Game Maker Blog

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.

During last weekend there was game expo event in Szczecin (Poland), where guys from Polish community got their own stand. Promotion of GameMaker as game dev tool for programmers and non-programmers, presentation on stage for all visitors, games made in GameMaker playable on stand – that’s how it was looking. Mainly there was shown two games that are under development by Gear-Studio group: Alien Territory (online shooter) and Almora (RPG) which should be released next year. For visitors there was tournament every hour – for best frag score in Alien Territory there was special mug from Gear-Studio team with logo of their products. All promotional materials were made from GS own money, but stand, two 40” LED TVs and two PCs were sponsored (in total there was 6 PCs on stand for playing games, and Mac for presentation).

Next year the Polish Game Maker Community, GMCLAN, turns 10 years old, and it will be celebrated during SzczecinGamesShow, together with releasing Gear-Studio games. It’s probably the biggest non-official GM community.

At what was the third game expo in Szczecin, the GameMaker stand with Gear-Studio games and GameMaker presentations was visited by more than 20,000 people.

The theme for the 2011/2012 Creative Game Challenge has been revealed as ‘collisions’. This will be third game development competition for Dutch High School students organised by Mark Overmars’ Utrecht University.

Entered games are required to be made using version 8.1 of GameMaker and can be submitted either by an individual or a small team. As in previous years prizes are split between numerous awards, with this year seeing a total prize fund of €7,500.

Registration is open until March 1st 2012 at the Creative Game Challenge website (Dutch). The website also contains a hidden link to a couple of “secret” pages offering advice on how to approach the project.

Stencyl is to add options to their StencylWorks game creation tool to allow users to export and create native iOS, Android and HTML5 games.  Dubbed iStencyl details of pricing have not yet been released.

The GameSalad game creation tool last week added Android publishing alongside their existing iOS and HTML5 publishing options. Publishing to Android requires a Pro account which costs $499 a year.

Scirra recently posted about their anti-piracy strategy. Their post contains a nice .gif visualising the effect DRM has on paying customers which those who experienced problems with GameMaker 7 and 8s Softwrap will surely understand!