GProtect, an easy way to limit people to sixty minutes of playtime?

What GProtect does is nothing new. It’s been done so much in demos that I want to kill myself. But now it’s bringing its easy-to-use feature to gamemaker! You can easily protect your games, and set keys to them just like that. The great thing is it’s free and really simple.

GProtect: A simple solution to time limits in games? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The team/person behind the project have rather aptly decided to name themselves “Pure Evil Productions” – bound, I’m sure, to inspire confidence in both game makers and game players.

The plan is for 100 GameMaker created games to be sold on a CD, with each game creator earning $0.35 (AUD) a sale.  This would mean the total minimum retail price of the CD would have to be at least $35 AUD (around 30USD, 20EUR, 17GBP), plus of course postage.

Or you could just download them, or very similar and probably more professional games, for free from numerous online freeware websites.

100 Games in 1 is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I first reviewed the original service back in October of last year when writing for Issue 9 of the MarkUp game development magazine.

Put simply the site contains everything you need to create a global online highscore table for any game created in GameMaker. It handles both submitting and retrieving highscores, and everything is hosted for free for you.

The latest version, Vex K, includes the facility to show an online highscore table within a GameMaker game itself, instead of requiring access from a web browser.

The original Vitarsi Vex online highscore service currently hosts more than 270 highscore tables free of charge.

If you want to create a worldwide highscore table for your game and don’t have your own webspace, Vitarsi Vex K is my recommendation.

• Mark Overmar’s announcement in October last year that YoYo Games will create their own online highscore table service appears to have come to nothing despite Mark stating that the service would be introduced “pretty soon”.

GameMaker highscores with Vex K is taken from: GameMaker Blog

• 35: Flywrench by messhof
• 33: Clean Asia by cactus
• 19: Deathworm by JTR
• 17: Frozzd by 2DCube
• 10: Seiklus by tapeworm

Congratulations to all the makers of these games. Nethack’s on place 15? Blasphemy!

Game Maker makes top 50 freeware games ever is taken from: GameMaker Blog

WallShare by zedman1000 is a small (2.84 MB download) program that enables you to swap and share your desktop wallpapers with other users from around the world.

Downloading and Installing
To get started first download the software from the WallShare website, http://wallshare.uni.cc/. Once you have downloaded the file you will need to extract the contents of the zipped folder using a decompression program. Then double click on ‘WallShare_Client02e.exe’ to launch the program.

Setting up WallShare
As this program shares wallpapers via the Internet you need to be connected to the WallShare server to make use of the application. Therefore when you run WallShare for the first time you may need to configure your firewall to allow the program access to the web.

When running WallShare occupies a very small area of your desktop and can easily be dragged and dropped to an unobtrusive location on your desktop should it interfere with your icons or any other widgets you happen to be running.

Downloading WallShare Wallpapers.
Right click on the top left menu to slide it down in to view. The timing options button (bottom icon) opens up a menu of options. You can choose for WallShare to cycle through all available wallpapers as previews in the right hand window (these are the “Set Timer” options), you can then manually make these your wallpaper by clicking on the preview and on the “Set Wallpaper.” option. Or if you prefer you can have WallShare automatically control your desktop wallpaper in Slideshow Mode. There are 3 timer options you can use to adjust the rate at which your wallpaper changes.

On of the great things about WallShare is that when you find a wallpaper you like and set it as your desktop background the image is saved directly on your computer. This means you don’t have to connect to the Internet or reopen WallShare for the image to appear in the future.

Uploading and sharing your Wallpaper
First make sure that the wallpaper you want to upload is your current desktop wallpaper. Then on the main WallShare menu select the top green icon. After a few seconds your wallpaper will have been uploaded to the service, and can be used by other WallShare users. All wallpapers are also included in the WallShare online gallery (follow the links from http://wallshare.uni.cc/ ).

GMC Topic

Share your Desktop Wallpaper with WallShare is taken from: GameMaker Blog

How many times have you started to play a gamemaker game before realising that the programmers ‘forgot’ to include full instructions and a control map?

Finding yourself playing a game for the first time without knowing what you are meant to or how to do it is daunting; however there are a lot of games out there which are just like this.

Some people make use of the ‘Game Information’ screen which can be set up in gamemaker, and viewed in most games, even if it has been left blank by the authors, by pressing [F1]. This however has very limited capabilities and can display only basic text.

Of course, for people unfamiliar with gamemaker they may not even know that help is available by pressing [F1]. So it is always best to include an external manual or full instructions which are clearly accessible from your games main menu.

A well-designed manual can include screenshots, graphics, annotated diagrams and illustrations such as a keyboard map of controls. There will also be room for a full introduction to the game, and you can even include hints for players to get more out of your game.

Creating an external manual is easy. It can be done using the most basic of software – a wordprocessor. Many games are distributed with a .txt readme file, however this usually contains just copyright information and is not suitable for a full professional-looking manual.

The beta version of Microsoft Office’s 2007 version of Word did contain a built in .pdf compiler so you could save your documents to be read by Adobe’s free Reader software. This however was removed from the official release, but is still available to install as a plugin from the Microsoft website.

Earlier versions of Word or other word processors can still be used by making use of free text-to-pdf converters such as pdf995.

There is no excuse for not including good instructions with your game. They can make the difference between someone trying and failing to play your game and someone playing and enjoying your game.

Links:
o Microsoft Office 2007 PDF plugin
o GMB: tutorial: Using pdf995 to create a .pdf file

As featured in the May 2007 edition of the MarkUp Game Development Magazine – Download it now for more gamemaker articles, reviews and tutorials.

Why you should include a manual with your game is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Downloading and installing the software is easy, and is compatible with all versions of Windows from Vista right back to 1995.

You can download the software for free directly from the pdf995 website.

After you have followed the instructions to install pdf995 you now have an additional ‘virtual’ printer linked to your computer.

To create a PDF file using pdf995 first create your document using your normal software, e.g. Microsoft Word. Then go to Print your document but from the drop down Printer Name menu select ‘PDF995’, then click ‘Print’ or ‘OK‘. A box will then pop up asking you where you want to save your exported PDF document and what you want to call it.

The pdf995 software will now get to work, converting your Word file into a PDF file which can easily be distributed over the Internet or on a CD. Wait until the advert has finished and your PDF document has been created!

This is the type of advert you will see when creating a PDF file using the free version of the software. The progress bar normally takes just a few seconds to complete.

Below, a PDF file created using PDF995.

Tutorial: Using pdf995 to create a .pdf file is taken from: GameMaker Blog