MariaEngine

I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I'm aware in all countries that has signed the Berne Convention, you automatically get copyright on everything you create (with some exceptions: companies will own copyright on things their employees create during work hours, generative AIs and animals cannot own copyright to things they create, and violating copyright and trademarks when creating something will void copyright on your custom additions)

So TL;DR: "No, you get the copyright automatically."

It's set up in script player_locals_init, it is always set to one of these "playerstate_" scripts:

(You can quickly find assets by using Ctrl+T for the "go to anything" searcher or middle-clicking the script/asset name in the code editor)

As long as you're planning to make SOME sort of platformer, you'd probably get some use out of this project, it's easier to remove / hide things you don't need than to make something new from scratch. The system to carry things like shells and companion cubes around seems like a nice fit for a Klonoa-style game, for instance - all you'd need to add in is a grab attack that turns enemies into "liftables" on contact, and some code that lets you jump again in mid-air if you're holding something.

Harvesting individual systems could get a bit harder, since there's a lot of dependencies between things (like the jumpthrough-platform and moving platform code being an essential part for both player, enemies and throwables since they all are affected by those platforms) so you might end up having to frankensteining a lot of unexpected code into your existing physics; it might be easier to do it in reverse (add your unique quirks into MariaEngine) depending on the scope of the projects.

It should be pretty easy to get it working, you should be able to just copy the code in esm_zombie (at lines 176-184) into a keyboard event (or new key check in a new player State Behavior Package script "psbp_shoot", which you can add to psm_ordinary before the psbp_animation_ordinary call) and just spawn a new player bullet object instead of the enemy bullets.

Nevermind. I guess it was because GMS2 uses a different color code. I just used make rgb instead.

It's a GameMaker:Studio source file, so you can change ALL the sprites. (Note that you need GMS1.4 or GMS2 to be able to use the source files)

If you have the Android port you should be able to run it on Android devices (I haven't tested this, but the engine mostly uses  very basic functionality - the thing I'm the most worried about is the darkness effect in the underground levels, mobile devices usually have very low VRAM so surface effects like that don't always work properly).

There's no built-in functionality for weapon slots, a quick way you could implement this would be to have more "powerup states" that fires different projectiles (the example ones has hammers and fireballs) and add two new buttons that changes your powerup between all the weapons you have unlocked, and then change the health system to use a healthbar instead of the Mario powerup system.

Not really, I'm kinda busy and my schedule for doing indie programming stuff is very erratic. And I'm not a particularly good teacher either, for that matter :P I'd recommend just going to the GameMaker Community forum, there's plenty of tutorials and the programming questions board is still very active. (You can find me there as well, even if I'm not exactly active every day)

I'll check it out and see if I can narrow it down. Did you use the GMS2 source file or import the GMS1 source? I've seen a similar case for another project where import changes made the GMS2 source break but importing the GMS1 source solved the problem.

Tried importing the GMS2 version in GMS2.2.0.343 and it had one error, there's a mistake in player_score (Scripts-->Gameplay-->Player-->Score Lives Etc) where it uses the calling instance's x/y instead of argument0/argument1. The body of the script should look like this, then it compiled fine for me:

if(argument3 && argument2 > 8000){
    global.playerlives++
    effect_spawn_textpopup(argument0,argument1,"1UP",c_lime,c_teal,font_retro)
}
else{
    global.playerscore += argument2
    effect_spawn_textpopup(argument0,argument1,string(argument2),c_white,c_black,font_narrow)
}

If this doesn't solve the problem for you, could you please copypaste the entire error message? Usually it hints at where the error occurs.

Scripts-->Initialization-->init_characters, it's a tabbed script with init_character_maria as the only alternate tab at the moment. At the bottom you'll see the lines of code that initializes sprites. To fully add a new character, I guess what you should do is...

• Make a new constant for the character's ID (must have a different value from char_MARIA)... you could use the existing constants char_LOUISE, char_PRINCE, char_FROG and char_SUNSHINE if you'd like to, of course.
• Make a copy of init_character_maria (create a new tab and copypaste init_character_maria's code text into it) and use the search-replace feature to replace "char_MARIA" with the new character constant
• Change the sprite assignments to the new character's sprites (they're at the bottom of the script).
• Don't forget to call the script from init_characters, just how it calls init_character_maria.
• To change the active character, just assign the character ID to the variable global.playerchar based on what the player selects - it's always assigned char_MARIA by default since the demo only has 1 character. You can make the menu any way you want~

I think that's all you need to do, hopefully I didn't forget anything :) Just hit me up with more comments if there's any problems~

Uploaded a "v1.1" version of both source files with this fix applied. Let me know if there's any more problems.

It's a GMS source file, so anything you see in the demo can be tweaked just by editing the code. The dialogue system basically just uses an array for text, shouldn't be too much work to add in another array for mugshots/busts to go with it.