GameMaker Blog

Darren Poole has released his sixth issue of GMWeekly (mediafire dl) - one day late. This means that GMWeekly has now released as many issues as GameMaker Scope. If Weekly continues to release on-time it will have reached its 20th issue by the end of the year making it the GameMaker magazine which has released the most issues ever.

Obviously it should be noted that the magazines all have different release schedules, so we would not expect them each to release a certain number of issues per month. Russell’s Quaterly, for example, is actually ahead of schedule whilst GMWeekly are sticking to their promise of one issue per week.

From what I can see there appears to be a pattern in the release dates of magazines in their first few months. GMTech, MarkUp and Scope all took at least a months break after their first issue was released, then managed to produce several months of back-to-back releases (MarkUp released issues in 11 consecutive months!), before slipping to less regular releases.

Exceeding the expectations of some GMWeekly has managed to stick to its schedule of releasing every Friday before today.  Prior to the release today it has received around 85 downloads from its primary host per issue. The short issue length and limited degree of coverage (of GameMaker news which can be found elsewhere) may contribute to these relatively low download figures - however the magazine hasn’t even been around for 2 months yet, so given more time I expect recognition of the magazine to increase.

What are your thoughts on the regularity of magazine releases? Does it even matter?

Many people have moaned at the GMC about what they view as inadequacies with the rating system on YoYo Games. Whilst this is a relatively trivial matter for most of us the conspiracy of the so-called ‘downraters’ appears to have got under the skin of plenty of GameMaker users.

In a move that may please these users Mark Overmars has announced that the rating system will change and YoYo will move to a more traditional five-star ranking instead of the bizarre 6 star system they currently use.

…a good system to find the interesting games is indeed important and I agree the current system is not good enough. But we are working on it. We will soon go to 5 star rating and we will make changes to the browse pages to give better sorting possibilities. I will keep you posted.

We will be careful with the way we do the change. Clearly we want to increase the spread of rating, not narrow it. I cannot reveal the precise mechanism of the new rating system (I sound like Google here) but I probably will when it is all fully implemented. We will continue monitoring it and making changes when required.

- Mark [YoYo Games blog]

On another note why are these topics even allowed the GMC? We are constantly being told by the mods that the GameMaker Community is not the YoYo Games forum, and these are comments about YoYoGames.com not GameMaker.

If, instead of downloading GameMaker games in the traditional sense, you prefer to use YoYo Games’ InstantPlay technology you might be interested to know of a recent change at GMArcade.

GMArcade have updated their “Play Online” feature so that saved games are not wiped each time you restart a game. Describing the feature GMArcade admin homebrewpc wrote “Any files that have the extension .sav or whose filename starts with GMASAVE will be kept on the players computer. This way you don’t have to worry about save data being erased every time a user plays a game”.

A good feature, but I’ll stick to downloading games the ‘old fashioned’ way.

YoYo Games announced there 4th competition entitled ‘The YoYo Games: Save The Planet Competition’ which reminds  me of the comic that was featured GM Weekly issue 3.  This competition features the same rules and prizes that were in all the other YoYo competitions (thats a shocker) , or to quote YoYo directly:

“Same prizes, same rules, new theme.”

The competition page (with more details on this competition) mentions the idea of global warming several times (hint hint).

“Politics: Most of us at YYG believe there’s something to this global warming idea, but we’re not out to indoctrinate our gamers, or game makers. Whatever you believe, it cannot be denied that the debates themselves are important, decisions made here will affect all our lives. If you firmly disagree with the green message then feel free to make a game where the world must be saved from a bunch of crack-pot environmentalists.”

Read more…

In an interview published yesterday on The Auntie Pixelante blog 21 year old Jesse Venbrux, perhaps better known by his GMC alias of 2Dcube, announced that along with 2 of his classmates he has created a Flash version of his popular suicide game Karoshi.

The Flash version of Karoshi will be sold to the highest bidder, describing the process Jesse said “it’s really neat how it works. there’s a site where you can put up your flash game and sponsors can bid on it“.

Jesse also announced that he was considering making an iPhone-compatible version of the game, “I’m gonna talk with someone soon about doing an iPhone version“.

Karoshi and its sequel Karoshi 2 are both staff picks at YoYo Games and have been played over 50,000 times. I’ve tipped Karoshi Factory to win a prize in YoYo Games’ co-operation competition.

TIA Software, who previously suggested a 100-games-in-one idea, are holding a $100 “Limited Graphics” GameMaker contest.

The entrance criteria are as follows:

• Your game must only have 2 different colors in it. (your game may have different shades in the 2 colors you choose)
• Your game must be made of basic shapes (triangle, square, rectangle, circle, etc). If you want, you may have stick figures as characters.
• Your game must be made for this competition. (if evidence is found of your game existing elsewhere before your submission, you will be disqualified).
• You must be a registered member of the GMC to compete, and to pass a vote.
• The competition will be judged by the members of the GMC community.

No word is currently given as to how members of the GMC will judge the competition, but voting starts on November 10th.

For more information see the TIA Software website.

For the past 5 days the website and forum of the GameMaker Technology magazine have been inaccessible for readers of the magazine and staff members.

Explaining the situation at the GMC, GameMaker Tech editor gmjab wrote “Our host has unexpectedly closed without any noticed to all its registered users. We are trying to resolve this issue but we cannot guaranty that we’ll be able to retrieve our data.”

I guess that’s what comes from relying on small free webhosts…

Update: The website is now back online and can be found at GameMakerTech.info

Last week GMArcade added a new feature to their website which enables users to launch any game uploaded to their site from any other website using their “Play Online” technology.

This bypasses the need for a gamer to visit the GMArcade website as games can be launched from individual team websites or even, as GMArcade suggest, the GameMaker Community.

Whilst I am sure some GameMaker users will welcome this move, I fear this feature could backfire and result in increased bandwidth usage for GMArcade with no commercial gain.