Round one of judging, which takes place this week, will remove from the contest games which do not comply with the contest rules or are unplayable.

You might find you need to install a Silverlight plugin in order to view the judging progress page though, at least at the moment, the page doesn’t do anything fancy.

Competition Six Entries Confirmed is taken from: GameMaker Blog

• Today is the final day to vote for the community favourite award in IndiePubGames’ (formerly 2BeeGames) latest competition. $5,000 is up for grabs for the game that receives the most votes and $100,000 will be awarded to the judge’s favourite.   The entries include several Game Maker games (Remaddening and The Oil Blue are in there) though I have not had the time to go through them all to see which or how many.

• A couple of days ago Game Maker Community member time4dan launched a narrowly themed Real Time Strategy competition where entries must focus on “human evolution from Ape to Stone-Age Man”.   There is a $250 (CAD) prize and the winning game will be sold with at least 60% of royalties being passed on to the game’s creator.  If you decide to enter make sure you read through both the contest and the game rules carefully as there is quite a lot in there.

Mid-week Competition Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I waited a couple of days after I first saw (and started but did not finish) the survey to see if others shared my opinions on the survey.  I did not want to be accused of undermining a project produced by a site some may view as a competitor to Game Maker Blog by voicing my thoughts on the survey before criticism had arisen elsewhere.

I thought the survey was extremely poorly designed. Some questions don’t let me give the answer I would like to whilst at least one other, question 57 (see below), has two answers which mean exactly the same thing.

And apparently you either “know GML” or “don’t know GML” with no middle ground.

If you start the questionaire you are required to answer all 60 questions even though, as stated by robert680, some of the questions assumed you use Game Maker 8 despite an earlier question asking which version of the software you currently use.

There have been many other criticisms of individual questions and the general style of the survey, some comments taken from the Game Maker Community are listed below.

“Ok the survey had two kinds of questions:
What’s your favourite color? (Who needs this information?)
Aren’t all the useless features that are in Game Maker all useless? And aren’t stupid Yoyogames doing everything wrong? (Answer options: “a) Yes, b) Yes, but not often”.)”
- Tepi

“The quiz has some design flaws and its usefulness is suspect. For example you must choose a single GM version. I use GM8 and GM4Mac. You are forced to answer every question, though some don’t apply. Having a N/A, for some questions is important. Some questions are subjective and won’t have concise meaning to every one. For example, “How often do you save your project?”, the choices are meaningless.”
- NakedPaulToast

“Have answered it, though I should imagine about half my answers are inaccurate because there wasn’t an option for my own response.”
- NAL
[gmc topic]

This survey, which GMIndie list 6 people as contributing to, needed more thought put into it before it was released. Like I’ve mentioned before when offering so many different ‘products’ the quality will suffer.  I am unsure of the level of involvement from GMVision (who haven’t released anything since May,) it appears their contributions may be limited to promoting the survey and providing two of the questions.

GMIndie and GMVision Game Maker Survey: Poorly Implemented is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The discovery themed competition has $1,750 of cash prizes up for grabs for the games YoYo Games deem to be the best.

Some Game Maker users had expressed their surprise at the runners-up listed in YoYo’s previous competition, won by 2DCube’s They Need to be Fed, which they felt were less worthy than some titles which did not receive a mention.

It appears the transparency will enable competition entrants (and everybody else who reads YoYo’s blog) to know if their game is still in the running as Russell said that a day after the deadline the titles accepted for judging will be announced. Presumably this stage will weed out all of the created-in-five-minutes, not-actually-playable and blatant rule-infringing entries.

YoYo Games also want you to spread the word about their sixth competition on Twitter.  In an attempt to widen the audience of YoYoGames.com and the Game Maker software it has been announced that entries must be tagged with #YoYoComp06 which will also be used by YYG and others  to discuss the competition on Twitter.  So far no-one has used the hash tag.

YoYo Promise more Transparent Judging for their 6th Competition is taken from: GameMaker Blog

• Andrew McCluskey wrote his first glog post for YoYo Games discussing more efficient alternatives to the draw event in Game Maker.  The post is the first in a series which YoYo Games hope will eventually cover all aspects of Game Maker coding.

• Jacob Habgood’s Game Maker’s Companion [Amazon: $26.39 US|£23.62 UK] has had its release date pushed back again – to 30 September this year.

Mid-week Community Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog

KC LC retires from the GMC is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Check the performance of your banners. You can see the click-through ratio of individual banners uploaded to your account. If the performance of one banner is significantly lower than others in your account consider why – how is it different from the banners which are getting more clicks? You can pause or delete poorly performing banners at any time and upload new banners if you have a new message or design.

Don’t upload multiple identical banners. Uploading a particular banner and linking URL combination more than once is pointless. Because of the credits system (every time you show a banner your banner will be seen once) there is no benefit to flooding the system with identical banners. They simply divide your statistics between multiple pages and the banners can also be shown in the same GMA block on other members sites which wastes the impressions.

Good: 4 different banners

Bad: 4 identical banners

Have a static banner. GMA gives members an option to restrict animated GIF banners from appearing on their site by affixing &angif=1 to the end of the URL in the banner display code. If you don’t have a non-animated banner you will never be seen on these sites.

Place one promotion code on every page of your website. Promotion codes display from one to ten banners at a time in lines, rectangles, squares or as a single banner.  It is easy to find space to fit a code.  Remember though – you are only allowed to place one code on each page, if you use more duplicate banners may appear on your site which wastes advertisers credits and can result in a system ban.

Make sure you have at least one active banner in your account. There are currently more than 3.5 million credits held in accounts that do not have an active banner.  The owners of these websites have helped to promote other Game Maker user’s websites but are not reaping the benefits by having their site advertised elsewhere on the network.

How to get the most out of Game Maker Affiliation is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The Conference:
If you are already an app developer, or someone who is looking to get into app development, this conference is for you – with a program of essential information to get you developing that killer app and connect you with all the people to make it happen!

The AppJam:
Running parallel to the main conference will be a 48 hour ‘App Jam’ where selected participants will have the challenge of developing and presenting their app concept. Participants will be working together in small, international, multi-discipline teams to develop original ideas and IP with the aim of releasing any new titles developed, and exploiting routes to market immediately after the event. Supported by industry lead workshops and surgeries, the teams will be encouraged to help each other out with problem solving and production while sharing their skill set to achieve final publication.

If booked early conference tickets are £100 or £30 for students (excluding VAT). Entry to the AppJam is free.

YoYo Games an Industry Partner at AppJam 2010 is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Also on Game Maker Blog:

• Immortal Defense earns $7,500 in first 18-months
• Google Docs spreadsheet of Commercial Game Maker games revenue
• Who is making money from Game Maker?

Immortal Defense Pay What You Want Sale – Results so far is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Over the past few days visitors to the site have reported virus infections on their Windows machines caused by an exploit in the Acrobat PDF reader browser plugin.

There have been no public comments from YoYo Games on the issue. Although YoYo Games is a bespoke site the makers of Game Maker have a history of using out of date software which has been exploited on more than one occasion in the past.

Update (~12:35 BST): At around the same time as this post was initially written YoYo Games made a post about the matter. Russell Kay writes that the problem was caused by an attack on the OpenX ad server which was used to manage the advertisements displayed alongside games on the website. The ad server has now been removed with ads being served directly from Google and it appears that the issue has been resolved.

GMC Urges YoYoGames.com Stay-away is taken from: GameMaker Blog