How I Made a Platformer Using Action Game Maker
Listeners of The Respawn Station Podcast may recall that back in June of 2025, we had devised a new segment where we pitched a game idea that we would try to create in a piece of recently released video game development software called Action Game Maker. The concept we dreamt up was loosely based on the film 65, in which Adam Driver plays an astronaut-soldier type that crash lands on an unknown planet filled with dinosaurs.
Our game, in theory, was going to be an atmospheric sci-fi game where the player assumed the role of Ronnie Driver, a humanoid alien frozen in a comet sent from another galaxy to wipe out the dinosaurs before they advanced to take over the universe. It was going to be a 2D pixel art shooter where you would blast away at various dinosaur enemies like Pterodactyls and Triceratops, maybe even a T-Rex.
Fast forward to the present, it’s been 7 months, and the podcast has been on hiatus for a bit, so what’s the deal? Well, while we were able to get a moving character and a firing weapon into the prototype, it was clear pretty early on that we were perhaps overestimating our abilities at being able to execute on our fun yet lofty podcast brainstorming session ideas.
Sri and I both have a pretty limited knowledge base when it comes to actually crafting and building video games. And as we had received access to the Action Game Maker software, on top of trying to grapple with game design fundamentals and theory, we were also trying to learn a completely foreign set of tools to utilize in sculpting our game. So unfortunately, our grand idea of blasting dinosaurs is yet another casualty of the dreaded “scope creep” and a bit of our eyes being bigger than our stomachs, so to speak.
However, I was recently able to hop back into Action Game Maker to try and make something a bit more well-suited for my extremely beginner skillset, and to try and get a feel for what the experience is like using the software from a complete beginner’s perspective.
Instead of trying to craft a sophisticated 2D shooter from scratch, this time I opted to load up the “Platformer Tutorial” level that is included with Action Game Maker as a base. After sinking a couple of hours into the toolset, this is what resulted!
This tutorial file starts off pretty barebones, featuring a floating island, a controllable character with some basic animations, including a jump, and a coin counter UI element. I wasn’t planning on tweaking much of the actual game code or mechanics. My goal was more centered around trying to build a playable level, one that ideally incorporated some areas to actually jump around, and maybe one that would implement a bit of “world building”, something that would at least somewhat touch on that atmosphere idea we were daydreaming of.
I started with the background, and by that, I wanted to completely switch it away from the bright and colorful grassy field that was selected by default. After perusing the options that were available in the background templates, I decided on a mix of two styles. In Action Game Maker, the background is separated into different layers: near, mid-range, and distant. These could be changed independently, so I landed on a combination of the “castle” style and the “snow” style. The “castle” style had this ocean or lake background feature for the near distance layer, and a mountain range that was a bit of a cooler shade of blue that fit well for the mid range layer. For the distant layer, the “snow” theme had this colorful skybox that sprinkled stars throughout the clouds. The background layers ended up informing the design of the foreground and the level itself as I felt a game in this type of setting would be cold and a bit lifeless.
After landing on a background I liked, I then moved on to sculpting the level itself. Admittedly, it took me a bit of time to come to grips with the menus in Action Game Maker, specifically trying to figure out how I could select tiles and actually start manipulating the environment. While it’s awesome that software like this exists to try and blast open the idea of designing a game and making the process accessible to more people, I think in its current form, for a beginner, it is still a bit overwhelming to try and navigate the various menus, information, and options at your disposal. It is structured in a way that I feel if you are a person who has prior experience with game development, you will be able to get up and running with a project much faster than someone starting on the ground floor. There are some tutorials on the software’s forums, but using these feels like it only scratches the surface of all the functionality the tools provide, and it would be nice to see some of these tutorials officially implemented into the software somehow, rather than having to link out to an external source.
