Game Maker Tutorial

Page 11 of 13
Finishing the Game
We have now created a scrolling shooter with different enemy planes. It has become a playable game that gets harder all the time. There actually is some fun in playing it and trying to achieve the highest score. But to turn it into a real game a couple of finishing touches are still required. We need some background music, a loading image, a better icon, etc.
I also put a delay in planes to reappear when shot, making it more interesting for the player to try and shoot planes, rather than simply avoid them. Finally there is a special fire bonus when the player reaches a score of 400 and another one when he reaches 1000 points.
You can use this game as a basis to extend further. Here are some ideas of what you could add. It is rather common in scrolling shooter games to find power-ups that give the player extra fire power, repair the damage, give extra points, give an extra plane, etc. Such power-ups can appear when the player shoots a plane or they might simply be encountered during the flying.
Also you could create extra types of enemy planes, for example, planes that fly from the side or fire more powerful missiles. I leave it to you to work on these and make your own scrolling shooter.
You can find a collection of 1945-related sprites, created by Ari Feldman, as a .bmp file in the Resources folder within this tutorial's folder. To get the individual sprites out of this file, create a sprite, click on the button Edit Sprite, select Create from Strip in the File menu, and select the image(s) you want. See the documentation for more information.