The Game Maker Community Game has been released. The release is titled “GMCG: The Arcade” and is a collection of arcade mini games developed by different individuals and teams. Because of this the games don’t share the same look and feel – this is essentially a linked selection of games similar to those “100 Great Arcade Games” CDs you can pick up cheaply at electronics stores. Initially a single game was being developed for the Game Maker Community Game project but this was later revised to the collection of mini games.
GMC Links: Creations Forum Post | Announcement of Release

Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5 – ZDNet
Adobe is to stop development of Flash Player for mobile browsers in favour of Adobe AIR packaged native Apps and HTML5.

Cactus Interview, GMCG Released, Adobe to Stop Mobile Browser Flash Development is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Future Game Maker users will be given more choice, able to select one or more of four editions to suit their needs. Game Maker Studio, HTML5, Mac, or what will no doubt be the most popular edition, Game Maker Standard. However with an increasingly steeper price tag for features better suited for professional developers, is Yoyo Games abandoning its roots and shutting out a big portion of the community in pursuit of a new and perhaps more profitable demographic?

The price tag of the HTML5 version of GM will hit triple figures, coming in at $199USD a copy, accorrding to a recent announcement from Yoyo Games. It goes without saying that Game Maker, generally regarded by much of its users as a tool used mainly by children and teenagers, has always been a popular choice for people who need a starting point in game design and programming. The earlier price tag of $20 was suitably placed, but even then for some younger users, it was a fair amount of money to obtain and spend in one go online (judging by the odd begger asking for a free key). A creeping price tag for the standard version, now at $40, may require more work than mowing the neighbours garden and doing chores around the house.

For older users and veterans of Game Maker the standard edition should still be within budget. But for those who may have been looking forward to porting their collection of work to an online format, at almost $200 for a single copy of HTML5, its an option that excludes most everyday homebrew users in favor for an audience closer to that of a professional developer. The prospect of someone thinking seriously about developing apps and using Game Maker, instead of Apple’s official developer tools or an alternative professional IDE, may seem laughable.

We contacted Yoyo Games CEO Sandy Duncan, who said he would gladly answer our questions by unconventionally posting a response on the YoyoGames blog. In an email, Mr.Duncan recognized the need to address issues regarding pricing and its affect on the existing user base.

“I want to take this opportunity to reassure you that this is absolutely not the case.” Mr. Duncan wrote in his post at the blog, after we asked him whether or not Game Maker was “abandoning its roots and prioritizing less on the everyday user”.

“We want to make GameMaker a tool that can be seriously considered by professional and semi-professional developers. In doing this WE ARE NOT DESERTING OUR ROOTS, in fact quite the opposite.”

He went on to explain in the post that Game Maker can be used to create professional software, perhaps referring to questions we asked about Game Maker being considered only as a tool for beginners and young budding software developers.

Erik Paldanius known as HighQuality on the GMC, the developer of Wuka World amongst other online projects and platform based games, has been part of the community since 2008, and expressed his views on Game Maker pricing.

“The price tag is way too high, it should stay at $99 and never go any higher…

“What they are doing here is taking a product designed for kids and adding ability to export for multiple platforms to it and expect people to pay hundreds, possibly thousands for it when GM Studio comes out.” he said.

HighQuality explained that the short (albeit significant) list of differences between Game Maker HTML5 and other versions of the program would have him paying no more than $99 a copy. He said he would be interested in paying up to $399 for the studio edition however.

“YoYoGames has a lot of flaws to sort out such as decompiling, speed issues and a better API. Until things like that are fixed Game Maker is simply not suitable for professional development in my opinion.” HighQuality said, addressing belief that Yoyo may be moving towards a new market. Rest assured, the standard edition of GM should remain affordable.

“We’re not intending to keep increasing the price of GameMaker Standard.” Mr. Duncan wrote in the blog post.

YoyoGames may have anticipated a revolt in the significantly higher costs for selected Game Maker products, as they have sparked a short time deal. Users who want to grab Game Maker HTML5 for half the price had the opportunity do so during the beta period where the program will be offered at $99.

