Best books for Game Design Principles and Coding in GM

[Cotcho]

Hi,

This is my first post outside of an introductory post. Please be gentle

I'm looking for at least one good published resource for game design principles and programming concepts in GameMaker. Tutorials are great to cut your teeth into the development aspect and see immediate progress.
However I also would like resources that can explain conceptually why doing something one way instead of another is best practise etc. I understand that with coding there is not one right way, but i'd like to learn and adopt good coding and design principles from the get go before learning bad habits.

I know there are a tonne of great resources/tutorials online and that the physical medium can get outdated very quickly, however sometimes I just prefer having a book as reference.

I have come across a recent book by Ben Tyers - Introduction to Game Design and Programming in GameMaker Studio 2

also

there is another (at the time of writing this, an unreleased) publication by Sebastiano Cusso - Game Development with GameMaker Studio 2 (what's this author's publication pedigree like?)

Would anyone have any opinions on one or the other? Or know of any other physical resource that explains game design principles (preferably, but not necessarily) in GameMaker?

Thanks

 

[Yal]

I learned Game Maker back when we used stone tablets, so I never read any of the books. But coding best practices usually are pretty much the same between every language... so books on C++, or all this advice I found here when I googled "stackoverflow coding best practices" all would work just fine:

Spoiler

Some stuff not covered in that thing:

• The easier your code is to understand, the easier it is to fix problems in it (and also, it's less likely you'll make mistakes leading to problems)
• The more expensive an operation is to run, the less often you should run it, so the game doesn't slow down.
• Keep things simple: smoke and mirrors take less time to create and maintain than a complicated system.
• Put your most fun and exciting content right at the start of the game, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. Don't make the player slog through hours of tutorials in gray concrete corridors or they'll just stop playing.