GameMaker Blog

“Noted independent developer Cactus [Jonatan Söderström] received the inaugural Nuovo Award for his abstract visual puzzle game, Tuning. The Nuovo Award honors “abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.”

The Nuovo Award was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures, including previous IGF Innovation/Nuovo Award winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code’s Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.”

via IGF.com

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• FBIndie have posted an 8-tip guide to creating a video trailer for your game that will get it noticed. Included in the post are some examples of trailers that make use of the listed features.

• Ted Lauterbach has redesigned his RottenTater.com website and it is looking very pretty. Ted has designed games such as Fetus, Vatn Squid and Super Space Rogues.

• I came across a rather nice video introducing the concept of views in Game Maker.  I do question the need for them in the example application nevertheless I thought the demonstration using printouts of a Game Maker room was a clever idea.

YoYo Games have revealed the identity of their new Chief Technology Officer as former DMA employee and programmer of the original PC lemmings game Russell Kay.

By sheer coincidence I was reading about the history of Lemmings just a few days ago (is a good read). Russell was responsible for the game concept and name of the iconic game which was ported to many platforms and is estimated to have sold over 15 million copies.

DMA (which since a takeover is now known as as Rockstar North) will perhaps be better known to younger readers as the creators of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Russell went on to found Visual Science Ltd who were responsible for the PlayStation version of the game.

If you are interested here is an interview with Russell Kay albeit a few years old.  I think this development is the most exciting to happen at YoYo Games for a long time – possibly ever – as it demonstrates that they are serious about substantially developing the Game Maker brand.

Below is a video demonstrating Game Maker for PSP running a none-modified version of Chad Chisholm’s Skydiver.

There game is in a playable state but there are some problems with speed, a few graphical glitches and background music has not yet been implemented.

YoYo Games have hired a Chief Technical Officer in Dundee and will be making an announcement “indirectly” related to Game Maker for PSP tomorrow.

Yesterday’s downtime which affected all YoYo Games services including the Game Maker Community was caused by “simple maintenance” which went wrong following a firewall conflict. Around 30 minutes of downtime was followed by a period where games on the main YoYo Games were without screenshots.

Photo credit: Dundee by Flickr user macieklew, released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

A new online highscores system for Game Maker has been launched.

Linked which is part of the UpUrLoad file hosting website utilises 39dll to make it easy to maintain a global highscores table.

Created tables can be viewed directly within your game (there is no need to launch a browser window when sending or retrieving scores). Scores are sent as encrypted md5 strings which include a secret key visible only in the creator’s Linked account.  There are versions available for Game Maker 6-8.

This is probably the easiest to use online highscore solution for Game Maker games that I have seen.

Across several Game Maker forums we have seen the creation of  ”Community Game” projects. The most widely-participated in of these by far has been the “GMCG“, started by grimmjow. Other smaller-scale projects include NOD’s still unnamed Game Project, NODs first game project which died and 64 Digits’ (now dead) game.

Although the idea is plausible and there are always lots of volunteers in the beginning the initial thrill wears off in just a few short weeks.  If a strong group is not built up by then the projects slowly deteriorate until it is just a small group of elite leaders that are talking to the wall. Here is a look at just a few of the many problems that plague these so called “Community Games”.

1. Lack of proper leadership
Although from the outside it just looks like the position with all the glory and the honor (and the mod powers!), the leadership position plays a very critical role in the overall out come of the game. Too often the leaders of these projects are relatively inexperienced in creating games, much less leading a group of lots of people. More experienced members who would have the knowledge and technical know-how to run such a project realize all the responsibility involved and generally tend to run in the opposite direction.

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I don’t think that the potentially lucrative space on the YoYoGames.com homepage is being put to its best use.  There is limited real-estate on the index page of what is a popular gaming site so surely it should be continually updated with fresh new content to entice people to play different games, discover Game Maker or get involved with the community.

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