Comment: YoYo Abandoning Game Maker Roots? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Although a new name, MoaCube essentially consists of those who worked on existing titles alongside Tom.  Magi, a strategy “wizard dueling” game released in 2007, was still selling for around £10 until a promotion started on Sunday.   The game can now be picked up for $5.95 which also includes a 50% discount off the upcoming sequel.    ArcMagi, the more accessible sequel, has been in development since at least September 2009 when issue 17 of Game Maker Tech featured a insight into development of the game.   A couple of other packages are available one of which, for $50, means you will receive copies of all future MoaCube releases for free.

Tom who has worked in the games development industry for 5 years, most recently at Codeminion, founded MoaCube to attempt to make a living from games created using Game Maker after a studio restructuring.  In an interview with Mrme Tom outlined the reasons for his decision to use Game Maker in the studio he founded. “[It's] a very flexible and fast tool for creating 2d games. Time is of essence for us, and GameMaker allows me to create anything I need in very short time.”

Although ArcMagi is still in the pipeline the recent development focus of the team has been on a new title, Cinders, as Tom deemed ArcMagi to be too ambitious for a first release. Some quite incredible art from their upcoming game Cinders can be found, amongst photography and other art, on the blog of artist Gracjana Zielinska.

MoaCube – Game Maker Indie Game Studio is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Andrew McCluskey's internal version of Game Maker 8.1

The Software

Russell is working on including in Game Maker 8.1 something that supports distributing games. I wouldn’t call it DRM in the strictest sense but you can’t just put the games on the YoYo Store and say “help yourselves” and have some people paying $2 for it and other people ripping it off. We’ve put a mechanism in place which says “have you properly paid for this game? If not, you can’t have it”.

I’ve learnt a lot from Apple in the last year, their view on piracy is don’t go chasing after those who don’t want to pay, go find the ones that want to. I like to follow this philosophy if not the precise approach.

We haven’t decided yet if the games we publish for Windows will be distributed on the C++ runner or continue to use the Delphi runner. Use of the C++ runner in future Game Maker versions is up in the air at the moment. One thing that is certain though is that we wont be writing it in Delphi in the future, whether it is the C++ runner or is a new runner written in C#, Mono or something else I’ve no idea at this stage.

Game Maker 8.1 is our priority at the moment. It’s not because there is some huge and exciting new feature but because we need to get it done.

Room zoom slider via Andrew McCluskey

There are also lots of bugs in the Mac version that we need to fix, we just haven’t had any time. It’s been neglected, we’ve just had other priorities. It would have been fixed and dusted off in the last couple of weeks, it was one of the things that was sacrificed along with 8.1 [for the HTML5 proof of concept and GDC].

As of next week we will go back to Game Maker 8.1 and tidying up Game Maker for Mac, there is a lot we can do there. Then we will figure out what we want to do next, there’s no precise agenda at the moment as to whether that will be the HTML5 version or something else.

We are all eager to see Game Maker 8.1 out, there will be a very short beta to because if there are bugs we can fix them incrementally afterwards. One of the problems we have is that we don’t get good bug reports. At bugs.yoyogames.com we find people saying “Game Maker crashes”. What does that tell us? It probably does crash but we need to know more! It’s not helpful. When Russell did Game Maker for Mac he found that only 3 or 4 people gave him quality bug reports so instead of looking at a thousand user beta he just worked with those people.

The good news now though is that with Game Maker 8.1′s built in update mechanism as we find errors and can identify them we will very regularly update.

After Game Maker 8 it’s definitely our goal to unify the Mac and PC versions. Linux is not a platform we are focusing on as an IDE due to the various distributions which throws up so many problems for us. There is no enthusiasm within YoYo Games to do a Linux version of Game Maker. If we really wanted to have done it we would have by now.