Once I got the hang of selecting and placing tiles, the first element that caught my attention was building a wall that would serve as a boundary for the player, so they couldn’t just immediately turn left and walk off and into the endless void. I figured, based on the background I had kitbashed together, that the opening area would be a somewhat mountainous region, rocky with little grass or life to speak of. So I began building a rock wall to the left of the starting point. I had to change the height of the wall a few times to ensure that players couldn’t just hop up and out of bounds. After some back and forth I got the wall to an appropriate height and adorned it with some sharp-looking rocks and angled terrain to try and make the wall look less boxy and flat, an attempt to give it a bit of texture. I then filled in behind the rock wall, to give the impression that a mountain continued further off-screen for when the camera would extend past the playable area. By filling in the empty space the camera could see and decorating the cliff face, it actually made this very small chunk of world space feel much more immersive almost immediately, which was a pretty cool feeling to experience.
I moved on to placing rock and dirt down to have some space where the player would come to grips with moving around. I wanted to keep it simple, thinking it would be better to ease people into the world before immediately throwing them into a jumping gauntlet full of danger. Expanding on the mountain theme, I carved out some hills using a mix of pre-made pieces and individual tiles, blending them together to form some uneven terrain. When playtesting, the character movement system was able to detect these terrain changes and acted appropriately right away which made further iteration on the level geometry a breeze. If something didn’t work or looked weird I could quickly erase what I had built, try placing something new, and then immediately launch the playable build again to see if it worked better. While I was using template elements included in the project file, I was still pretty impressed at the speed at which Action Game Maker let me really trial and error through laying out my level.
After landing on some basic terrain that worked for me, I decided to spend some time decorating and introducing a bit of world building. The default character sprite kind of gave me a fantasy vibe, and so I decided to lean into that using some stone stair elements and a suit of armor to make a sort of long destroyed or forgotten temple area. And leaning into the cold and lifeless feeling I described above, I placed some dead trees and skeletal remains around the starting area. In my head canon, the skeletal remains could have been remains of dinosaur-esque creatures, harkening back to our original idea in a goofy and a bit far-fetched way.
After establishing the tone of the opening and allowing the player some time to move about, the level needed some actual platforming. We have a jump button and a mechanic that needs to be taken advantage of. Initially, it started as just a giant gap that you would jump across. In the gap between the two landmasses, it was just a hole into a bottomless void. At first this was fine, something simple to get you to use the jump button. I filled in some walls to make it blend a bit better off camera like I did with the boundary wall at the start, and called it there. But I realized as a platforming obstacle, it wasn’t really that fun.
I continued with laying out more terrain on the other side of the gap, but eventually circled back to the bottomless pit and changed the entire concept. While the bottomless pit is a staple of more retro-style platformers, it felt a bit punishing to have the very first bit of platforming you come across lead to what essentially amounted to death and a restart. So, I ended up keeping the idea of a shaft, but I filled in the bottom of the area to make it more of a hole with a solid bottom. Then I added some small platforms on the sides that you can jump between in order to climb your way back out.
This ended up being a great change for a few reasons. When approaching the hole from the top, because of the relative position of the camera, it was a bit hard to see that what lay in front of you was a hazard. So if you ended up falling into the hole, rather than starting over, you just have a fairly simple back-and-forth platforming section that allows you to use the jump button more than just a single time to clear a gap. Having the back-and-forth jumping design also works as a safe form of environmental foreshadowing, which we will cover in a bit. But one other cool aspect is seeing that, as I kept the distance of the gap the same, if you are a perceptive player and quick to react, you can still clear the gap in a single jump, allowing more skillful players the ability to save a little time.
I continued to sculpt the landscape with more mountainous terrain, dotting the peak with some fantasy castle towers for a bit of visual variety against the skeletal remains and dead trees. On the far side, I carved a large downward slope that was going to serve as a transitional area to something a bit colder and icier. Ultimately, I don’t think I did a great job actually blending the two types of environment. The rocky mountain environment sort of ends as the ice begins, but I was trying to incorporate the background into the level design, as the water on the horizon enveloped more of the screen, I felt like the ice made some logical sense to appear. And even if it doesn’t, the world is starting to become a bit of a dark fantasy-type place so ice doesn’t have to follow logical rules.
Using the new ice tiles, I wanted this area to be a bit flatter than the previous mountain area and a bit more separated, sort of reminiscent of floating icebergs. Here is where I decided to utilize the bottomless pit in the level design. After descending down the large slope, I knew I wanted to bring the player back up in elevation, so I started by creating some floating platforms.
