computer graphics applications of one kind or another. Gaming is something I'm new at, however, and I've only been doing object-oriented programming for about four years now. So, when one example showed how to animate a character on the screen so it smoothly moves from one position to the next by replacing it with an instance of a different object, having that object's position remain unchanged, but animating its graphic appearance to make it look like it was moving, then replacing it with an instance of the original object but in the new location, well... that was an "aha!" moment for me. Overall, a fine book. I will definitely be buying the sequel soon. But, until it is updated to reflect the actions available in the current version of GameMaker:Studio, I have to say it should be used only by people who already know how to program basic event-driven code, and who at least know what multi-threading is. ## Features - Includes CD ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,457,428 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #272 in Computer & Video Game Design #614 in Game Programming #1,741 in Software Development (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 268 Reviews | ## Images ![The Game Maker's Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71aLLEkdH9L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars Is Not Enough!!!! *by B***K on June 11, 2009* I have been an educator and professional software developer for over 20 years now and can say that this is the most well crafted instructional book of any kind that I have ever read. Taking a reader from zero to being able to create interesting games while understanding the logic, design considerations, and even programming syntax needed in one 300 page book with an easy to master learning rate/curve is an amazing feat. The authors deserve congratulations and they certainly have mine. The book starts with very basic logical programming constructs and builds an initial simple tutorial from these. Through each subsequent tutorial project in the book, additional concepts are introduced while previous concepts are reinforced. The tutorials are carefully crafted such that new material is presented in very step by step detail while previously introduced concepts are referred to in an increasingly shorthand way. This is a great teaching technique and one that doesn't happen without great effort. Along the way, most modern programming concepts and are introduced and explored in an amazingly non-frightening manner. In occasional chapters through the book the authors take a break from the GUI coding and talk about game design in more general terms and through examples from the tutorials and modified versions of the tutorials showing how game design and game player experience can be improved. The final chapters of the book deal with coding games and game features in the programming language that is "behind" the Game Maker graphic user interface. While some have complained that this language is not C++, it is certainly close enough in design and syntax that any concept learned here will be readily transferable to another more common language. The book ends with a discussion of other low and no cost tools that can be used to create graphics and sound files for games or any other software environment, and a discussion of the game design community available at the YOYO Games website. I can also attest to the fact that all example projects in the book work as advertised. That in itself is an amazing feat. Bruce Kirkpatrick MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, MCT, OCP, iNet+, Network+, Security +, A+ ... and so on ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great Book, But Needs Updating To GameMaker:Studio *by P***S on January 3, 2014* This book bears a notice, "Copyright 2006-2013," so I assume it came out in 2006, long before GameMaker:Studio's 2012 release. As such, it includes Game Maker 8 on its CD, and the text refers to that version. Which would be fine if the only differences were that GameMaker:Studio includes more features than Game Maker 8 did, but that's not the case. The "Sleep" and "Show High Score" actions no longer exist, but are used in the instructional games and text, nonetheless. Now, "sleep" functions of one kind or another have probably been used by generations of programmers who needed their continuous-action, real-time games to present a certain pace or timing to the player. Alas, a lot of those programmers were writing single-threaded, sequential-execution code (you know: FOR X=0 TO 359 STEP 5, and so on). In our current era of event-driven, multi-threaded software, "sleep" functions tend simply to muck things up. What we used to do with sleep, we now do with timers (what Game Maker calls "alarms"). That's a big step forward, but it plays havoc with the learning process when the text you are working from expects you to add a "Sleep" action in the middle of a list of actions, and you don't have that action available, nor do you know how you would get around it with Alarms (since those aren't introduced for another 80 pages and, even then, they are used to invoke the "Show High Scores" action, which, again, no longer exists). So, I hope the authors will update the book to match the current version of the product. That said, let me go on to say that I _really_ hope they will do so, as this is otherwise a very, very good book. If you already know how to program, but find the GM IDE baffling, the examples will help you calm down and get focused. If you already know how to program, but find the immense list of GM functions and the large variety of ways to do things daunting, the examples will help you calm down and feel secure. But, if you don't already know how to program, this book may frustrate you, unless you limit yourself to the GM8 product on the included CD. I wouldn't recommend doing that, however, as you will then be "learning" methods that are already obsolete and simply _will not work_ when you start using GameMaker:Studio. Ignoring the technical details, the book's methodological approach to game programming is very enlightening. I've written, oh, maybe a billion ( 8-) ) lines of code for computer graphics applications of one kind or another. Gaming is something I'm new at, however, and I've only been doing object-oriented programming for about four years now. So, when one example showed how to animate a character on the screen so it smoothly moves from one position to the next by replacing it with an instance of a different object, having that object's position remain unchanged, but animating its graphic appearance to make it look like it was moving, then replacing it with an instance of the original object but in the new location, well... that was an "aha!" moment for me. Overall, a fine book. I will definitely be buying the sequel soon. But, until it is updated to reflect the actions available in the current version of GameMaker:Studio, I have to say it should be used only by people who already know how to program basic event-driven code, and who at least know what multi-threading is. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Game Making Simplicity and Strength at its Best ! *by A***S on July 24, 2006* The Game Maker's Apprentice has to be one of my most eagerly awaited Computer Book purchases for quite sometime. The fabulous presentation and great use of terminology, really makes it a joy to read. Each chapter guides you through gently, in order to achieve more confidence into creating your own game or project. Each page is colourful and the beautiful illustrations brings things to life. The book is accompanied by a great CD with all of the examples, resources and Game Maker itself, which is really easy to get into. Within no time at all, you'll get used to it's interface and workings. The tutorials start you off with the basics and progressively bring you to the wonderfully powerful Game Maker Language (GML). So not only can you create games using a Drag 'n' Drop interface, you can also use a powerful programming language as well. All of this is included in the unregistered version, but by paying an ever so reasonable registration fee, you unlock the full potential of Game Maker. I used Game Maker to create my first ever PC game, Bugsy. The Game Maker Forum helped me out when I came across a problem or a bug I couldn't resolve. There a lots of games and projects created with this wonderful program. You will also find many other sites across the Internet that provide helpful advice and tutorials. Not forgetting the official Game Maker site run and hosted by Mark Overmars. The books co-writer, Jacob Habgood, has made a marvellous job along side Mark, to make this a very interesting book indeed. You might also be interested to know, that another book covering the Game Maker theme, Basic Game Design and Creation by Namu Swamy is available as well. This also brings you to the Game Maker stable to learn some very easy steps into the basics of game design without it appearing too boring or tiresome. Your gaming ideas and projects start here ! --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.be/products/2709841-the-game-makers-apprentice-game-development-for-beginners](https://www.desertcart.be/products/2709841-the-game-makers-apprentice-game-development-for-beginners) --- *Product available on Desertcart Belgium* *Store origin: BE* *Last updated: 2026-05-20*