The most disappointing and embarrassing thing for me, for the Game Maker community over the last four years, has been our inability to fix bugs, get out updates, add small features and incremental steps. You had to wait two years to go from Game Maker 7 to Game Maker 8 and if you have to wait again for Game Maker 9 you’ll of waited two years until the time you get it.

I don’t even think we are going to call it Game Maker 9. I think we should do something different for next year, it will be called Game Maker and will be a summary release of probably everything we’ve done so far. We’re not working on it yet but we know what it will be. Instead of “Game Maker 8.1″ think of it as “Game Maker 8 the next release”, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 are misleading. There will be plenty more iterative releases, they could happen daily, weekly or monthly. There is no cycle, when we’ve got cool stuff to add we will ship it out.

The Company

We started YoYo and it ran for about a year and I couldn’t find Mike and Russell, I was looking for them! It seemed really pointless paying 4 or 5 guys to keep things going. Nobody noticed when they left and for about a year and a half I ran most of it on my own. I had one other guy working for me part time as a systems admin and we contracted in web developers. The helpdesk was the real killer!

If you include me there are 9 full time employees on the payroll but there is actually a team of about 13 or 14 people. We’re taking advantage of what is really an excellent University for games, in QA for example we’ve got four guys who come in every week, if you add them together they’re at least the equivilant of a full time employee. We are trying to expand as you know we have an immediate vacancy for a Game Maker programmer, we think we might have found someone but we’re not going to be doing any aggressive recruiting until we decide what our next steps are.

The website is ready for a lot of changes. It actually isn’t going to take a tonne of money but we need to get it right. You will see a refreshed YoYo Games website in the future. When people see our Apps they will be attracted to Game Maker and will have higher expectations. Even if there are just twice as many people then the website will need work to go hand in hand with that. We want people who come to play games and those who come to make games to find the right part of the website for them as quickly as possible.

I just think everybody should be excited whether you are an occasional user of Game Maker or a dedicated member of the GMC who never writes games but just loves going on there and ranting!

Every penny we make is being reinvested back into the company. I haven’t been paid in 5 years. The company needs to make more money because people like me do eventually need to take a salary. It is a business, but it’s a business with its community at its heart and so we’ll try and do everything we can to grow and support the community and support the business at the same time. It does mean that for some people it feels like there is a kind of moral conflict going on, like between cyclists and motorists who can’t share the same street, it’s just silly. We’re actually all trying to do the same thing, just do it in different ways.

If you thought the last year was exciting, the next year is going to be utterly brilliant.

This is an edited transcript and is not a word-for-word account of the interview but it accurately reflects portions of the conversation that took place.

If you have enjoyed reading this series of articles perhaps you would consider helping to contribute to Game Maker Blog. It takes a large amount of time to run the website and even just a couple of hours a month on, for example, writing a review of a Game Maker game would be much appreciated.

Sandy Duncan Interview: Game Maker 8.1 and beyond is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Sandy Duncan: For 4 years we’ve had an on-off discussion about whether or not we could make a Game Maker for ActionScript, we decided that you could but you would have to take a big leap from bitmap to vector graphics and textures are all done differently. Mike and Russell said we should favour HTML5 over Flash.

I went to an event called Casual Connect, a casual games conference held each February. It was a real eye opener, a whole bunch of things came out of it. One of them is social features – how can you connect games like on Facebook games. Clearly this is an area with a lot of demand and interest and we would like to think about Game Maker games doing some of the things you see on Facebook for example.

A lot of people there were talking about HTML5 and there was one company who said they would be very interested if we could make Game Maker export to HTML5. With that one company in mind I took Mike and Russell off everything else including Game Maker 8.1.

The progress they made surprised themselves never mind me and Mark Overmars. Everyone was blown away with just how much progress had been made, I would have been pleased to say “Here’s catch the clown” as a proof of concept that Game Maker could eventually end up as JavaScript. The guys did most of the work over the weekend, it was 8 days not 2 weeks work!

