“As some of you might have noticed we have changed the Wiki to use the well-known MediaWiki software. Our hope is that the wiki becomes the best source of information about the use of Game Maker. Currently this information is spread all over the internet. The GMC stores a number of useful tutorials, some website store some tutorials and examples, there are some useful files in the resource section of YoYo Games etc. It is difficult to find and the information is often not updated and improved. The wiki is perfect for that.”

- Mark Overmars

A good idea. But there are already a few well established GameMaker wiki’s such as GMPedia and gamemaker.wikicomplete.info. Not sure they will be too pleased… Still, as the company behind GameMaker, is this not the kind of thing that YoYo Games should be doing? I’m sure some of you have strong opinions.

YoYo Games Wiki to Grow is taken from: GameMaker Blog

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.

YoYo Games Rating system to Change is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I must admit I am a little confused following the merger of The YoYo Games and Mark’s blog. The result appears to deliver a strange mix of YYG updates, GameMaker tips and requests to GameMaker users – and now apparently community news.

Bye-Bye GameMaker Blog? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Most of this criticism is about poor customer service and problems with the Digital Rights Management that is used to protect Game Maker 7.

YoYo Games’ relationship with users, in particular members of the GMC, has until recently been poor. Their infrequently updated glog did not address the issues that mattered to members and instead seemed to be looking far into the future.

Recently though that has all begun to change; it started with a long overdue upgrade of the Invision Power Board software used to power The Game Maker Community. Along too came a new server, effectively eliminating the MySQL overload errors that had in the past plagued the forum at popular times of day. A skin change made the forum look warmer and more welcoming, a reintroduction of post count and an increase in the size of Personal Mail inbox in response to member demands have made things better.

YoYo Games staff, Mark Overmars and in particular Sandy Duncan have also begun to post more actively at the GMC, something which ideally should have happened right from the takeover.

The dual communities of the YoYo Games forum and GMC don’t make sense, as tuntis wrote on Game Maker Blog, this is “decentralizing the community”. The YoYo Games forum appears to serve no purpose other than as a general chit chat area for what appears to be the less mature Game Maker users. I believe the official word on this one is that the YoYo Games forum is for gamers where as the GMC is for developers.

In February Sandy quietly mentioned on his blog that YoYo plan to invest $5M into the Game Maker software and their website in the coming years. Many members are disappointed at the lack of apparent progress with the development of Game Maker which has seen no new releases for nearly a year, despite the emergence of a game decompiler. It is also not specified how much of this funding will be invested into the Game Maker software as opposed to developing and promoting the YoYo Games website.

An attempt to take Game Maker cross-platform with work starting on a Mac version of Game Maker was also met with a mixed response with some users suggesting that YoYo Games’ time would be better spent improving the PC version instead of targeting what remains a very small market.

One universally popular move has been the two Game Maker competitions that YoYo have run, which with the results of the ancient civilization competition announced in early May will see YoYo having handed out $3,500 of cash prizes to users of the software. No other Game Maker competitions have come close on the number of entries received and value of prizes awarded.

Sandy has also made some frank admissions about YoYo Games writing on the GMC “I think, at times, that the DRM sucks and I think, always, that our customer support is terrible.” Many community members would have set that many months back, let’s hope that now YoYo Games are sure of their problems something gets done about this quickly.

This article was originally written for the MarkUp game development magazine, and was featured in issue 13.

YoYo and the Community is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I will take this opportunity to collate information about all of the recent Game Maker magazines. I will give my opinions on the output and will also talk to some of the people behind the magazines. Whilst I will not be rating the magazines as such I may compare them and bonus points will be given for FredFredrickson interviews.

GMTech

This is certainly a magazine on the up. Led by gamez93, who also writes for GameMaker Blog, GMTech have produced 11 issues and have recently undergone a dramatic design change.

There’s no FredFredrickson, but GameMaker Tech became only the second GameMaker publication to publish an interview with GameMaker creator Mark Overmars in their 10th issue.

MarkUp

As far as I am aware GMKing‘s MarkUp has released more issues than any other GameMaker magazine to date, with the 13th issue due for release later this month. It hasn’t all been plain sailing though, the current form of MarkUp launched in February 2007 however there had been a previous version of the magazine which flopped.

MarkUp was the first magazine to receive official recognition from YoYo Games. There is a FredFredrickson interview on pages 18-20 of issue 5.

It is widely accepted that GameMakerTech and MarkUp are the “big two” GameMaker magazines as they have large numbers of contributors and regular releases which many other magazines have not been able to match. Originally MarkUp focused more on the game development side of GameMaker whereas GMTech was a general community magazine, however in recent issues the boundaries have become blurred and both magazines focus on similar issues. People still have their favourites though…

Indie Game Central Magazine

Released its sole 23 page issue in May of 2007 with a rather unorthodox design. The text was quite hard to read both because of the fonts chosen and also because it appears that all text was converted to images prior to the creation of the pdf.

The future of the magazine died after a problem with the hosting. Drewdelz who lead the project writes “once the site went down it was a two month hassle just trying to get it back up. After we finally got it back and running, 3/4 of the staff had vanished, people lost intrest, and I was putting more of my time and efford into my own games. So the Mag stood no chance to come back.”

“Even still today, if I could put together a good sized and more devoted staff team, I’d still attempt to bring back IGCM.”

FredFredrickson interview on pages 17-18!

