The podcast provide the following progress update on Game Maker games running on PSP and on the future development of the Game Maker software.

Direct MP3 link

Game Maker games on PSP:

Lots of work has been done on the runner streamlining its processes.  This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the loading for PSP games.  An example is given of Skydiver which initially took 40 seconds to load on the PSP and is now down to just 6 seconds.

Game Maker 8 features are currently being added to the PSP runner however no networking features are currently allowed.

Proposed or planned Game Maker changes.

• Runner: Improve performance of games running on PC using what has been learnt whilst working on PSP.  GML can be compiled to virtual machine code which is then interpreted.
• IDE: Russell said that a docking interface (Visual Studio) is better than the current interface based on MDI.  There was also a desire to enable easier switching between editing various elements.  But would need to discuss any changes with the community.  Wouldn’t want to take away accessibility for new users.  Problem finding suitable Delphi coders to work on this.
• Documentation: A re-written and extended help file and video tutorials.
• Resource editors: Modular structure including a “way of making music” which is “quite exciting”.  An understanding that  people will use external tools for creation of graphics so YoYo Games shouldn’t try and make a fully-featured editor in the IDE.  Improving sprite animation tools.
• Cross platform:  Want Game Maker features to be supported across all platforms. Instant Play to work across PC and Mac.  Will be able to export games in Mac and PC format.  Suggestion of an emulator for games designed for hand-held devices so they can be easily tested.
• Room editor: Usability needs to be improved.  Object selection for replacing.  Zoom in and zoom out.  Multiple layers in room editor.
• 3D: Importation of models.  Making Isometric 3D easier.  Will take time.  Long term plan to completely revise 3D maths and library with objects for cameras and actions for rotations etc.
• GML changes: New data types such as integers and single-precision numbers rather than just ‘numbers’.
• Particles: Rewritten particle system with a preview of generated particles.
• Debug: Script level debugging including the ability to step through code.
• General development: Large proportions of work will continue to be outsourced.  Cross platform online highscores. Not like we’ve ever heard this before… (first suggested by Mark in October 2007).

PSP Update and Future Game Maker Features is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GMVision’s Joshua Pedroza has interviewed the leader of Team SkyFire, Sokota, in his latest video released today (watch on YouTube). Team SkyFire have been working on their platformer stasis for over a year.

• After receiving criticism over the subscription-only policy of Game Maker’s Digest Brian has promised “NO more long annoying forum sign-ups to subscribe” for the next issue. I’m not sure whether that means general public release or if he will still require you to join a mailing list.

• IndiePubGames have published a brief article looking at some of the pros and cons of promoting a game with social media marketing.

Mid-week Community Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog

A game based on the popular Call of Duty series has been quickly climbing up the ‘most played’ list on YoYo Games. The game, titled Modern Warfare 2D, is a two-dimensional take on the sixth instalment in the Call of Duty series.

Although it was uploaded just 2 months ago the game has already reached 25th place on the list of all time most played games with over 40,000 plays tracked.  It has also been featured on a large number of non-Game Maker gaming websites.

I got in touch with the Australian creator of the game, Callum Foot, and asked him about his games success.

“I didn’t use any special promotion techniques, but I think the fact that Modern Warfare 2D was featured on Pixel Prospector helped a great deal – the game is scheduled to be released on the cover disk of Xbox 360 magazine in the UK so I might have to make some promotional cover art.

I think the name definitely contributes to the amount of plays because the real game is extremely popular at the moment which lead to the game being picked up by sites like Pixel Prospector.

With a different name I don’t think the game would have been so successful, but I did base it on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 from the beginning to end so the name wasn’t a last minute decision.

Top 25 most popular yoyogames in two months? I think that’s awesome!  (is this some kind of record?) I do think thats pretty cool, but shouldn’t it be featured or something? Meh, I don’t mind!

I am working on creating an online version of the game and extending the campaign.”

-Callum Foot

Game Maker Modern Warfare 2D is a Hit is taken from: GameMaker Blog

One of the fastest growing Game Maker services so far this year has been Josh Conley’s file-hosting website UpUrLoad.