The project is currently on hold but it won’t take anything like we’d been estimating it would to get it complete. For something that had been floating around for the last four years it is something that is much more real than we had ever expected.

It was and still is essentially a proof of concept but that could change dramatically over a period of days not weeks or months. We want to get Game Maker 8.1 out of the door first though, that’s our priority.

If we do HTML5 I can guarantee you that it’s a product. It’s not something for us to play with.

I’ve called it an addon as I want people to realise that it’s not an upgrade to Game Maker. We live with the legacy of this $25 product, I just want to try and help people understand as early as possible that it might not be another $25 product here. It won’t be thousands, it won’t even be hundreds.

We’re making Game Maker potentially not just something for people who want to get into games but people who are already involved in making games and a higher price in someways helps people value the product. Absolutely no decision has even been made as to whether we will do the product yet, never mind the pricing.

This is an edited transcript and is not a word-for-word account of the interview but it accurately reflects portions of the conversation that took place.

Sandy Duncan Interview: Game Maker HTML5 Addon is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Sandy Duncan: When publishing we try to choose games which we know aren’t pushing the limits of Game Maker to the extreme because we don’t know how far we can take the runner. The runner was originally based on Game Maker 7, the guys have gradually added most of the Game Maker 8 features but it’s still essentially based on the Game Maker 7 C++ runner.

Porting an App is not a difficult process, we take a game and run it on top of a C++ runner on a Mac or Windows machine and if it loads and runs, even if it has got a few errors, we can be pretty certain it is candidate for publishing.

Game Maker was written solely with PC in mind so there are some areas which don’t behave as expected when we try them on different platforms. These include issues such as how many sprites you are displaying on the screen but there aren’t many games which we look at and think would be very problematic.

One of the biggest struggles at the moment is in-game physics, games very heavily reliant on physics such as Jesse Venbrux’s Mubbly Tower wouldn’t be great candidates at the moment.

Mubbly Tower - Not yet portable

We would normally work on about 6-8 titles at a time but this will grow once we open the store.

The store is where people can start thinking of their game commercially rather than just being another game on the website. We’ll be able to publish games [to PC] that use physics or have other non-portable issues but we’ll still expect these games to be of a reasonably high standard.

Some of these games that enter the process will then be considered for publishing elsewhere, we are limited to publishing about a game a week but this is A LOT compared to traditional studio. If we really wanted to we could add a team of about 4 or 5 people and that would be enough to publish another game every week.

As to whether or not the 500 games by 2012 figure will be met it depends on your definition of a game. You could say we’ve done about 30 games already because Simply Solitaire on 3 platforms could count as 3 games, so there is some artistic license in that figure. We could get to 2 or 3 games a week, certainly on Windows we could publish 3 or 4 games a day because we are not “polishing” and won’t need to worry too much about technical issues because the games already run on Windows. In theory for Windows we could have the games submitted one day and published the next.

[ Earlier sneak preview of the YoYo Game Store submission process ]

One of the concerns we have about the store is that when it opens there will be a huge influx of games. The store has been done for 18 months but this is a reason for it not being available at the moment. We want to make sure that when we do open the store we are able to cope with the number of submissions we receive, we don’t want to disappoint people by making them wait months for an answer.

The feedback we give on submitted games will depend on what is submitted, if a game looks really good but is fatally flawed we won’t just give a no, we’ll tell them “we like the game, but you are going to have to do some work here”. We are prepared mentally to do this but I don’t think we have the hands on board to open at the moment, one of the reasons why we are looking to hire another Game Maker programmer alongside Andrew is to help review the games for us.

Firstly we’ll get games on the YoYo Store and then we think 3-4 weeks would be reasonable for a game to appear on a third-party App store. If you submit a game to Apple it takes roughly a week, the Mac App store takes about 2-3 weeks for them to review it, I think to do it within a month would be a reasonable turnaround. Obviously this will depend on the number of games we are influxed with at first. The expectation is that everyone will send something in but that a lot of games can be quickly rejected, we really don’t know how overwhelmed we will be, but it has stopped us throwing the switch until we are sure we are absolutely ready.

