Game Maker Blog

A new Game Maker magazine, named “The Independent Gamer”, debuted its first issue yesterday.

Issue 1 includes an article on game theory, an interview with Game Maker user Notcturne on the Game Jam, snippets of news, and obligatory GM game reviews. There are 20 pages of content in total, including the front and back covers.

You can grab a copy of the magazine for the rather ambitious fee of $4.50USD for a printed edition. Additionally, you can also freely purchase a digital copy, but with a registered account at MagCloud.

A mirror of the digital version on Dropbox has also been provided for those who wish not to subscribe to the MagCloud service.

The magazine has been developed by the “surviving members” of IndieGo magazine, who subsequently failed to make three issues of their previous endeavor.

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A beta version of Gravemaker Grave Maker HTML5 has been released by YoYo Games. The Zombie/Halloween themed RPG requires you to create an account to play but the process is pain free and currently does not use e-mail registration instead asking only for a username and password. Wonder if we can expect to see a Christmas themed release sometime soon?

Greg Froning has created a free GameMakerNews Android App. The App provides easy access to GameMakerBlog’s latest stories as well as a community area for discussions.

Roan Contreras picked up three awards for his GameMaker game Circle Speedster at last weekends Philippine Game Development Festival.

The Filipino bagged the prizes for Innovation, Best PC game and Best Indie Game at the event held at De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde in Manila.

Roan writes that the event was “the best night for me… ever, and another first for me!”.

Circle Speedster is a black and white puzzle game first released in March 2010. Trailer below the fold.

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Alarm bells: ESET blocks the link.

A Game Maker creation, released under the ‘Tools & Applications’ section of the Game Maker Community, was not been dealt with by staff at the website for several days despite alarm from users at the forum.

“Easy Ragdoll v1.0″ was published by GMC member Locknar, who released the program on the 7th of December, the same day he joined the website. He has denied that the file, a corrupt Windows executable that reportedly fails to run, was intentionally infected with a malicious trojan.

The file was reported as infected by multiple virus scanners and firewalls including ESET Smart Security, and online service Virus Total. It was tested by GMC member Dylan93 who alerted topic viewers of the potential dangers. A witness to the topic YellowAfterlife warned the virus may have password stealing capabilities.

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Vaporware; software or hardware that is announced and never released, nor officially cancelled. Or as I see it, the fate of most GM projects.

It is a sad truth. Many Game Maker users will announce tonnes of new games, applications, and concepts in their time at the GMC, but so many of those projects will never see it to the end of their development.

Rest assured, many of us are guilty of abandoning projects. Even I have trashed a lot of promising ideas because I got lazy.

Sometimes its as simple as apathy or disinterest in our games when we hit nasty bugs or technical flaws. Fortunately there are ways of commiting to your Game Maker projects. So to avoid joining the (overcrowded) graveyard of games that were never to be, here are some tips that helped keep me on track for some of my past and present game developments.

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• The pricing details for Stencyl’s iOS exporter has been announced. A $149 a year subscription will enable users to publish their games to the iTunes store providing they have an Apple Developer account. A free version exists but this watermarks creations and doesn’t allow for publishing to the store.

• Stencyl also recently nice promo on the BBC’s Click technology programme, positioning itself the best way to get started in game development – something I’m sure GameMaker would like to be billed as.

• Dutch game designed Kjell ‘t Hoen, who created Rick O’Shea whilst at YoYo Games returned to Holland after six weeks in Scotland yesterday. Flying in the other direction comes Piotr Gnys who arrived in Dundee earlier today from Poland.

• Quick catch-up interview with the creators of Dustforce. The prize-winning GameMaker created prototype is being rewritten and should be available on Steam from the middle of January 2012. IndieGames.com also have a post on this which contains a gameplay video.

• The website of indieFunction, who had announced they were going on hiatus until the January 2012, is back online after earlier being suspended.  Hopefully this means that the publisher of indie(Magazine) will indeed return and continue to release new issues.

During early December we saw a surprising image of what appeared to be a port of Game Maker to Linux. Yet the excitement YoYo may have wanted to build, using the screenshot of the program running on a Fedora distribution, may not be manifesting itself as strongly as they had hoped.

I for one saw nothing but another opportunity for Game Maker Studio to be delayed when I saw this announcement. And I don’t believe I am alone in this point of view. Aside from Studio, YoYo are already having to deal with PC spin-offs of GM, such as the HTML5 edition. And lets not disregard the ol’ faithful Standard edition.

If we all sit back and take a moment to recall Game Maker history, there was a time when a port to Mac was the “big plan of the future”. It had Macintosh users purched on the edges of their seats, regularly looking for news of the release. And then out of nowhere a good year or more after the announcement, out plopped a half backed, outdated port for Mac that left few impressed. GM4Mac has grown to be a little better over time, but it still needs work, and fast. So why exactly are YoYo trying to cover more platforms when they haven’t refined their last endeavor?

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YoYo Games have released a screenshot of the GameMaker IDE and a GameMaker game running on the Fedora 15 distribution of Linux. This is a ported version of the three year old GameMaker 7, using the Game Maker for Mac Lazarus codebase rather than the latest 8.1 derivative.

Writing on Twitter Russell Kay stated that YoYo Games are looking at the possibility of getting the GameMaker maker, or IDE, running on the $25 RaspberryPi computer which is soon to be placed on sale.

The latest version of GameMaker is currently only available for Windows.