Although it is a general file hosting site it is clearly targeted towards Game Maker users and unlike many Game Maker websites there has been a good rate of improvement since launch with new features regularly being added and more in the development pipeline.

The clean design, unobtrusive advertising and  has helped the site gain over 150 registered accounts.  The 1,900 uploaded files, which are mainly downloaded from the official Game Maker Community, use about 15GB of bandwidth a month.

Here is a short question and answer session with Josh:

Are you aiming to have the position that WillHostForFood had?
I hope to get as many people as I can using it much like WillHostForFood, but with popularity comes a price. As many people know, WHFF went down due to a large amount of traffic that came too quickly for the developers to pay for and support. I hope to get into the position where I have a lot of people using and enjoying the site for free but not so much that may make my host unhappy or require me to pay more.

Although I have had a few donations, (thanks again to those people!) I don’t have enough user support financially to fund the site. Therefore I must pay for the hosting myself, which is good because I host everything I need and then have a lot of extra space and bandwidth for UpUrLoad.com users. If I were to get in to the position where I have to pay more myself for hosting than now, I would have to make a few restraints on UpUrLoad.com to slow down the use of space/bandwidth. Though I do not expect that I will get into this position very quickly and I don’t think that it is something I need to worry about at this time.

Now thinking in the present, UpUrLoad has a ton of space and bandwidth so I encourage everyone to join and use the site.

Many sites come online with a fanfare and are then neglected by their creators, how have you managed to keep the momentum at UpUrLoad?
I always like to add little useful features which keep me into the site and more and more I am seeing my name get wiped off of the first page of the users online list even though I log in everyday (The names are sorted by who was online last). This never used to happen as only about 3 or 4 people logged in everyday. Now there are much more users being active on the site which encourages me to keep working/supporting the site as much as I can.

As well as the main UpUrLoad site you run the Linked online highscore service, do you have plans for any more services to benefit Game Maker users?
Free services that I have provided such as UpUrLoad.com and Linked were created in my spare time to help encourage Game Maker users to develop games quickly and to be able to share them easily and free. At the moment I don’t have plans for any new services, but if an idea comes that could potentially benefit developers then I will get right to work on it and hope people will love it!

Resource Review: (Game Maker) Filehosting site UpUrLoad is taken from: GameMaker Blog

As well as the first official mentions of devices beyond PSP Sandy also revealed plans to start commercially publishing games within the next 12 months and for more community involvement.

Development of Game Maker

• All effort currently going into PSP version.
• Users would need a Sony Dev kit (incredibly expensive) to test PSP games.
• No timetable for what they plan to do with Game Maker after the release of the PSP version however the emphasis is on new run time environments rather than features.
• 3D look and feel will be built into the PSP version
• Likely to see better 3D support in next 12 months – the features that people are using from external extensions will be built into the normal Game Maker distribution.
• Don’t want to over-complicate the product – basics will remain the same – fundamentally a 2D product.
• Currently 3,500 – 4,000 downloads of Game Maker a day. Similar rate to Feb 2008
• No massive advantage of going from a compiler to an interpreter. Huge job. Not on the agenda.
• To make games look better want to provide better resources including Sprites
• First official mentions of the possibilities of getting Game Maker games to run on Android, iPhone and also Windows 7 Mobile.
• PSP, iPhone then a question mark.
• Game Maker 9 will be unified across all platforms. Enable you to create ‘New PSP game’, ‘New iPhone game’ after which an appropriate template will be loaded.
• Lot of confusion by the recent changes in Apple’s developer agreement made in response to EA writing games with Lua. YoYo Games have been unable to get a definitive answer from Apple. Another product has which, like Game Maker, uses an “interpreted layer” have been told they are okay.  Until WWDC in June unlikely to get a clear answer from Apple.
• DS too much effort. Underpowered. Dual screens. Not impossible however – more likely to do Android, Windows 7 Mobile version first. Commercial possibilities of selling games on DS are dreadful.