Android phone and iPhone games [in Game Maker] are identical, yes there is GameCenter support but that is handled in the runner so if you’ve got highscores we can just send them somewhere else. A minor concern might be advertising but in reality we don’t touch the game, we’ll spend more time testing and that’s about it.

The problem with Android is that there are just so many different things you have to test, you have to draw a line somewhere but testing does take a while. We’ve been surprised that some of the more expensive Android handsets we’ve bought don’t have the performance that some of the very cheap ones have had. The phone that’s impressed us the most for the money is the Orange San Francisco.

On Android it’s easy to push the games out, the problem is you just don’t know what errors to expect. Everything is isolated in the runner so if you have a problem on one handset you tend to solve it for them all, there were archtiectual things with Android that left us gobsmacked, we couldn’t understand why we got some slowdowns in the games. It turns out that it was just the way multi-tasking works on Android, it’s different from the way it works on iOS. It’s now solved though.

Prison Ball uses the same 3D that you have within Game Maker, so it’s isometric 3D, so we now support this.  The guys are always adding support for features to the runner, it still isn’t quite at Game Maker 8 yet but it’s very close. There was a bit of a philosophical discussion between Mike and I about whether we should ever use tilt. There are other games [besides Sync Simple] that would definitely benefit from it, I think Skydiver is one. Tilt is supported on both Android and iOS.

Philip Gamble: The recent Android releases, Poker Squares and Sync Simple, have had both free and paid releases. Is this the way things are going to continue?

Sandy Duncan: Definitely, and the same on iPhone as well. We’re still learning, we’ve had some very very interesting advertising revenue from some games that’s made us realise that ad supported games are viable.

I’d probably say at the moment that commercially nothing is viable on Android, piracy is really high, people even pirate the free games! They upload the apps to their websites and get paid from the ads on their website, we don’t even know if they rip our own ads out of the games and insert their own.

We see some weird statistics, we use AdMob for most of our ads at the moment. On the Android version of Simply Solitaire we get the same number of impressions as we do on the iPhone version and yet the game has had five times as many downloads on iOS as there been officially from the Android Marketplace. It’s a good reason to have adverts in the game because then it doesn’t matter where the game is downloaded from.

We’re still trying to understand pricing. Google’s terms and conditions make it easy for you to buy a game and then reject it. I’m not exactly sure what happens on your handset if you do that, I don’t think you lose the right to use the game. About a third of people who download a game request a refund. The problem is that when Google refund the customer they refund them the $1 they paid but we only get paid $0.70. So actually we lose $0.30 when you ask for a refund because they deduct the $1 from our $0.70.

If you factor in advertising iOS is on another planet [in terms of revenue]. Solitaire has been our big hit so far, in fact the cumulative downloads for Simply Solitaire are getting up towards a million. We won’t issue specific figures for other Apps, particularly where other people are involved but we did that one ourselves as an experiment.

It was rather a strange one that it did so well for such a simple game, people seem to like the “arts and crafts” style of it so we bought out a version of Poker Squares. The game was already on the website but we’ve added our whole look and feel to it. This was an interesting discussion because there was a game on the website that gave us an idea and we did an awful lot of work to that particular game but we are still sharing the revenue with the guy who created it because he gave us the inspiration.

We’ve paid out our first months revenues for up to the end of December. We’ve certainly given out more money than we would have if we’d run another competition and in the current month it’s way beyond the competition. We aren’t looking at millions of sales for most of the games but everybody’s got some money out of it. If you’re somebody 18 years old sitting in Australia and somebody’s just sent you a cheque for a few hundred bucks I think you’ll be pretty happy. I don’t think anyone so far has been disappointed.

We will get hits, there was no reason why Simply Solitaire should have been one. The thing we’re not doing is spending any money on marketing, we push press reviews and we’re relying on virality to be the key essence.  There are ways you can spend money to promote games, if you look at TapJoy or MobClix. You can basically pay people to download your Apps from the App Store, if you hit the top 20 when someone picks up their phone and wants to buy a game 99% of the time that will be one of the top games.