Gnazine

Containing a rather unfortunate word within its title this publication by nateistoraw/hardcoregamer24/prodigygm managed just two issues. The GameMaker content was, well, limited and of low quality – but there was only one writer. Nateistoraw does not have plans to create further issues “any time soon” which I’m sure will please some people.

Astonishingly for a GameMaker magazine Gnazine doesn’t feature any interviews in either of its issues.

GMFetch

“Its not about beating the competition – because weʼve already won!” [sic] screams the first issue of this “GameMaker Extension magzine” [sic] which contains just four pages of content despite having three contributors. It’s too early to see where this magazine will fit in, I guess we’ll just have to wait to see if a second issue appears and if it does whether or not it contains an interview with FredFredrickson.

Game Maker Magazine

By far the most original name, writes Philip Gamble of GameMakerBlog.com, this recently launched magazine is improving. The second issue in two months had 27 pages and looked very different from the first issue, however there has been criticism of the quality of writing which suffers from appalling grammar.

Issue 3 should be out around the 10th April and will be the first to be lead by new editor Broxter who is “one of the most hard working users” Matt has ever seen. FredFredrickson interview on pages 10 and 11 of the second issue.

Russell’s Quarterly

Russell’s Quarterly is very different from all of the other magazines that have been mentioned so far. Not only does it not soley focus on the GameMaker platform, in fact “GameMaker” is only mentioned once in the 74 pages of issue 1, but it is a one-man no-frills-design output. The first issue was Winter 2007, so perhaps we should have already seen a second release for Spring 2008….

There is no FredFredrickson interview and I wouldn’t have expected one either as this is so unlike anything else the GMC has seen.

Game Makers Data Magazine

If not the first GameMaker magazine John Hempstead‘s Game Makers Data Magazine was certainly the first big GameMaker magazine to receive widespread recognition from the community. Released under Hempstead’s “Morphosis Enter-Active” banner four issues were produced in the years 2003 and 2004.

As well as being significantly longer than any of the magazines around today, GMDM also featured an exclusive first look at GameMaker 5 and columns written by Mark Overmars. But I can’t locate an interview with Martin Crownover!

The majority of GameMaker magazines fail after just one or two issues because people don’t have the time to commit to such a project on a regular basis. Whilst I believe that having just one community magazine is not the ideal I do feel that too many people needlessly create their own ‘magazine projects’ simply so they can be in charge. The efforts of editors and contributors would be far better spent improving one of the existing stronger magazines rather than a one-issue-wonder (perhaps for the wrong reasons!).

So far Game Maker Magazine has produced 2 issues in 2 months we will just have to wait and see if they progress or, if like so many other magazines, they fail after just a few months in existence. Matt from Game Maker Magazine says that he sees GMM “as a long term Gamemaker Magazine like GMTech or MarkUp”. It certainly will be interesting if they have grown to the size of MarkUp/GMTech in 6 months or so time.

Game Maker Magazines is taken from: GameMaker Blog

On top of that I am now frequently seeing Mark Overmars and Sandy Duncan online at the GMC and they have been posting more frequently. I’m not sure what bought about this change but it is certainly for the good of the community – finally YoYo staff are commenting publicly on issues that effect Game Maker users.

Chronic has hinted at further changes to the GMC, anyone care to think what is coming?

• A skin changer has been mentioned by several members and administrative staff since the YoYo Games theme came along, but there have been conflicting responses to whether or not the feature is coming. Thankfully the new theme is not as bad as I thought it would be – it appears that YoYo have decided to keep the GMC similar to its previous format.

• Having 2 different forums really doesn’t help. The YoYo Games forum really serves no purpose, other than to display ads. It runs on inferior software, is slow loading appears to be more of a general chat forum than anything else. Why divide the community when it could all be together.

What would you like to see? What do you think is coming?

What next at the GMC? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Contry to what you may have read elsewhere YoYo Games Ltd was formed on October 15th 2004, although it did not trade for some time. The partnership/take-over of GameMaker (call it what you will) did not take place until a couple of years later however.

Mark Overmars does not (or did not on Jan 15th 2007) own any shareholding directly in YoYo Games, but instead The Game Maker Company (headed by someone other than Mark) owns a third of the issued shares in YoYo. At this time he was not a director of YoYo Games (I must also point out that he has not claimed to be a director at this time), there were four directors who are the other four shareholders.

As of 31st October 2006 YoYo Games Ltd had assets less liabilities of around £9,500 (all shareholders funds).

Do you care? Probably not, but I thought I’d share this with you. I would love to get my hands on the accounts for the year upto October 2007…

YoYo Games Accounts is taken from: GameMaker Blog

YoYoGames already has a rating system and reviews can be added to games so I really don’t see what the problem is with their open policy. YoYo is in effect a YouTube for Game Maker games, limiting submissions to a select few or imposing pre-moderation on all games uploaded would be counter-productive. Imagine a YouTube where you had to wait several days for a video to appear, and only a 100 select people could post video. It wouldn’t work.

No one is forcing you to play the low quality and incomplete games – the best games are much more likely to have high ratings or become featured anyway.

Quantity is Good is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The only exclusive I could find was an interview with Mark Overmars

“this is a huge exclusive, as the only other magazine or GM service he has done an interview with was GMDM (quite a few years back), “

Take that MarkUp.

GameMakerTech Exclusive Mark Overmars Interview is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Obviously the whole book isn’t on there but it will give you a good idea of what the book is like.

Related GameMakerBlog article: Free Game Development Books

GameMaker Book is taken from: GameMaker Blog