When downloaded and extracted the 5.66MB file (a far cry from the 975.7GB claimed size!) contains a poorly made platformer created in Game Maker.  The file has already been downloaded over 5,000 times.

On the YoYoGames.com blog Mike Dailly writes that in order to target a younger demographic Game Maker is to have a new logo. He also states that Game Maker 8.1 will be the last version in the current style as it is “as much as most hardcore users will need”.

It’s a mix of the ridiculous and sensible suggestions such as those for the addition of “several new videos and tutorials for getting the younger (and inexperienced) designer up and running” and “allow[ing] you to attach pre-canned behaviors” to objects.

Thanks to BlueMaxima

April Fool’s Watch is taken from: GameMaker Blog

An MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, is an ambitious project often jumped in to by people who do not have sufficient experience of using Game Maker or programming in general.

The set of tutorials available on the website is designed to teach the creation of a 2-dimensional Game Maker MMORPG making use of the popular 39DLL networking sockets library.

True Valhalla has first-hand experience in developing for the genre with his Myriad Online project recently passing a year of development time. News that the first beta version of the game is currently expected to be released at the end of 2012 or start of 2013 indicates the kind of commitment and dedication that will be required to complete such a game, even with the availability of resources such as How to Make An MMORPG.

The Warrior’s Path, which had the added complication of being 3D, was a rare example of a long running Game Maker MMORPG project. However it was never released as the project was abandoned which the developers attributed to speed issues with Game Maker. Much more workable were the 2-dimensional Stick Online and Realm of Past Worlds, two Game Maker MMORPG projects which successfully reached release but both appear to no longer be supported by their developers.

The website starts off assuming no knowledge whatsoever with section available entitled “What is Game Maker?” which then takes you through the basics of using the software and GML. Whilst this will obviously be of benefit to programmers who are not familiar with using Game Maker this may encourage a few too many in the “I have no programming knowledge whatsoever but I want to make a MMORPG” category to jump in and quickly become confused. To mitigate this there are about 20 pages or so before reaching the “Getting Started” section appears, this should demonstrate both the complexity of such a project and the the level of detail that has been provided in the tutorial.

The material is presented in a clean and consistent fashion with function names highlighted, sufficient screenshot and is accompanied by well commented downloadable examples. Arrows at the bottom of each page link to the next section in the tutorial or you can choose to access a particular page directly from a contents listing.

Colour coded and documented GML

The site doesn’t just throw code at you either, there are good explanations behind everything that is taught, such as this introduction to the concept of a client-server model and how it will work for a MMORPG.

Once networking has been taught you aren’t abandoned either, there are additional articles on common misconceptions (perhaps the thought was that incorporating this into the main tutorial would scare people off!), funding a game, security issues and on how best to deal with malicious users.

The site has been online for about 9 months and despite the amount of material available it is far from complete as a quick look at the examples download page will show. Future additions will include platform movement, AI, combat and inventories. From this list of exclusions it is clear that the guide doesn’t currently teach you absolutely everything you need to know about creating a MMORPG in Game Maker however the basics of using 39DLL to create a working networked game are covered.

Over the coming months and years this could develop into a comprehensive tutorial for everything Game Maker MMOPRG related and would be a good link to post in response to the overly-ambitious MMORPG as a first game attempts that crop up at GMC.

Visit www.HowToMakeAnMMORPG.com

How to Make a MMORPG in Game Maker is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The site claims to offer “Everything you need to make a game” and along with the teaching side also has a resource store where you can purchase sprites and backgrounds for your game for either personal (~$1.75) or commercial (~$17.50) use.

Each lesson consists of well over an hour of video tutorials, all the resources you need to make a game and some short ‘how to’ guides. It’s not just lessons though. ‘Customise game’ features suggest additions and modifications that can be added to the taught games along with some hints as to how to go about implementing them. ‘Extended Learning’ offers suggestions as to what you might want to do next with sample code where appropriate and finally a Quiz asks multiple choice questions about Game Maker and the reasons behind aspects of the created game.