We want developers to stay with us, we are going to help [more serious developers] in any way that we can. Good developers will get help from us before they finish their game. It costs us £2,000-£3,000 every time we do a game, that money could often be spent before the game got to us because then we wouldn’t have to do anything to it. We have already helped one developer spend some money on graphics for his game and the game went from a very interesting prototype to something I would call quite sensational.

The thing we’ve come to understand is that Game Maker is no barrier to creating wonderful games. AngryBirds could have been done in Game Maker.

Is the answer to license our [porting] technology to third parties? Possibly. At the moment our method of distributing Game Maker is a $25 or free download from the website. We love the fact that literally millions of people worldwide can pick up Game Maker, we’re getting 5,000 downloads of the Lite version a day on average. About 80% of people never use it, I don’t think people expect a blank canvas when they open the IDE for the first time.

The problem we have is that if we come up with a solution it has to work for everybody. We want to make money from the games and we don’t want to be associated in the publishing world with Catch the Clown coming out 10 times a day. At the moment we just don’t have an answer.

For now if we open up the store it means that for the better developers who are prepared to give up 50% of their NET revenue with NO RISK, we’ll do everything – the marketing, the finishing of the game, we’ll get it published, it’s actually quite a good deal. We know for a fact that if you go to a publisher like Chillingo they’ll give you about 50-50 if you’re lucky.

I’ve got an open view towards people’s attitudes on this but I think 50-50 is a decent commercial deal especially when we take all of the risk. I think the people who are complaining [about the revenue share deal] are not experienced in getting games published. They are very lucky if they get a substantially better deal than that.

We’ll figure out a way of solving [portable runners] for everyone but right now I’m more concerned about getting 40 or 50 Catch the Clowns a day submitted to the App Store, Apple would block Game Maker – we can’t afford for that to happen. Android is similar, we don’t want YoYo Games or Game Maker to become associated with that kind of game.

Game Maker will maintain its roots as being an accessible tool to everyone. There will always be some kind of free version and some kind of very low price for the basic Pro version but we are increasingly finding that we are attracting professionals.

Russell is at GDC this week, we’ve been approached by 3 or 4 very large games companies who want to understand how we get games published on different platforms and how they can work with us. We believe it can extend all the way into being a professional tool.

This is an edited transcript and is not a word-for-word account of the interview but it accurately reflects portions of the conversation that took place.

Sandy Duncan Interview: App Publishing Process is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Sandy Duncan: I’ll go back to how YoYo Games really started, there were a bunch of us paid by a Venture Capital firm to come up with some ideas for them.  There was me, James North-Hearn (now CEO of Foundation 9 – the worlds’ largest independent games developer) and Spencer Hyman (COO at Last.fm).  We were soon joined by Michel Cassius.

We came up with several ideas, one of which we called Ministry Of Games, which is what YoYo would have been called had the domain name been available.   We liked the idea so much that we decided to form a company around it, the idea was to be a games talent incubator.

Spencer went off to Last.fm and got into the whole social networking thing and said to us “you’ve got to do this YouTube thing” but for games.  The phrase helps people get their head around what we do, but it is not what we are about –  we are a talent incubator.

Michel was my marketing director when I ran xBox in Europe and we had both seen the emergence of the casual games sector where companies like Popcap were rapidly emerging and it looked pretty interesting.  They were producing games for £50,000-£60,000 and as they were downloaded there weren’t all the problems you get with a packaged product and retail distribution.  The numbers weren’t stacking up for us to become a regular publisher 5-6 years ago and you can see now that games publishers everywhere are struggling to survive.

Casual content, Downloadable content and Talent were the three things we wanted to do.  We then bumped into Mark Overmars shortly after he had agreed to sell Game Maker to somebody else, quite a big company, but he hadn’t signed anything.  Somehow we pursuaded Mark to join us, it was the last peice of our jigsaw and meant we wouldn’t have to write our own product from scratch which we had considered to be too expensive.

