GameMaker Blog

GMLScripts.com

on June 21, 2007 - 1644 Views

One of the sites I promised to take a look at quite a while ago now was GMLScripts.com. Each month a script from GMLScripts is featured in MarkUp, and the site was also suggested for mention by a reader of this blog.

GMLScripts currently contains over 100 scripts for use in Game Maker, and the number is rising as new scripts are frequently added. The scripts are well organised under categories and sub-categories and have good descriptions – crucial in enabling you to find a script quickly. The scripts, which are commented, can be viewed online or downloaded as a .gml file. The design is clean and very easy on your eyes, in fact their are no major problems with the site at all.

As with many sites GMLScripts is driven by its community who provide scripts for inclusion on the website. If you’re interested you can submit your own scripts to the database to help build up the resource for other Game Maker programmers.

I personally haven’t made use of GMLScripts.com when looking for help with a bit of scripting, my favoured method is normally Google search – but perhaps if enough scripts get added this can be the site people first think of when looking for a script.

Giveaway! (all $20 of it)

on June 19, 2007 - 3376 Views

Today I received the go ahead I had been looking for from YoYoGames. Thanks to Clayton at YoYoGames Customer Support my wish to be able to offer a GameMaker Pro licence can now become reality. In case any of you are interested, buying a prize licence is as simple purchasing a normal licence from YoYo. Although of course I don’t know how easy this will be since I upgraded in the 5.0 days when Game Maker was still very much a one-man-band.

I’ll let you know the thinking behind my idea as the audience of gamemakerblog are mostly cynical and know that I wouldn’t do this for nothing. The idea is really three-fold. One to see how easy or hard it would be to get the go ahead from YoYo and run a competition for people who use Game Maker. Two, to see what I can get people to do for a chance to win a cheap ($20) prize, or to put it another way to attempt to exploit the Game Maker Community. And third, and probably my main aim, to try and spread the word about the free Game Maker Affiliation Service which I run.

The basic idea is that members of the GMC will place a promotional graphic advertising the Game Maker Affiliation Service in their signature which will enter them into a draw to win the licence. Obviously our target audience here are people that aren’t using Game Maker Pro or are using cracked earlier versions of the software. Therefore this certainly isn’t the premium clientele, heaven forbid they read this, but I suspect these members will be more willing to sacrifice the majority of their signature space to me – and of course the prize is suitable.

Actually I fear that I may have made the image too big and this may deter some people from entering, but of course I can see how things progress in the early weeks of the competition. The idea is to make the draw on the 1st July to give people at least a month to enter and to hopefully ensure that more people are attracted to enter, viral marketing if you wish.

The image is below – it’s actually a bit wide for the blog template, sorry – and also includes a link back to a page with details of the competition on it.

I’d be interested to know your comments, suggestions or basically whatever you think of the idea. I haven’t promoted the service in any way yet, I’m just looking for a bit of feedback before I go ahead and start trying to spread the word.

Sophistication for beginners

on June 17, 2007 - 1513 Views

Stop Press! There is a genius at the GMC.

A topic appeared a couple of days ago in the Community section entitled: “The Game Maker Community’s Members Are Not very sophisticated“. The member puts it well “Many are impolite and have a very sickeningly unsophisticated vocabulary. There are hardly any members with any artistic vision or wisdom”.

Too bad this member took almost two months from registering to discover this.

Quick Review

on June 16, 2007 - 1666 Views

Looking back at some of the recent posts on Game Maker Blog and what, if anything, became of them.

It appears the GMC are playing catch up to the comments I made regarding criticising games in my post about rating the success of a game.

YoYoGames have been featured more often than previously, perhaps because of my experiences of their customer support.

Many of you agree with my comments about bad posts in the Website Announcements section of the Game Maker Community, however we all know some people will continue to construct badly written topics.

I think perhaps in the future I need to review more Game Maker creations since this is after all GameMakerBlog.

Listen to GMking

on June 15, 2007 - 2724 Views

GMking.org have released a pilot episode of their Audcast, that’s a podcast to you and me. At 31 minutes and 20 seconds it is quite a long pilot, or at least I believe so. The sound quality isn’t great but it was recorded from a Skype conversation over a distance of more than 6,000 miles. I also feel the podcast could have done with being cut down a bit.

Listening to half an hour of conversation between two people isn’t exactly exciting. Improvements could be gained by breaking the show up with jingles and by conducting interviews or playing pre-recorded reports.

But as far as I know this is a first for the Game Maker world, and of course it’s always good to give something a go.

It’s also interesting to hear people for the first time, especially as I had built my own pictures of the GMking crew and their voices in my head!
I’ve passed on my comments to low-voiced Eyas.

Listen here:

Customer Support

on June 15, 2007 - 3535 Views

My experience of customer support at YoYoGames.

I initially contacted YoYoGames (YYG) via their helpdesk to ask about how I would go about offering a GameMaker Pro licence as a competition prize. After about 24 hours my message was accepted, I assume with manual approval, onto their helpdesk system and I was e-mailed details of my helpdesk account.

Two days later I received a message from a guy at YoYo informing me that their helpdesk had been playing up and asking if I had received his previous response. I replied to say I had not got the message, and today YYG have marked my ticket as solved.

🙁

I stress this is my experience, I am not suggesting everyone has the same perception of the levels of support they have received.

Exams Over

on June 14, 2007 - 3405 Views

Totally off-topic and none Game Maker related but today I had my last exam. Therefore I should have some time to catch up with my list of sites and games to review, so Game Maker Blog may be updated more frequently from this weekend.

How not to promote your website at the GMC

on June 13, 2007 - 3358 Views

Marketing your site is quite obviously one of the most important aspects of running a website. Put simply, what use is a site without any visitors? The Game Maker Community lets members promote their sites in their forum signatures and by creating a topic about it in the Website Announcements section of the forum.

What not to do when posting your site in Website Announcements:

Lie about your domain – there is no benefit of doing this, it just makes you look <insert none offensive but still adequately derisory term here>.
Post a link to an unfinished site – what do you hope to gain from this, it is also against the forum rules. No link to an example of this, it happens many times a day.
Decide to make a new FreeWebs site after being told that FreeWebs is bad
Post a forum. Can’t you read?
Post a site without any Game Maker related content. Again, it seems that the young generation are become more illiterate (sounds like a thing old people would say – yuk!).
Include a long detailed history of the site. A short paragraph detailing what’s on the site and a link is sufficient. People don’t want to read your story of how you are working on your 6th clone game and are now head of your fifth global gaming empire, which by the way you aren’t.
Claim to be a registered company or anything similar. This is plain ridiculous – professional companies rarely use the grammar and spelling of people promoting ‘Incorporated’ sites. Unsurprisingly companies also decide against using poor ad-ridden hosts.
Reply to your responses with excuses such as you made the site in 6 minutes
Slag off around 50% of your potential visitors

Obviously this is not addressed at the typical Game Maker Blog reader.

GMLScripts.com

Giveaway! (all $20 of it)

Sophistication for beginners

Quick Review

Listen to GMking

Customer Support

Exams Over

How not to promote your website at the GMC

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