There are currently six Game Maker ‘courses’ available, which in reality are detailed tutorials since they only teach one game, starting with novice level 2D maze and platform game courses and then quickly advancing to a 3D racing game, maze, arena and scrolling shooters. All the courses have video tutorials available for both Game Maker 8 and Game Maker 7 (for Mac). For the intermediate and advanced courses the Pro version of Game Maker is required.

Sample Course Content (Click to enlarge)

The individual pricing is set at $20 for the earlier and $30 for more advanced courses. Access to all six courses is $50 for a year. Wisely the course aims to sell to parents, schools and summer camps rather than children themselves though it will be interesting to see how GameSpark plan to get the product it front of these people. There is a free trial which will enable free access the first five lessons of the 2D Maze tutorial.

I haven’t had the time to work my way through a course so can’t vouch for the accuracy of the material but since the tutorials are presented in video format nothing should be missed out or overlooked. Some do see a bit regimental “do this, do that!” often with a very brief (if any) explanation as to why an action is being performed. Telling us how to spell each resource name letter by letter – T.E.D.I.O.U.S!

The courses have obviously been under development for a while as the second beta version of Game Maker 8 is used in at least some videos.

Comparisons will inevitably be made with freely available video tutorials and Jacob Habgood’s books.   A detailed  help system with comprehensive coverage of potential issues you may encounter when working on each game helps make GameSpark package far more useful than any series of free online Game Maker video tutorials I have seen.

A notice omission is the presence of partial (or even complete) editable .GMK files for the taught games. Though given the educational targeting for the courses this makes sense.

Verdict: The best Game Maker video series though the cost is likely to put most people off.  If I had to choose between a annual GameSpark subscription and a book I would probably opt for the book.  I think for something this in-depth the videos would quickly get boring though for use in education the videos would probably come out on top.

GameSpark Game Maker Video Courses is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I think we will see it back online again shortly though as the service has rapidly been gaining popularity and I have seen active development on the site within the past couple of days.

Update (9th May): The domain has now been renewed and the site is back online.

Domain Expiration leaves UpUrLoad files unavailable 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

• The GMC admins appear to have been busy authoring fake posts using various user accounts in a new “GMC Off-Topic” section of the forum.
  

  “The GMC has a new forum called GMC Off-Topic. Membership is by invitation only, according to 3 criteria.
  In order to post there, members must fit into at least ONE of these categories:
  1. Be revered and admired by most GMC members and Staff… or
  2. Provide insightful and scathing criticism (that’s deserved)… or
  3. Have absolutely nothing useful to contribute.

  If you fall into one of these categories, you may be selected to participate in the Off-Topic Forum. If not, just use the regular GMC.”

  Some of the created posts (which actually appeared before April Fools day) were quite amusing.  The first posts came from NakedPaulToast berating the creation of such a forum, Frederick saying how great the section would be to promote his radio show, a post about porting Game Maker to toasters from a member whose previous posts had all been in a Game Maker on Linux topic, and Caniac, whose avatar features him wearing a hockey Jersey, slagging off American hockey teams.

• Rather than delete the irrelevant and totally unsuitable posts at the forum they manage, the YoYo Games forum moderation team decided to create a fake moderators only forum and make it visible to all site users.  It probably won’t surprise you that the first two none-moderators to post in it thought it was real.  Discussions included mentions of a decent click the clown game, an idea for the planned removal of the hell-hole that is the general chat forum and discussions of various fictitious ports of Game Maker.

• GMVision claim to be closing due to a lack of available funds to renew their domain name.   No videos have been released for a long time and the gmvision.tv domain name expires in 4 days so there may be a degree of truth to this one.

• Overbyte magazine posted claiming they were switching from monthly releases to become an annual publication.

• Game Maker Games have made a Christmas skin their default forum skin (for logged in members only)

• The Adrenaline website claims a hippy version of the game, titled Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, is on the way.