We hired a few people and got an office but we did it all in such a rush that we didn’t ask Mark Overmars if he would continue writing Game Maker for us!  He didn’t have the time to do it which was the reason he was selling it – it had become too big for him to manage alongside a full time job.  For a long time we didn’t fill that gap, it was problematic to find someone who knows Delphi [the language Game Maker is written in], let alone game design and hardware.

We were looking at the DS which had no store, PS2 and PSP which both had some level of connectivity and we knew about xBox 360 and PS3 through our connections so we weren’t looking at phones at all.  When iPhone came out it helped us get even more excited about what we were doing, from the minute it came out we were thinking “how can we get in there”.

Then we found Mike and Russell and everything just fell together.  Those guys are amazing.  Their history is great but means nothing if you can’t do anything with it, they could.  What we needed were software engineers who understood games and hardware.  When they wrote Lemmings you didn’t have Direct X to write for Amiga, Atari etc so they had the unique combination of talents that we utterly needed.  They had the ability to take a games focused product and adapt it.

We had done some work in the interim by outsourcing a C++ runner because we had always known that this would be the basis of taking Game Maker elsewhere.  It wasn’t very well written initially but the groundwork probably saved us six months to a year so that once we’d found Mike and Russell the basics of getting Delphi into C had been done.

The rate at which they’ve worked has been amazing.  When Mark and I first met them he said “they’re really nice guys but I’m going to have to sit with them for weeks explaining how Game Maker works”.  They just said, “give us the sources and we’ll see what we can do”.  We did that and then six weeks later they presented me with a modified PSP which was running Skydiver.  It blew me away.

Naively we were quite excited when Sony announced that they were going to support mini games.  You have to develop to a minimum spec, for a PSP 1000, that’s 233MHz processor  and 32MB of memory.  To get a game approved by Sony it has to run on that.

There are problems with Sony, they are still living in the console age!  They split the world into 3 regions: EMEA, US and Japan which are all managed separately.  This is why you only see GreenTech in 4 countries in Europe, we have to have completely separate agreements and go through different approval processes to get on the other stores.

Costwise the only thing that makes publishing for PSP more expensive than elsewhere is the cost of having to talk to so many people.  Their technical requirements change daily and even people inside Sony can’t keep up!  It’s not massively more expensive but in return they do lots of game testing for you – it’s a bit silly to do this for minis.  The reason we haven’t published more with Sony is the issue with access to their markets.  On iPhone you press a button and the app goes worldwide, on Android it goes worldwide even if you don’t want it to – there are pirate .apks all over the net!

There are very definitely a bunch of Game Maker games that will never run on a PSP but on the otherhand it meant that the guys had to target a very small footprint for the C++ runner.

The direction that Sony is taking with PSP2 is not terrible exciting to us.  On PSP we had struggled to get Skydiver up to 40 frames a second.  Choosing a really low tech bar was great for us though.  We moved over to iPhone and Skydiver was so fast it was unplayable, we were getting 400 frames per second!

In practice we can pretty much move the C++ runner onto any device with a screen and some kind of input, right now we have no plans to add any more hardware platforms in the short term.  The good news though is that it only takes Mike and Russell about a month from start to finish to get a runner that’s not bug free but working in a shippable state.

This is an edited transcript and is not word-for-word account of the interview but it accurately reflects portions of the conversation that took place.

Sandy Duncan Interview: How YoYo Games Really Started & PSP is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Karoshi Shirt!

Earlier today I spoke with YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan and asked him about App publishing, Game Maker 8.1, Game Maker for Mac, the HTML5 runner and company itself.

I was hoping to post a recording of our conversation here but Sandy asked that I instead publish edited transcripts.  I will do so covering various topics in the next week or so.