Previously, when I was discussing the design of the hole above, I said that the back-and-forth design of the platforms serves as “environmental foreshadowing”. The way I organized these floating ice platforms was similar in layout, where the player has to jump back and forth, gradually moving higher in elevation, only this time, they don’t have the safety of solid ground to cushion their fall if they miss a jump, as they did before. As a sort of visual clue for the player, I placed one of those skeletal remains just before the section to indicate that this area had a more present danger. I also learned at this point that I could rotate the position of individual tiles, so I used some upside-down angular pieces on the ledges that were higher above, serving as a sort of visual boundary in case a player attempted to jump to a higher platform they couldn’t actually reach.
After successfully navigating the “dangerous” part of the level, I flattened off the terrain once again and began building a small town of sorts with these igloo assets. A kind of place serving as a bit of a base camp for explorers, perhaps. And as I tested the level to this point, it felt like a natural spot to put some sort of area that would serve as a level or scene transition. I had an idea to include an ice cave with icicle stalactites on the ceiling, so that’s what I began building up. Blending was a particular focus for this area because just slapping in the stalactites on the regular ice texture didn’t look that great. So utilizing the rotation tools and various singular parts of the different ice texture tiles, I was able to blend the edges around these spots to get something that looked a lot more natural. Rounding off the area, I sort of bookended the level by backfilling in the walls behind and above the back of the cave in order to make the area feel a lot larger outside the boundaries of the camera view, just like I did at the very start of the level with the edge of the mountain.
Going back through the level, I was pretty pleased at this point with how I laid everything out. Everything felt like it flowed pretty well and the pace at which you discover new areas or platforming sections felt pretty good. But it was missing something, I had this coin counter UI that was also going unused from the template file so I decided why not fill up the level with some treasures. So I went back through and placed some coin objects throughout the level, sort of like a bread crumb trail to guide the player. This is one of the oldest design philosophies in video games, a way to signpost to a player that this is the direction they should be moving in, go over here and you are rewarded with some treasure. This really tied together each of the platforming areas. Sure a skilled player can entirely bypass this spot with a well-timed jump, but if you aren’t as skillful and end up falling down the hole, at least you can get some gold coins for your trouble before hopping your way back up.
And with that, I have completed a level of a platforming game, a very basic one, mind you, make no mistake. There are all sorts of other features that Action Game Maker allows you to implement. I didn’t even mess with trying to place enemies or building a combat system, for instance. The game/software has a visual coding interface that uses these node bubbles that you connect together in order to string together different systems to build out more complex game mechanics. I dabbled with this briefly but quickly discovered that coding takes a specific kind of mindset that I’m not sure I have. I was much more interested in getting my hands on the pieces and throwing together the geometry, layout, and art direction of the level I was making. In this way, I was surprised at the end result I was able to create after just a few hours with Action Game Maker.
That being said, I do think the software on the whole isn’t a great starting point for a beginner game designer looking for something with a bit more guidance. If it weren’t for the tutorials I read, I would have been very lost in the various menus, and even after reading tutorials, I would come across weird menu interactions that felt a bit unintuitive. It gives off the impression that you should be able to simply drag and drop items into your game scene, but I would come across many instances where you are blocked from doing so, the asset wouldn’t behave the way you thought it would, or just maneuvering around the scene itself in the editor window became a bit cumbersome. Like all tools, they take time to master, and Action Game Maker is no different in that regard. I think with continued support, making it a bit more user-friendly, beefing up the tutorial resources, and smoothing out some of the kinks with the software overall would end up going a long way towards making it a tool that would be a great starting point for some would-be game developers.
So while we may not ever get to see the adventures of dinosaur exterminator Ronnie Driver, I did have some fun with this creative exercise. If nothing else, it did somewhat confirm to me that if I were to continue down this game development pathway, which jobs I would love to tackle and which jobs I would loathe. Thank you to Gotcha Gotcha Games for sending us a code to play around with their Godot-powered development tool.