YoYo Games

• Goal to publish games. YouTube for games with best developers going on to have games published.
• Next 12 months want to start commercial publishing of content through the website.
• Next few weeks will offer people the opportunity to sell their, high quality, games on the YoYo Games website. Some of the best developers on the site have already been signed up to help launch the store.
• Server/bandwidth costs minimal compared to turnover
• Website development outsourced – ridiculously expensive.
• Previously outsourcing to work on Game Maker … (link)
• 2 people currently working on Game Maker and the website
• Now started to hire own staff, Russell Kay and Mike Dailly
• Going to hire more staff in Dundee
• Looking for an office
• Interviewing for a “community manager” next week
• Never captured in one place all user suggested improvements. Will try to do this – maybe the YYG wiki.
• No more logo/design competitions(!)
• Sandy admits the site needs to do more to let people see the best games – algorithms need tweaking
• Search doesn’t work very well
• Thankfully an admission that the whole homepage needs a redesign
• Single login for entire site, including the GMC

A future episode of the podcast featuring an interview with YoYo Games CTO Russell Kay.

GMIndie’s first podcast (last week)

What are you most excited about?

GMIndie Podcast 2 – Sandy Duncan Interview is taken from: GameMaker Blog

• Keith Stuart made a post today in today’s Guardian Games Blog title “How to become an indie developer in eight steps. Developer Rob Fearon recommends Game Maker:
  

  “Personally, I prefer Game Maker which is a whopping $25. Shoddy DRM and lack of regular updates aside, it’s an immense package.”
  -Rob Fearon, Guardian Games Blog

  A number of the developers mentioned in the article may be familiar to you.

• Ubisoft recently revealed how they plan to combat piracy of their titles in the future – by requiring users to create an online account which they can then use to download purchased games on any computer. Something similar for Game Maker someday?

Cactus Interview, Guardian Games Blog, Ubisoft Piracy is taken from: GameMaker Blog

DS Game Maker (click to enlarge)

I recently spoke with the creator of DS Game Maker James Garner. DS Game Maker is, as the name suggests, an equivalent of Game Maker which can be used to create games playable on the Nintendo DS console.

Written in Visual Basic .NET 2008 the project has been around for a year and a half and is run by just one person – 15 year old James Garner.

Although YoYo Games’ Game Maker and DS Game Maker are entirely separate projects there are similarities between them. The information James Garner was happy to supply me with is probably as close as is possible to get without planning a midnight raid on the currently non-existent YoYo HQ.

The software

Whereas Game Maker is a stand alone application DS Game Maker is an easy-to-use front end for the devkitPro toolchain and PAlib library. Instead of exporting an .exe of your final project a .nds file can created which can then be transferred to the Nintendo DS console where it can be played.

There are currently 111 built-in actions compared to around 1,000 in Game Maker however PAlib functions can also be used.

Reach

There are far more computers in the world than DS consoles so creating games, or other applications, for use on the handheld console is far more specialised and of interest to fewer people.  Understandably there not many alternatives for programming for the DS.

Although YoYo Games are, like James, UK-based Game Maker began in The Netherlands.  Therefore a high proportion of Game Maker users are Dutch or in English speaking countries around the world.  90% of DS Game Maker sales are from the United States and the website is most popular in USA, Australia and Italy.

James says that the average age of his forum users is 11 which causes a problem YoYo Games also experience – “none of them can buy it. I offer mail order for them (instead of PayPal) but no one has used it”.

Upgrades

Like GM DS Game Maker has both a free and paid-for version. The limitations imposed on the free version are greater than those in Game Maker with audio disabled and a maximum of 3 game rooms permitted unless you upgrade. The upgrade cost at $11.99 for life is less than half the price of Game Maker 7 . In August 62 copies of the Pro Edition were sold with the number of downloads exceeding 6,000.

A download-to-upgrade ratio exceeding 1% appears very impressive but you have to consider that many users upgrading will have been using the software for several months and only just decided that it was worthwhile to pay to lift the restrictions. Also only downloads from the official site are tracked whereas all upgrades go through the site.

