This tutorial will help you get more familiar with GDevelop. Our primary focus in this tutorial will be to make an infinite car game without actually moving the background. We shall dodge the car on the road and simultaneously, increase the score as we get past the cars.

If you do not have GDevelop yet, you can do so from GDevelop's official website. It is available for Windows, macOS as well as Linux.

After downloading GDevelop, you can proceed with the installation/extraction followed by the launching of GDevelop.

Click on CREATE A NEW PROJECT on the Start Page. A dialog box appears.

Click on Empty game (you might have to scroll down to find this option) and choose the location, where you want to save your project.

Scene is the area where we'll work for most of our time while creating the game. As soon as we click on Empty game, we see a panel on the left side of our screen. This is the Project Manager. Click on the Scenes option in the Project Manager.

Create a new scene using + button beside the Click to add a scene option from the drop-down that appears. Our new scene has been created. Go to your new scene by clicking on NewScene.

You will need a few files, to create objects for this game. You can download them here. Download and extract the .zip file to the directory, that you have chosen as the location of our game.

Choose the + button beside Click to add a new object from the Objects panel on the right side.

Choose Sprite from the Add a new object pop-up. This will be followed by the appearance of a dialog box.

You can name the object as per your wish, but in this tutorial, we're going to name it Car. Let's add an animation to the object. Animations are containing images that are displayed on screen for Sprite objects.

To add an animation to the object, click on the + symbol beside Click to add an animation.

Add the image named 'car.png' as animation and click on the APPLY option.

Similarly, add a new Sprite object Highway which consists of the image, 'highway.png' as the animation.

Our next step will be to add the 4 cars as different Sprite objects namely Blue, Gray, Green, Pink which would have the image 'blue-car.png', 'gray-car.png', 'green-car.png' and 'pink-car.png' for their respective animation. From now on, we will address these cars as 'Traffic cars'. These will be the objects that we need to dodge.

Create a new Sprite object Tree which has 'tree.png' for its animation. This will be the object we will mainly use to simulate a moving background.

Create a new Sprite object Explosion and select all the images from 'Explosion1.png' to 'Explosion8.png'.

Your scene by the end of this step should contain 8 objects.

Since the Car is to be controlled by the player, we add a behavior to it. First, we need to open the Object Editor.

To do this, you can either double-click on the Car object from the object side panel or click on the three-dot-menu besides the object and click on edit object.

Click on the BEHAVIORS tab at the top of the panel and click on the + button beside Click to add a behavior to the object.

Choose Top-down movement in the Add a new behavior to the object pop-up. This would open a wide variety of options to alter.

You can see the default values for the properties of the behavior. Set the deceleration to 400 and untick the boxes having the options Rotate object and Default controls and click APPLY. Rest of the default values are fine for our game.

Remember that in this tutorial, we shall not move the Highway but rather move the traffic cars and the trees in the backward direction. To achieve this, we need to add Top-down movement behavior to all the traffic cars and the trees.

Our trees should move in the direction opposite to that of the Car so that we can simulate a moving background. For this, we will add top-down behavior to the Tree object.

During the gameplay, the player should not be able to control the movement of the trees and the trees should move in a straight line without rotating. To implement these settings, we will untick the boxes with the options Allow diagonals, Default controls and Rotate objects.

Also, set the acceleration to 1000 (will be explained later) and set the maximum speed to 300 so that it will simulate a fast car.

If you observe closely, you will see that the cars Blue and Gray face in the same direction while the cars Green and Pink face in the opposite direction to that of Car.

We can use this to our advantage and reserve the left 2 lanes of the highway for the forward moving cars (Blue and Gray) and use the right side of the highway for cars moving in the opposite side (Green and Pink).

From the above statement, we can assume that cars moving in the forward direction should have a maximum speed less than that of Tree and the cars moving in the backward direction should have a speed higher than Tree.

For Blue and Gray, we will set the maximum speed to 100 and the acceleration to 1000. Because we want their movement similar to that of Tree, we will untick all three boxes.

Similar to Blue and Gray, we will set the acceleration of Green and Pink to 1000 and untick all the boxes but we will set their maximum speed to 500 because they are moving in the opposite direction with respect to the car.

An event is a pair of conditions and actions. When a given set of conditions is true, the corresponding action or set of actions is performed.

While making this game, we will encounter a few events with no conditions and one or more actions assigned to them. In such a case, the action is performed on every frame created.

To add a new event, open the NEWSCENE (EVENTS) tab from the top

From the events editor toolbar, choose the option that says Add a new empty event.

This will create a new event, with an empty condition and an empty action.

To create an instance of the Car object, we can drag it from the Objects panel to the scene and give it the coordinates of our choice.

You need to click on the object Car in the Objects panel and drag it to the scene while holding the click. After getting it to the desired position, you can leave the click.

If you need to alter the coordinates of the object after getting it on the scene, you can do so by the click-and-drag method, but by dragging the object on the scene, rather than the one on the Objects panel.

