Our game right now is totally empty, so let’s add the most important piece first: our player! Click on the Game Script, then in the Code Section/Start Tab, copy down this line of code.

player = object_new('obj_player')

Press the Stop/Play button to apply your changes to the code.

Hmm… That’s weird, why is it just a box that says "empty image" and not a cool spaceship? Well, this object doesn’t have an image or “sprite” attached to it. Let’s attach one!

Click on the obj_player script here in the Object Scripts section.

Now click on the Start Tab and use this line of code:

sprite = sprite_new('spr_player')

Now press Stop/Play again and check out your new spaceship!

Right now, our spaceship is stuck in the middle of the screen. If we want to change where it goes, all we need to do is change it’s x and y values.

When making 2D games, everything is on a grid, like a sheet of graph paper. X represents how many squares it goes to the left or right, and Y represents how many squares it goes up or down.

Click on our Game Script again and copy down this line underneath the old one:

player.x = 100

Press Stop/Play and see what happens!

It should have moved over to the right. If we changed that number from 100 to 200 it would move even further to the right! Try it out. See if you can get it to move right up to the edge of the screen.

Great work! Can you guess how we’ll make it move back over to the left? Here’s a hint: we’ll need numbers smaller than zero.

That’s right, negative numbers! Try changing your line from before into this:

player.x = -100

Now it should move to the left. Again, see if you can make your spaceship touch the left edge of the screen without going too far.

Awesome! Now for moving up and down it is almost the exact same idea.

The only thing different is instead of writing player.x we need to write player.y! Make another new line and copy down this:

player.y = 100

See how it moves up? Try changing the number until you reach the top edge of the screen. And finally, just like before, change it to a negative number and try to touch the bottom edge of the screen.

Now if you change both player.x and player.y, you can move your spaceship to any part of the screen!

Our spaceship is pretty cool, but it isn’t much of a game if there is nothing in the world besides our player. Let’s add some new objects to decorate the place!

We've been working on the object “obj_player”, but there should be more objects underneath it.

Our next step will be adding an asteroid to the game, so click on the one called "obj_asteroid".

Now back in the Game Script/Start Tab, let’s add this object to our game with this line of code:

asteroid = object_new('obj_asteroid')

Just like before it’s only a blue block that says "empty image". Remember how we fixed that last time? We added a sprite onto the object!

Let's do just that! Add this line in obj_asteroid/Start Tab:

sprite = sprite_new('spr_asteroid')

Now press Stop/Play and check out that new object!

You can move it around just like we did with the player by going back to Game Script/Start Tab and using the lines:

asteroid.x = 100
asteroid.y = 100

Change the numbers around to whatever you want to put it somewhere in the game.

Try making it reach each corner of the screen!

Perfect! Now it’s time to practice. There is a selection of other sprites you can use to decorate your room in your project. You should be able to see them all listed.

It is also possible to upload your own sprites from the internet. If you want to, you can get images from Google and click on the "+" button next to Sprites to add them to your project.

Load sprites onto the other objects we have in the project. For example, in obj_enemy, use the code we learned today to load spr_enemy onto it. Then create a new instance of it in the game!

Decorate your room like this until you're happy with how it looks.

Next week we’ll make our player spaceship move around by pressing arrow keys!