Taking the download figures on the YoYo Games Wiki¹ if just 1% of the people who downloaded Game Maker in 2006 upgraded their copy revenues of almost $300,000 would have been generated.

Unlike YoYo Games who utilised third-party Softwrap DRM protection, which has proved problematic for some users, the online registration system provided for DS Game Maker is a simple php and MySQL system coded by James.  ”As a big corporation I guess they [went] for what was industry standard”.

Additional provisions

James is quick to admit that DS Game Maker has short-comings when it comes to the provision of resources for potential programmers to make use of.  There is no manual which he says is his “biggest flaw” and the online documentation is not yet complete.

There isn’t yet a DS Game Maker equivalent of YoYoGames.com but James is working on one.

As the software development continues and the community grows the number and quality of resources can only grow.

¹ – figures were previously on GameMaker.nl and article has been updated by Mark Overmars

DS Game Maker – Can we learn anything about Game Maker? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

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.

Who is the book aimed at?
Its target audience is beginner to intermediate game developers and programmers. It teaches basic game development and programming principles. First timers will find all of the information they require to use Game Maker’s drag-and-drop development approach. More advanced game developers, comfortable with drag-and-drop game development, will benefit from the books almost 100 page review of GML scripting.

What can we learn from reading the book?
Readers will learn how to develop computer games using Game Maker. They will learn how to navigate and configure Game Makers Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and to master its drag-and-drop approach to game development. The last third of the book focuses on GML scripting. By the time the reader finishes the book, he/she will have a good understanding of both drag-and-drop and scripted game development.

Summary of the games made in the book

Do you think that Game Maker is a good starting place for those wanting to go on to more advanced programming?
Absolutely, by starting with its drag-and-drop development approach new programmers can quickly master basic programming concepts and when they are ready they can make their leap to GML. The GML language is robust and powerful and the GML function library is huge. Anyone who puts in the time and effort required to master Game Maker and become a good game developer will find themselves well positioned to make the transition to programming languages like Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Java.

Last year you released Scratch Programming for Teens. How does Scratch compare to Game Maker?
Scratch is a good programming language for children just getting started programming. It lets you create computer programs using drag-and-drop Lego style bricks, where different types of logic blocks snap together and can be configured. However, Scratch does not have any where near the depth of features that Game Maker has. Nor does Scratch support scripting. So you are limited as to what you can do with it. Scratch is a good place for beginners to get started but after a while, most people will outgrow it. Game Maker and its large library of functions, on the other hand, are well suited to meet the needs of both beginner and advanced game developers.

You must have seen the other books written about Game Maker. How is yours different?
I have seen The Game Maker’s Apprentice book. It is a good book though sometimes I felt that the book made too many assumptions about the things the reader should know. In my book I provide additional coverage or Game Maker’s IDE, which is quite extensive. I also delve deeper into GML, dedicating the last third of the book to teaching GML and demonstrating its use. I also place additional emphasis on a lot of other development skills like the creation of customer splash screen, progress bars, and debugging.

Have you got any plans to write about the more advanced aspects of Game Maker?
I would love to write a more advanced book but a lot depends on the success of this book. If it does well, I am sure my publisher would be willing to publish a more advanced Game Maker book.

What improvements would you make to Game Maker if you were its developer?
I would start by providing it with better documentation. The “Designing Game with Game Maker” PDF file written my Mark Overmars is packed full of information but is not well organized and would benefit from having a lot more code examples. It would be great if more graphic, audio, and midi files were bundled with Game Maker. I would also like to see the MAC version of Game Maker make its debut. An easily accessed library of code snippets would be another helpful add-on.

Getting Started with Game Maker is released in July.
RRPs:  $34.99 (US), £25 (UK), €30 (EU), $41.95 (CA).
Amazon: US $23.09, UK £18.99

New Book: Getting Started with Game Maker – Author Interview is taken from: GameMaker Blog