Sandy speaks: GameMaker 8 in 2009
Filed under: YoYoGames
CEO of YoYo Games Sandy Duncan has revealed some interesting information about the future of YoYo Games and GameMaker, not through his glog, but during an interview with ThatVideoGameBlog.
Sandy also provided the story behind the get-together of YoYo Games Ltd and GameMaker something I had not known previously.
ThatVideoGameBlog: What were some of the other factors that inspired you to create a social platform for budding casual game designers?
Sandy Ducan: To be honest we started out on a very different path looking to become a publisher of casual games. Then we noticed YouTube. In June 2006 YouTube was just starting to get big and people were starting to talk about “user generated content “and “Web 2.0” was becoming a buzz word. We could see the potential of the “YouTube” model in games …but couldn’t figure out how to make it easy to create games. Then by chance one of our Directors at YoYo (James North-Hearn) is also the CEO of Sumo Digital who are one of Europe’s top games developers. The top programmer at Sumo is a guy called Jacob Habgood who had just finished writing a book with Mark Overmars called “The Game Maker’s Apprentice”. It was a match made in heaven! This was early October 2006. We moved pretty quickly to close a deal with Mark and within 4 months the first (Alpha) YoYo Games website was up and running. We launched the full (Beta) site in late April 2007.
TVGB: It was announced on January 21, 2008 that in a mere eight months, the website reached a record 10,000 game uploads, making it the premiere repository of user-generated games. What were the critical success factors that contributed to this unprecedented level of achievement?SD: Our first challenge was to win the confidence of the Game Maker Community. Game Maker has been around since 1999, so there were already thousands of people using it. Luckily for us there wasn’t any truly great place for the community to post the games they had developed and get them reviewed and most importantly played. I won’t say we didn’t make any mistakes, because we did. But getting a site with a simple method of uploading your games and making it easy for casual visitors to play them was the key. We added the “Instant Play” feature to Game Maker in September 2007, which meant you didn’t have to download the game before you could play it and from there on the number of visitors took off. If you have almost 1 million people coming to the site every month, then there is plenty of incentive for the Community to keep writing and uploading new games as they have a readymade audience.
TVGB: What are some of the measures in place to counter such issues [poor quality games being submitted to YoYoGames.com], if any?SD: Much of the work that we will put into the site development in the next few months will be focused on making sure that the best games are even easier to find. At the same time we have ambitious plans to offer more free packages of development content (Sounds, Backgrounds, Sprites etc) which will be available to anyone. This will help ALL of the developers. We will also offer the best guys some personal support later this year and ultimately we will spend money on the best games to help “polish” them ourselves. None of this has been formally announced, but we’re working on it.
TVGB: Game Maker is in its seventh release. What is planned for the near and distant future for YoYo Games? Will you offer much more advanced platforms that add several additional malleable layers of complexity for gamers to mould into content? Are there any plans to release commercial games at this stage?SD: Game Maker will develop in 3 ways.
Firstly we are working on a version for the Apple Mac. This will be available in Beta around April time.Secondly we are re-writing the “Runner” in C++ (currently GM is written in Delphi) which will give us several advantages, primarily portability. Our vision is for Game Maker games to be running on non PC platforms such as phones, portable devices and Consoles. For example, Apple’s announcement of the iPhone SDK last weekend was very exciting for us.
Finally we will start work on Game Maker 8 this summer. You won’t see it until 2009, but multi-platform support will be a key feature. We may also do something about a compiler around the same time.
I’m sure some of you will disagree with Sandy on the matter of their not being any community sites before YoYo came along, specifically I remember GameMakerGames.com and The Games Showcase which were featured on the old GameMaker website.
True they were different from YoYoGames.com which attracts a far wider section of gamer, specifically those outside of the GameMaker community.
The second part of ThatVideoGameBlog’s interview with Sandy, which is not related to GameMaker, can be found here.
So the runner being in c++, does that mean games will run alot faster or will that only increase compatibility?
Im glad to hear that they are doing something about the crappy games being submitted aswell.
I guess C++ might make it relatively faster, however I do not believe that this is the main feature. The ’slowness’ of Game Maker is not as much related to it being in Delphi as much as the fact that the runner itself parses GML and interprets it in a certain way. This is what Mark said all along the way, but with YoYo Games, a lot of the past ‘impossiblities’ in GM became near-future objectives, so I’m not sure how much does what I say apply with the current state of YoYo Games.
I think the main problems with GM are that it can be decompiled and its really slow. If they make it alot faster and prevent decompiling, it will be incredible. As for me, it doesnt matter if it can run on mac or not.
Very good, nice to see YoYo doing something. I’m particularly intrigued by the part about possibly seeing a compiler later on… (That would speed up your games btw).
I’m assuming if GM ever becomes compiled we will loose some functionality (execute_file and execute_string) unless they implement some sort of JIT compiler (which could be interesting) like the one provided with .NET. But I think compiling would really be a great way to go.
@Revel
Anything can be decompiled/reverse engineered.
Anything can be decompiled/reverse engineered, but sometimes only to a certain point. If you wrote a game in C++ and then compiled it, you wouldn’t be able to get variable names (or any kind of name) out. If you decompiled it you’d end up with a bunch of assembly and maybe some C++.
check out http://www.enigma-dev.org/
multi-platform?
wow, time for some really laggy DS games.
its epic win that he said “I won’t say we didn’t make any mistakes, because we did. ” maybe they’ll stop being so lol.