Another method to move the object is by changing the X and Y-coordinates in the Object properties panel on the left side.

You can choose the values of your choice, but if you want results similar to that of the tutorial, you are expected to have the same values.

Similarly, to create an instance of Highway, you can click-and-drag the object to the scene and alter its X and Y-coordinates.

A user can use the preview feature provided by GDevelop. Using this feature, you can see how the game behaves in the real world. You can preview your project by clicking on Launch a preview of the scene icon above the scene.

You should see something similar to the image shown below and you should also be able to control the car using the arrow keys.

We see a few problems:

• The Car is not fully visible.
• The part of the screen below the Highway is empty.
• The Highway is too far away from the center of the screen.

To make the car visible, we need to know the reason for it being hidden under the Highway. The answer is, Z Order.

In our case, we can assign a Z Order of 1 to the Highway and 2 to the Car.

To create the bottom part of the Highway, we can elongate the height of our object Highway.

To do this, you can click and drag the white box at the corner of the Highway.

Another way to do this is to tick the box beside Custom size option in the Properties panel and enter the height and width of your choice.

To get our game to the center of the preview window, we will create our first event.

But before that, we need to determine the X position and Y position of the camera.

For the X position, the camera has to be at the center of the window/highway. The width of the Highway is 535 pixels. So the center of the Highway will lie at 267.5 pixels.

Similarly, to set the Y position of the camera, we can keep it a little above the Car so that the player can get a better view of the trees approaching. In this tutorial, we will set it at 350 pixels. You can use the values of your choice.

First, create a new empty event using the explanation above.

We need to make an event such that the game lies in the center of the screen. Therefore, setting the X and Y-coordinates will be our action.

This action needs to be true for all frames, i.e. for all conditions. And so that the action is true for all conditions, we enter no condition.

To add an action, click on the Add action option.

To choose an action, you can either choose it from the various drop-down menus available or you can use the search bar at the top.

For example, to change the position of the camera, you can go to Layers and Cameras, followed by Camera center X position. The right part of the window will now display configurable parameters.

Because we want to set the X position equal - neither less nor more - to 267.5, choose the = (set to) option in Modification's sign. In the Value field, you can enter the desired X coordinate of the camera.

Else, you can search for the action in the top Search bar.

Click OK.

You can now see the added action in the Events Editor.

To set the Y position of the camera center, click on Add action in the same event.

You can now follow a similar procedure for Y position as you did for X position but make sure that this time you choose the Camera center Y position option and enter the Y coordinate.

Your preview should now look something similar to this:

To make sure that all your progress has been saved, click on Save in the File menu, or press, Ctrl + S.

To move the Car, we need to create an event such that the car translates as well as rotates to some degree when left or right key is pressed.

As we can deduce from the above statement, the condition of the event is left key press and right key press.

We will start with the event that has the condition of left key press.

For the action, when the left key is pressed, the Car should have a movement on the left side. This can be easily done using an action Simulate left key press that would simulate the left side movement for the object selected (Car).

But, make sure to use the action with the same behavior as your object (top-down movement). So, we need to choose it from the Top-down movement drop-down.

Now, we need to give our Car the desired rotation for a better visual experience. If we just give rotation to the object, it will rotate up to 180 degrees.

To avoid such a result, we need to set a final angle too. We will assume it to be 30 degrees on both sides, i.e. -30 degrees for the left key press and 30 degrees for the right key press.

But, before we move ahead, we also need to assign the Angular speed for the rotation. We are using a value of 60 degrees/second for the same.

Remember that the angular speed will be the same for both the key presses. It cannot be negative, because, it is the “Angular speed” and speed cannot be negative.

We can repeat a similar event for right key press.

If you preview your project, you should be able to control your Car using the left and right arrow keys.

But we still encounter one problem, the car does not return to its original state when we leave the keys. Instead, it stays oriented at an angle. Let's solve this problem now.

We need to return the car to an angle of 0 degrees when none of the arrow keys are pressed. In other words, we need to return the car to an angle of 0 degrees when the conditions, right key press and left key press are inverted.

To achieve this, we add a new event and try to add the above 2 conditions, i.e. right key press inverted and left key press inverted. We add a condition Left key is pressed, and turn on the switch below, that says Invert conditions.

In the same event, we add a similar inverted condition for right key press.

For the action, we will make an action for rotating it towards 0 degrees with an angular velocity of choice, similar to what we did for the non-inverted conditions of key press.

Now, the car moves and rotates to an extent when an arrow key is pressed and rotates back to the original angle when the keys are released.

If you wish, you can change the background color of the scene.

To do so, you can right-click anywhere on the scene and select Scene properties.

Click on the box below Scene background color that says Click to choose.

You can choose the color of your choice and click OK in the Scene properties.

Although we have given motion to the Car, it still doesn't look like moving in any other direction other than the two sides. To simulate a moving background, we will make use of the objects Tree1 and Tree2.

Read the next part of the tutorial here.