GameMaker Blog

Game Maker Community member beeproductions has released a “first issue demo” of a magazine titled Game Maker Time (view PDF).

Explaining the reason for deciding to launch another Game Maker magazine beeproductions writes:

“After reading other issues released by other GMC members I started to realize that we actually need a good issue. Not 20 issues where you can find the old very well known news and to contain 4 little pages and a total of 200 words. I promise that in this issue you will find a very well structured content and some really good articles that I’m sure that will get your interest.”

The content has clearly been written by someone to whom English is not their first language but to be honest the quality of writing is better than that found in many other publications aimed at similar readers.

The theme of the issue is Retro Games and the magazine contains a very brief history of ancient games and some incredibly short ‘reviews’ (in reality more like ‘spotlights’) of 3 retro-themed Game Maker games. No download links though.

There is code for a drag and drop inventory system and links to some photoshop video tutorials which aren’t retro-related and seem out of place.

The fifth page is titled ‘Retro Interview’ but to me appears to contain no text – perhaps this is all part of the ‘demo’ release!? Hopefully it will be proofread by the final release.

Despite the introduction promising something different I thought the magazine was pretty average at best – though thankfully it stuck to its promise of to avoid the plague of weeks old Game Maker news.

Two months after the launch of This Is Indie Evan McClane has released the second issue of his Indie Gaming Magazine. Download 5.8MB PDF (left click only)

The PDF opens in an annoyingly secured format and tries to take over my screen but by the time I have scrolled through a couple of pages the design has me on side.   The first issue was a bound above the designs normally seen in first issues of Game Maker magazines, though the file size suffered as a result, but the second issue is beautiful. It clearly has had a lot of time spent on it and manages to fit in at under 6MB.

Sadly the textual content was a little short on the ground.  The pages are divided between brief spotlights of YoYo Games and community news, some none-GM stuff and a couple of full page ads – one for Adobe!?

Despite the lack of up-to-date reading material I enjoyed this second issue of This is Indie.  Hopefully for the next issue Evan will have some contributors to help increase the wordy content.

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A couple of brief updates regarding Game Maker books that are currently being written.

Jacob Habgood’s Game Maker’s Companion [Amazon: $26.39 US|£23.62 UK], follow up to his successful Game Maker’s Apprentice book co-authored with Mark Overmars, is now scheduled to be released next month. Release was originally planed for April 2010 but that deadline has obviously been and gone with Habgood’s new position as a senior game design lecturer getting in the way. Martin Rijks, better known as former Game Maker Community administrator Smarty, is also involved in the project and we can expect to see some more stunning artwork from Kevin Crossley.

The contents of the book are best described by Jacob himself:

“The book itself focuses on the development of platform games. There are only three example games this time, but their scope is much larger than in the first book and it generally takes several chapters to make each one. One of these games features a character called Zool, which might ring some bells with older readers. Below is some footage of the game actually running in Game Maker: Interestingly this entire version of Zool is created using the Lite version of Game Maker 8 using 95% drag and drop programming. Nonetheless the last (and biggest) example game in the book is made entirely with GML, and brings in storytelling elements (more on that at a later date – as its still being finished off now).”
-Jacob Habgood

The other Game Maker book news I have to report is not as positive.

Birmingham based Packt Publishing were planning to publish a Game Maker cookbook authored by a contributor at the YoYo Games forum. Some of you may know that I have been involved in this project for around two and a half months as a technical reviewer. The book would have featured several ‘recipes’ explaining how to implement particular effects and features into Game Maker games.

Sadly I have now been told that the author is busy with other commitments and the project has been cancelled. I am disappointed both because I quite enjoyed working on the project and also because it promised to be different to the typical beginners guide style introduction. If anyone else is looking to publish a book about game development with Game Maker and is looking for a technical reviewer…

Pre-order The Game Makers Companion on Amazon.com
Pre-order The Game Makers Companion on Amazon.co.uk

Nathan Hurde is joined by Dan Moulton, Tim Van Norde and Roland in D3D Laughs and Tears the first TailWare-GMHV video podcast.  [part 1 | part 2]

A global group of Game Maker users, featuring krejic‘s rather magnificent Dutch accent gather to list the reasons why they like Game Maker and talk a bit about “Game Maker d3D” providing few insights or opinions.

Despite the collection of accents I was able to understand everything that was said until the volume dropped after the unnecessary and downright bizarre choice of advert:  ”I use Java and that has a user friendly interface”.  It must be Gmindie.  It is.

Although most of the content is purely audio, and the intention was for this to originally be in the form of a podcast, the presence of game play video clips is a nice addition though they are rather choppy.

I will admit I had been expecting this to be diabolical – it wasn’t.  The end of the video is strange, the sound quality could definitely be improved but is far from the worst we have had in a Game Maker podcast or video show.  A bit more time spent thinking about the content and I think this could be around for a few more episodes.

This weekend GMClan were present at the Zjazd Twórców Gier 2010 game developers convention in Gdansk, Poland.

The first unofficial meet-up of GMClan members was held as a PSP running a Game Maker game was demonstrated and a pile of YoYo Games yoyos were given away.

© GMClan

Hopefully we will be able to bring you a video of the PSP Game Maker demonstration in the near future.

With YoYo Games recently expressing their intention to hold face-to-face meetings with Game Maker users, do any readers know of any other local Game Maker communities which have organised get-togethers?

Our latest look at games that have recently been featured at YoYoGames.com.  The three games looked at today, Globules, Sync Simple and The Ultra Mission are all very different and all enjoyable.

Globules by True Valhalla

Globules

Globules is a strategy tower defence style game which sets two players against each other as they build colonies in space.   Through harvesting resources build-up credits to construct attacking and defensive facilities and try to wipe your opponent’s settlement from space.  Special attacks are available after a certain time period.

A review on YoYo Games lists “Time consuming” and “Hard to win” as two of the cons of this game.  It’s supposed to be a challenge its a strategy game!  Playing on medium difficulty I lost my first game but managed to win the next four I played after learning how the game works.

Read more…

The winning games have been chosen in GameJolt’s Indie Game Demake contest.

• The third placed game, Saucelifter 8-Bit was written in a version of the Blitz game creation tool.
• In second place is a Game Maker demake of Seiklus by Legendary Creations.
• The winning game was a flash demake of of the classic indie shooter Warning Forever.

The next contest to be held at GameJolt will be one of their popular weekend game jams in which entered creations must be built within a two-day period.

Almost 3 months since the initial release of Instant Play for FireFox 3.6, YoYo Games have finally released a fix.

A fix was released (by me) exactly 2 months ago at the Game Maker Community which leaves you wondering why it took a company like YoYo Games an additional 2 months to discover and fix the issue.

Hopefully this fix will begin to get more Firefox users back on the YoYo Games website!