Game Maker is a complete development environment. It includes all necessary tools to develop and test games without requiring external tools, devices or special setups. The user interface is built around a central frame where multiple workspaces can be allocated. Workspaces are panels or boards where game elements and resources can be placed and organized during the development to allow for a more personalized organization. Workspaces will themselves display internal windows with different content, from generic objects with properties, to lists of events and to GML code. Every element window which is part of another or is linked somehow has a line drawn from one element to the other.

In addition, around the central workspace area, there are secondary panels. Most of them are collapsable if necessary to allow the central area to expand. These panels show:

• A tree list of every resource of the game. This tree is perpetual and changes only when resources (or assets) are created or deleted,
• A list of controls to change the property of any selected resource. This panels changes whenever the developer focuses on a different element.
• An output window to see the result of the game compilation and execution.

Other window may appear either solitary, above the rest or as a tab inside the central area when some special tool is launched. For example, the image editor is seldom used, but when a image resource is edited, it's brought to foreground as a tab in the central area.

Game maker offers two ways to create a game:

• Drag and drop (or "DnD"). This mode is intended for newbies who don't like or don't want to code and pretend to build standard games. Game maker allows the definition of the game logic by using a "visual scripting tool". In this mode, the developer drags and drops logic elements that are linked and grouped to specify the behaviour of any element.
• Game Maker Language projects. This mode is the default and standard, and the logic of the game and behaviour of any element is specified by programming code in GML Language.

In this tutorial we'll be using the GML option, because the complexity of the examples will be shallow and we won't do complex programming but, when completed, we'll have more open possibilities in the future by doing so.