GameMaker Blog

When on Sunday we revealed that a beta of Game Maker 8 was “not far away” little did we know just how soon it would emerge.

Earlier today Mark Overmars posted details of how to obtain a copy of Game Maker 8 beta on the YoYo Games blog.  To receive a copy of the beta you will need to register here which also gives you access to the bug reporting facility.

Features that will only be included in the Pro version are present but documentation states that the beta “will stop working at the end of August 2009.  The same applies to all games created with this beta version.”  Hopefully YoYo Games have put steps in action to ensure that this can not be abused.

Details on the new features included in Game Maker 8 can be found here.

Earlier today Mozilla released version 3.5 of Firefox. As I write YoYo Games instant play is not compatible with this version due to the ‘maxVersion‘ value YYG have placed within the plugin.

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Evidence of the increasing use of Game Maker in education can be seen by the upcoming release of the third(?) English language book that focuses on the game development platform.

Published by Course Technology Jerry Lee Ford’s Getting Started With Game Maker will be coming out next month. Ahead of its launch we caught up with Jerry who has previously authored books on programming in languages such as Visual Basic and Scratch.

You have previously written books about programming in several different languages, why did you choose to write about Game Maker?
Learning new programming languages and writing books are hobbies that I am passionate about. Last year one of my son’s friends started talking to me about this great game development tool he had found called Game Maker and he wanted to know if I had written a book about it. Based on this young man’s excitement and enthusiasm I decided to learn more about Game Maker and the rest is history.

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Sandy Duncan has revealed that a “GM 8 Beta is not far away….”.   The statement was made in a response to a question by Polish student Piotr Gnys on Twitter.

A preliminary list of features for Game Maker 8 was only revealed a couple of days ago so the news may come as a surprise to some.

Then again it all depends on your interpretation of ‘far’.  The latest official word on a planned release date is “during or after the summer” given by Mark Overmars in March. Unlike the beta versions of the C++ runner and Game Maker 7 for Mac which were released to a small private group of testers Sandy has said that the Game Maker 8 beta will be public.

If you don’t understand how Twitter works the screenshot above may confuse you.  Either way you can still follow Game Maker Blog on Twitter!

Marc Simpson, YoYo Games’  ”in-house programmer and occasional system admin” has this evening, Saturday 27th, sent the second version of the Game Maker 7 mac beta to those enrolled in the closed beta testing programme.

On Sunday 28th Sandy added a message to testers  ”This is much more stable, though not completely bug free.  We REALLY need you to test and provide feedback to the bug testing website.  How much you do will determine whether or not we EVER release this version of Game Maker, so PLEASE HELP !…  if we think the product is stable we will fix the major bugs and release the Mac version, hopefully by the end of the summer.”

He also added that YoYo Games do not plan to synchronise the Apple and PC Versions of Game Maker currently – this means we could see Game Maker 8 for PC released whilst Game Maker Mac remains version 7.

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You can see videos of Game Maker Mac in action in the exclusive look we published last week.

Mark Overmars has posted on the YoYo Games blog with a preliminary list of features that are planned to be included in Game Maker 8.

We already knew about the improved image editor with support for alpha transparency, the new bundled resources that YoYo were seeking artists for and GMB had speculated about an object exporter to aid collaboration – today Mark announced a feature that would enable users to import and export  resources to make it “a lot easier to collaborate on games”.

The remainder of the additions are listed below:

Collision checking option
Collision checking options for sprites have changed. You can now e.g. indicate whether sub-images should all have the same or different collision masks. Also you can increase and reduce the mask and use a disk as a mask.

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The results of the first GameJolt contest have been announced.  A total of about 30 games were entered and the majority of entries and all three winners developed in Game Maker.  There were however a number of entries made using Construct.

The three winning games earn their creators a place in the beta of GameJolt’s ad-revenue share system.

Very little is known about the progress of the C++ Game Maker runner re-write which YoYo Games intend to use with Game Maker 8.  There is however a version of the runner, created in November last year, that works with (some) Game Maker 7 games which is currently in testing.

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I know this is probably not of interest to the majority of readers, and this is certainly not time sensitive, but it is proof that something was happening and there has been little information posted elsewhere.