What a bloody load of bullcrap! GM sucks because indeed it IS slow - unless you can content yourself with using 1 sprite on screen at once, anything barely complex slows it down to 2 fps - forget about using this bloody junk of a game maker program and program your own - this is the slowest, most buggy program ever - making the runner in C++ will have fuck all to do with running your games faster - GM needs to be completly re-written - and I doubt that they will be able to convert all the GML source and D&D actions into a compiled game, you lot are dreaming in colors. GM is poorly written, it is bloody slow, it lacks in many features, its whole programming structure is difficult to understand, no wonder it’s damn slow.
Don’t waste your time Sandy on version 8 nobody wants it unless it is a total and complete re-write not some bloody fixes and udpates like 6.0 to 7.0, which was a major bloody disappointment IMHO.
Gee, GM is slow, but what the fuck are you running on? A Voodoo 2?
Im seriously mor amped about the multiplatform game thing i mean sure ure games wont be any good on ps3 or 360 but cellphone games that sell r usually crap side scrollers but with game makers 3D capabilities u might be able 2 make 3D cellphone games(it is possible cz John Carmack did it on c++) and hopefully mochiads will be able to eventually support GM (though if however it did there would be a lot if not 2 much games on mochiads)
woah, ah… pipe down take a chill pill buddie, they will fix it up and get to making it faster when they do ok.
which won’t be long.
all is not over if instead of running the game it gives you the code in C++/language required and then you use it with programmers notepad which supports many languages to write files in and then save it and run it and try it and see if it even works or if your so called clever coding even does anything because i can bet you right here now $15.00 it won’t run and how do i know because i followed the manual and used the correct functions correctly and ran the program and all i got was not even a simple dialog popping up to show me the slightest pixel and you call this programming ever soo great.
soo much for programming being the right track to take huh?
so take a chill pill and in given time who knows things could improve including the speed of the application and running the game and using it.
Hello Gamers
I think that moving the site is a very big leap for the GMC and yoyogames
I think you should give serious repracutions to people who download developers games, then upload them and call them thier own.
I also have been collecting all kinds of resources into a huge folder. I would like to know how to give this to you to share with all the developers. Please reply.
Also I think it wasn’t a very good idea moving the site just before the competition02 ended. Please don’t do anything like this again.
Can you please make a link on the home page that leads directly goes to the members online.
Regards
Sam Whillance
[...] If all goes to schedule this would mean that we would see the first version of Stencyl before Game Maker 8 which Sandy has said will not be seen until 2009. [...]
lol, these kids. if you were trying to make cutting edge games in GM, you fail. If you were trying to make decent 2d games in GM, you are able to read.well done. it boasts a lot but the reality is its awesome. have you ever written anything this scale ? didnt think so but yea, if you were gonna be so 1337 at programming and making fast paced action 2d games you would learn an engine,make an engine, or shutup and do it.
Dissing other peoples work that is in fact awesome just shows how narrow minded and shameful you act when you think you are better then everyone else. Thanks for playing.
Rimmer66
April 8th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
What a bloody load of bullcrap! GM sucks because indeed it IS slow - unless you can content yourself with using 1 sprite on screen at once, anything barely complex slows it down to 2 fps - forget about using this bloody junk of a game maker program and program your own - this is the slowest, most buggy program ever - making the runner in C++ will have fuck all to do with running your games faster - GM needs to be completly re-written - and I doubt that they will be able to convert all the GML source and D&D actions into a compiled game, you lot are dreaming in colors. GM is poorly written, it is bloody slow, it lacks in many features, its whole programming structure is difficult to understand, no wonder it’s damn slow.
Don’t waste your time Sandy on version 8 nobody wants it unless it is a total and complete re-write not some bloody fixes and udpates like 6.0 to 7.0, which was a major bloody disappointment IMHO.
Yeah. GM isn’t slow. If you actually use it right and aren’t a noob, it will run fine. GM is a good platform to develop games on, because it is fast. You could spend 10 years developing your own engine, or you could use Game Maker. Try loading sprites from files. Ultimate 3D (ultimate3d.org) is a great program for developing 3D games in Game Maker. It still runs normal speed, looks great and can pretty much do anything, PROVIDED YOU USE IT RIGHT. If you get into GM more, you find it CAN handle anything you want it to. I can’t wait for the release of 8, becuase I’ll get multi platform games and just a little faster speed, which may just be what I need. Not alot, just a little bit. So, GM is a great tool, and the release of GM8 will be great.
Honestly, you guys don’t get it…the fact that it is written in Delphi does not affect speed, if it is written in C++ it will be the approximately the same speed, the thing that really matters is the interpreter itself. If the interpreter is well written then it will work faster and more efficiently.
Jedimace, your opinion is garbage and don’t know what you are saying, Game Maker can NOT handle DLLs well and that is a definite slow thing, Game Maker is slow no matter what, everything is slow, face it. Also, if I were a n00b and used it right, it would be slow, just cause I’m a n00b? Makes no sense, you’d better get your facts right.
I know for a fact that Ultimate3D can do most things that deal with 3D, not almost everything…I am not sure there is a “right” way to use Game Maker, but there is a smart way to use it. Example: Using pixel objects as water can be right, but not smart. If you use something like GearGOD’s metaball example then it would be smart.
I’d like to see you try to make and manage a growing language.
Hahaha, Sandy is a girl name.
Hi im with the developers of the site http://www.thegamecreators.com
I have seen the game maker recently at home,
even bought the pro version, and it seems great,
but the compling is way to slow.
Great to hear that it will be in c++ though!