Also on Game Maker Blog:  See how little community members have matured in the last two years.

I Pity the Fools is taken from: GameMaker Blog

There have been very few changes to the YoYo Games homepage since the launch of the site back in 2007 (see screenshots at the end of post). First things first – I am glad to see the cheesy 1990s marquee has gone, but there are still several features that make me ask ‘why?’.

1. Why isn’t the Game Maker logo on the homepage?  Does the casual site user know what “GM 8.0″ is and why they should download it?  Sales of Game Maker account for 90% of YoYo Games’ revenue and more users will result in more quality games which can be uploaded to the site.
2. Why is so much space given over to news that is often more than a month old?
3. Who decided that puzzle and shooter games deserve more attention than platform and arcade games?  Arcade games are both more child-friendly and outnumber the ‘shooters’ category both in the number of games on the site and the number of featured games.
4. Why do the most popular games continue to get so much exposure?  Sure they can be listed somewhere but this space could be better used to highlight more recent creations.  I think this makes the site look stale.
5. Why do the spotlight games have numbers?  (Just visual).  Also why only 2 lines of descriptive text?  Far more words are given to the blog posts (see 2).
6. Why is space given to listing a games author rather than a  description or larger screenshot?  Who made a game really won’t be of interest to the casual browser.

YoYoGames.com homepage over time:

[Show as slideshow]

Some Questions about the YoYo Games Homepage is taken from: GameMaker Blog

This time last year we asked whether 2009 would see the release of Game Maker 8 and Game Maker for Mac.  You thought so with these two predicitions for the year receiving the most votes in our poll (results repeated below).
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Here is a  look back at how the predictions fared:

• Game Maker 8 left it late - originally planned for a late summer/early autumn release (for those in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) the final release came just a few days before Christmas.
• Progress on Game Maker for Mac was very slow.  The project was officially ‘delayed indefinitely‘ at the start of December but that won’t be the end of Game Maker on Mac.
• Game Maker loses market share – pretty much impossible to measure.
• The 50,000 games hosted at YoYoGames.com figure is harder to judge.  A December update to the site saw the figure for games uploaded jump dramatically by around 30,000 to over 70,000.  This, I presume, takes account of beta games that were not included in the earlier number.  I think we’ll call that a pass even if there aren’t 50,000 officially finished games.
• With MarkUp “on hiatus” for the entire duration of 2009 and GMWeekly replaced by KwikLook which in turn quickly became a blog “one or more of the well-established Game Maker magazines” certainly did stop producing.
• A battle between the Game Maker TV shows GMTV and GMVision never really happened.  Both shows released a few episodes which were well received but neither managed to stick to a regular schedule and GMTV recently announced they were cancelling all future shows.

Your 2010 Game Maker predictions will be wanted soon!  Suggestions for predictions/poll options are appreciated.

Illustration based on “The Wizard” by Flickr.com user seanmcgrath (cc).

Did you predict 2009? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

When we launched YoYo Games in April 2007 Rails was still fairly new, despite this it functioned pretty much as promised and the site has worked reasonably well until now. Still, we have had too many outages and performance has been poor when the site is loaded, especially at weekends.

After many lines of what seemed to be Sandy referencing to the various posts about him using improper punctuation, competition 5 was mentioned. Sandy stated that Competition 05 will be announced along with a Game Maker 8 release schedule if the website upgrades go smoothly.

If all works well I will go ahead and announce Competition 5 and update you on Game Maker 8 release schedule next week …so thanks, in anticipation of your continued support !!

YYG Website Upgrade to Launch Monday/Competition 05 is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The hosts featured in this Minisode are Host-A, UpUrLoad, and My GM Host. Each website is ranked based on Ease of Use, Layout and Limitations and are scored on a 5 star basis. The video featured some good footage of each contestant and ranked each host fairly.

The rankings will not be revealed here, but anyone can go and watch the show on the GMVision Website to see the complete reviews and final rankings.

GMVision’s Second Minisode Published is taken from: GameMaker Blog