Money and the App store: a few figures that might help an indie developer
The Game Bakers outlines some common App Store myths and posts some details of the varying successes games have found in the store.

HTML5Haven
Game Maker Community member Dangerous_Dave‘s HTML5 game hosting website is currently serving up 100 unique game plays a day. Aside from the blocky choice of font it’s a pretty good start for a showcase of Game Maker HTML5 games.

Community Links: Game Maker Studio release “shortly after” Grave Maker is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The Filipino bagged the prizes for Innovation, Best PC game and Best Indie Game at the event held at De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde in Manila.

Roan writes that the event was “the best night for me… ever, and another first for me!”.

Circle Speedster is a black and white puzzle game first released in March 2010. Trailer below the fold.

Roan Contreras collects 3 awards at Philippine Game Development Festival is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Alarm bells: ESET blocks the link.

A Game Maker creation, released under the ‘Tools & Applications’ section of the Game Maker Community, was not been dealt with by staff at the website for several days despite alarm from users at the forum.

“Easy Ragdoll v1.0″ was published by GMC member Locknar, who released the program on the 7th of December, the same day he joined the website. He has denied that the file, a corrupt Windows executable that reportedly fails to run, was intentionally infected with a malicious trojan.

The file was reported as infected by multiple virus scanners and firewalls including ESET Smart Security, and online service Virus Total. It was tested by GMC member Dylan93 who alerted topic viewers of the potential dangers. A witness to the topic YellowAfterlife warned the virus may have password stealing capabilities.

The file was reported by at least two GMC members shortly after it was posted by Locknar. However even after three days since its release, the topic and its link remained publically visible, potentially leaving users browsing the subforum risk. There was no response from any moderators in the topic.

Mike Dailly, a well known programmer and developer at YoYo games, acknowledged it was “very easy to see it’s not a GameMaker .exe” given its small size of just 250k. Although it is primarily moderators who should be handling such an issue, Mr. Dailly removed the file and dealt with the situation immediately after we contacted him.

“As to .EXEs on any forum, you always have to take your own precautions.

“… until HTML5 and browser tech is the standard, anyone wanting to share games will need to share .EXEs, and users will just have to take care.” Mr. Dailly said.

Aside from logging into his account, Locknar had not shown any further activity since the 7th of December, the very day he joined and released the corrupt file. He has since had his posts removed and been flagged as a spammer.

GMC Moderators Neglect Infected Program? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

• Stencyl also recently nice promo on the BBC’s Click technology programme, positioning itself the best way to get started in game development – something I’m sure GameMaker would like to be billed as.

• Dutch game designed Kjell ‘t Hoen, who created Rick O’Shea whilst at YoYo Games returned to Holland after six weeks in Scotland yesterday. Flying in the other direction comes Piotr Gnys who arrived in Dundee earlier today from Poland.

• Quick catch-up interview with the creators of Dustforce. The prize-winning GameMaker created prototype is being rewritten and should be available on Steam from the middle of January 2012. IndieGames.com also have a post on this which contains a gameplay video.

• The website of indieFunction, who had announced they were going on hiatus until the January 2012, is back online after earlier being suspended.  Hopefully this means that the publisher of indie(Magazine) will indeed return and continue to release new issues.

Community Links: Stencyl iOS Exporter Price, Piotr in Dundee, Dustforce is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Next year the Polish Game Maker Community, GMCLAN, turns 10 years old, and it will be celebrated during SzczecinGamesShow, together with releasing Gear-Studio games. It’s probably the biggest non-official GM community.

At what was the third game expo in Szczecin, the GameMaker stand with Gear-Studio games and GameMaker presentations was visited by more than 20,000 people.

SzczecinGamesShow – GM stand from community is taken from: GameMaker Blog

One of the new included features is sprite obfuscation whereby sprites are only constructed when the game starts running.

The Game Maker Obfuscator can be downloaded from the GMC.

Game Maker Obfuscator – Now Supports Sprite Obfuscation is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GMClan at SzczecinGamesShow is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Bret states that the group hope to continue projects abandoned by GMIndie when it merged into GMVision last September. Since then GMVision have not released any media at all.

First to appear should be indie(Radio) which will “kickoff” at an unannounced time today and includes an interview with Andrew McCluskey.

New Game Maker Media Team to Launch: indie(Function); is taken from: GameMaker Blog

A 72 page PDF document listing the results has now been released.  Where the questions were multiple choice the percentages are given and for write-in questions a selection of answers have been shown.