Listed below are the points we covered, due to time constraints on my behalf it is unlikely that I will be able to write up everything so I will try to focus on those most of interest to readers.  If there are any particular areas you would like covered sooner rather than later please post them in the comments.

• How YoYo Games really started
• The revelation that Mark Overmars had already agreed to sell Game Maker to a big company before YoYo Games got in touch.
• The problems in finding the right people to work at the company
• Issues regarding publishing to PSP

• The fact that the C++ runner can be pretty much put on any device in a shippable state with about a months work
• The process of porting games to different platforms
• The current limitations of runners
• The YoYo Games submissions process including timescales
• When they decided to try HTML5
• A “none DRM” game anti-piracy mechanism will be in place in the Game Maker 8.1 runner
• C++ runner is up in the air, but it definitely wont be Delphi
• That Android device performance varies dramatically and can be a problem
• Portable device runner support including Game Maker 3D
• Free and Paid release model of Apps
• Interesting in-app advertising revenue
• High piracy of Android Apps, including piracy of free games!
• Android App refunds
• Cumulative downloads of Solitaire are approaching a million
• Marketing of apps
• That they will be offering extra help to good developers
• The cost of porting a game
• YoYo Studios will be announced at some point
• Thoughts on the publishing revenue share deal
• Licensing of runners to third parties
• Game Maker download figures
• Interest in Game Maker from large companies
• The decision to work on a HTML5 version
• Socially connected games
• Game Maker to ActionScript/Flash
• Status of HTML5 version
• Game Maker 8.1 – the changes
• The most disappointing and embarrassing thing for the Game Maker community over the last 4 years
• Not Game Maker 9?
• Neglect of Game Maker for Mac
• HTML5 version as a product – not $25
• Quality of bug reports received by the team
• Linux version
• The early years of YoYo
• Helpdesk requests
• Current employees
• YoYo Games’ relationship with the community
• YoYoGames.com website overhaul

Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions of questions.

Sandy Duncan Interview – Coming Soon is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Woodley and Lexie who went to highschool together had always had an interest in game design. They had worked on a couple of unfinished projects together and the pair had used Game Maker before to create a couple of prototypes but Dustforce was their first serious attempt at a finished game.

The game, which involves cleaning a platform world was, well, unusual. Woodley explains how the concept came about.  ”Thinking about fun platforming mechanics, covering ground and being acrobatic. Then the idea of chores and how they could be made fun. I think I was actually sweeping leaves at my uncle’s house and imagining it as a platformer.”

“The idea [for Dustforce] was floating around in a different form before the competition, but we made the game with the competition in mind. We were working on another prototype, but it was meandering a little, and we both got excited at the idea of making Dustforce because it was more concrete.”

“Lexie was very competent in Game Maker and we knew we could quickly start prototyping mechanics.”

Of Game Maker’s capabilities Woodley says  ”Unfortunately, since we never had the time to optimize our code, the render still felt pretty slow. We have used other systems in the past that were capable of rendering way, way more particles and sprites on the screen at once. Also, the inbuilt sound engine was pretty simplistic and limiting. We ended up using supersound.dll, a free plugin, to play and manipulate sound files – it worked quite well!”

“We’ve actually ported the game to our own C++ engine now, so we won’t be looking at GM for future versions of Dustforce. However, we will definitely go back to it for rapid prototyping – we recently made a 48 hour game during the Global Game Jam with Game Maker.”

So, what has happened since their competition win?

“We’re in the process of relocating to the USA from Australia. Dustforce has been re-coded and re-animated from scratch in our own engine. We learned a lot from the prototype version – it was an extremely basic version of the game that we have in mind – so we’ve spent a lot of time working on the final design. There will be much more to the full version than just the sweeping mechanic. We’re still working out what is going to happen with Dustforce’s release but you can expect the game to be released within the year!”

You can keep up to date with the Hitbox Team and Dustforce on Twitter @hitboxgames. A development log will also soon be available at hitboxteam.com

What happened to the Dustforce creators? [Interview] is taken from: GameMaker Blog

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