View survey results: PDF, Google Docs.

Thankfully, given the document size, some GMC users responded to the survey with humorous observations:

• What do you enjoy most about Game Maker?  “It’s a chick magnet, Ever since I started using Game Maker I just can’t keep them off.”
• Do you see Game Maker capable of making professional games?  ”Is Paris Hilton Sexy?”
• What new feature do you think Game Maker needs?  Answers included “A tool to file taxes” and “Boob enhancer”

The results document is well worth a read and not just for the silly answers!

• 5.6% of survey respondents claim to have sold a game they made using Game Maker
• Over 60% of Game Maker users would like to see the software have a new interface
• More than 98% of people would like to see “an instant chat messenger popup where users can ask for help from other Game Maker users on demand” built into Game Maker.
• What would you like to tell YYG:  ”Updates and bug-fixes please! Actual development of the package in your custody would be darling.”

The ‘Reason for Question’ and ‘Editors Result Notes’ present for each question quickly get old as egotistical Brian Fetcher gives us such gems as ”To be honest, I didn’t start using tiles until my 61st game was complete”  (in his “2 years of Game Maker”) and patronises people for misunderstanding some of the questions.

That said it is interesting to see these stats even if some of the questions could have been better worded.  If the figure of 3,003 contributors is correct (seems very high to me) this must surely be the biggest Game Maker community survey by a large margin.

Photo credit: Chick Magnet by Bryan Maleszyk (cc)

Game Maker Survey 2010 – The Results is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I wondered why GMVision, creators of a Game Maker video show and previously the GMLive Game Maker radio, had collaborated with the over-ambitious GMIndie to run the recent poorly implemented Game Maker Survey.

Things obviously ran a little deeper than I thought as it appears that GMVision has now taken over complete control of GMIndie.

Looking back our very brief write-up of the last GMLive show, broadcast in February this year, mentions that the next show date had not been announced because “host Joshua is considering the possibility of a merge with GMIndie Radio”.  No GMLive episodes were released after this and I had presumed the idea was dead.

Similarities

That said there are a few similarities between the two Game Maker media collectives.  Both were over ambitious and planned to produce multiple formats of media alongside each other which never really worked.  For GMVision this was in the form various video shows, the GMLive audio show and the GMVenture magazine. GMIndie’s list was, take a deep breath before you continue, long. A 250 page Game Maker eBook (not released) to start their free eBook series, the very long Game Maker’s Digest Magazine as well as the shorter GMIndie magazine, the redesigned-more-times-that-I-can-remember Game Maker Gazette blog not to mention their various radio shows, podcasts and the never seen “GMIndie TV”.

Despite having teams around them in both organisations the majority of work was done by just one or two people.  At GMVision this was Joshua and Jonathan and at GMIndie “Brian Fetcher”.

Differences

GMVision have been absent from the Game Maker world since their last show in May whereas GMIndie were still going strong until just a couple of months back.  If I had to place a bet on which group would close first my money would have been on GMVision because GMIndie have stuck to producing Game Maker related content pretty well until recently.

GMVision seemed to work at a more relaxed pace than GMIndie who appeared to be launching a new project every month or so.

There are also major personality differences between the people running both groups but I won’t go into that here!

Why the merge?

Writing earlier in the month on GMIndie’s Gazette “Brian” wrote that he was “way too busy with my career, upcoming constant traveling, college, family reunion, my wedding, and other complications this fall and holiday season”.

It is unclear what in the deal appeals to GMVision.

Gone and not forgotten?

GMIndie did manage to produce two very insightful podcasts which featured contributors from YoYo Games.  In the first CEO Sandy talked about future plans for Game Maker and the YoYo Games company, in the second Mike Dailly and Russell Kay spoke more in-depth about the current and future development of the Game Maker software.  Getting these required remarkable persistence which I know YoYo Games employees noticed only too well in their e-mail inboxes, Twitter feeds and on Skype.

It worked though and GMIndie certainly stuck  to producing output even if some of their projects changed.  When they were producing their enthusiasm could not be questioned.

What now

The GMIndie website is now offline and their multiple twitter accounts appear to be in the hands of GMVision.  We are yet to receive the promised results from the Game Maker survey though a new GMVision video should be released soon.

GMVision takes over GMIndie is taken from: GameMaker Blog