GMKing’s sporadically released GameMaker Audcast Podcast is back with a fourth episode. Dan Eggers, a writer here and creator of GMTV, joins Robin Monks for a dicussion on GameMaker news from the past month.

Here are the topics covered in the second audcast of 2008:
Cage Match: 00:50
Loads of Game Maker mags: 02:18
G3D Effects library: 04:45
GMTV Merge with GMking: 06:26
Game of the Week: 7:27

This is the shortest ever podcast from GMKing and features background music for a short period of time – something not included in any previous episode.

4th GMKing Podcast released is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GMKing on openness:

In a post on the recently launched GMKing network blog Robin Monks, a co-editor of MarkUp, gives a brief insight into the decision making process behind the magazine.

Matthew from GameMaker Magazine:

The owner of GameMaker Magazine Matthew Haigh has launched his own blog on which he writes about his GameMaker projects and those of others. Like the magazine it could do with an extra proof read.

Blog watch is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I came across a preview of the imaginatively titled Monkey Island 5 at the Game Maker Community. The game is being built to demonstrate the AGEGaM (Adventure Game Engine for Game Maker) which was made by its creators.

I was interested in this for two reasons – first because I loved the first two original Monkey Island games and second because about 6 months ago I was wondering why no-one had yet created a decent point and click adventure engine for use with GameMaker. I also thought up with a better name for the one I planned to build but never did – GM PACE (Point And Click Engine).

As you can see, if you’re old enough to remember the original series, the game features sprites ripped from the real Monkey Island games. But instead of using LucasArts’ SCUMM engine the as yet unreleased AGEGaM is trialed. It is a good likeness and this short demonstration features Guybrush, Elaine and Stan.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in helping with the project, the creators are looking for people to make background images for the game.

Look behind you, a three headed monkey!

I’m rubber, you’re glue!

etc.

Monkey Island! is taken from: GameMaker Blog

As part of the agreement, GMking will provide resources and services to GMTV necessary to continue and improve upon their core goal: providing high quality, information-rich, audio-visual media to the Game Maker community. Additionally, some of the writers from the popular MarkUp Magazine, also produced by GMking, will be assisting in the writing and production of future GMTV episodes.

GMTV will complement and expand GMking’s services to the Game Maker community as well, making this a relationship that is truly beneficial to both sides.

Robin Monks, who represented GMking for the negotiations for this merger stated, “I think this will benefit the entire Game Maker community. By uniting forces, the newly expanded GMking Network will be able to produce even more content tailored to the Game Maker community.”

GMking is a thriving community of volunteers who produce content for indie game developers and users. GMking has served the game development community since 2004; and continues to produce relevant, quality material to educate and inform.

GMTV is a fast moving and informative Game Maker video podcast with a focus on producing quality content for users of the popular Game Maker game creation platform.

GMTV now part of GMking is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The show is, as before, hosted by MarkUp editors Robin Monks and Eyas Sharaiha. Topics discussed include the re-writing of the GameMaker runner in C++ (including “glog” abuse!), the insecurities of GameMaker and the release of the obfuscator. Also covered is the success of the YoYo Games competitions in revealing the extent of GameMaker users talents.

It isn’t exactly fun and games, and I think it does get a bit dull after a while – perhaps a musical interlude between each topic or some pre-recorded reports (such as for the competition results) could have provided some variety. However, it makes a good listen if you want to catch up with all the Game Maker news from the past few months.

3rd GameMaker Podcast is taken from: GameMaker Blog

A month after the launch of gmplanet clickthroughs from GameMaker.info had declined at planet still lagged far below gamemaker.info in popularity.

In the past month gmplanet has sent just 10% of the number of visits that gamemaker.info has sent our way, but I love it!

The RSS feed that gmplanet provides makes it easy to check the latest Game Maker related news (and some stuff that isn’t Game Maker related and probably shouldn’t be in there) in one place. I have the RSS feed installed on my iGoogle homepage.

The only criticisms I have is that the RSS is sometimes delayed in updating – meaning that despite a hard refresh [ctrl + f5] the feed still sometimes lags behind gmplanet.org. The only other issue is that sometimes news articles of the same story clog up the feed as seen in this screenshot below (taken a while back).

I love gmplanet is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Previously MarkUp has been my magazine of choice, but I haven’t really been happy with what has been going on their for the last couple of months. I’m not alone on this as fellow GMB writer tuntis recently left MarkUp and applied to join GameMaker Tech.

I still have a desire to contribute to a magazine though, and I guess to many the obvious choice would be GameMaker Tech. It is a rapidly improving magazine and has strong management, particularly Kay, who I regularly chat with. I’d be perfectly happy working with GMT and it would certainly be interesting to see how working with them differed from working at MarkUp.

However part of me feels that I should stick with MarkUp. After all I have been writing for them for a year now and they were one of the first sites I went to when I returned to the GameMaker world last year. Loyalty is all well and good, but do I really feel I could turn around the magazine? The simple answer is no, not from its current state.

Then my decision became more difficult. Game Maker Magazine may not have had the best start with its first two issues, but I feel my input here would make the most difference. Despite the shaky start I see potential in the magazine and I truly believe that come a few months it could be the main challenger to GameMaker Tech.

Of course another option is not to tie myself down to any magazine and instead submit articles freelance to magazines as and when I feel like it, or if I receive a request for a particular kind of article.

I think I will wait until after the next issues of GMT and GMM are released before making my decision about which way to go.

Which way to go? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

MarkUp has been notably absent as it normally releases to a pretty strict schedule at the start of the month. Whilst GameMaker Tech have been delayed following several days downtime at their forum. Still they plan to use Drupal as the CMS for their main site which I’m sure will please MarkUp’s Robin.

It has been quite a slow period for Game Maker news recently, without any magazine releases and no recent updates from YoYo Games.  YoYo’s ancient civilization competition now has less than 10 days remaining.

April Magazines is taken from: GameMaker Blog

This isn’t the first time that a site has tried to do this for GameMaker. There is already gamemaker.info, a site which Robin from GMKing describes as “flawed in it’s presentation”. Personally I find Simon Donker’s GameMaker.info a useful place to catch up with the latest news from GameMaker sites – for a start it is much easier to use it than go to the slow loading YoYo Games glogs – and it is also easy to modify.

I also use iGoogle as my homepage. A customised version of the Google search engine which also displays RSS feeds and widgets, although I use this more for keeping tab on news, sport and weather and my personal sites (vain I know) than GameMaker related matters. I do have a handful of other blogs on there, but it’s nice to have all the GameMaker stuff in one place – up to now this has been GameMaker.info. ((STOP PLUGGING THAT SITE!!))

The main difference between GMinfo and GMPlanet is that whilst .info displays only post titles, a description and link to external posts GMPlanet displays entire news articles on a single page – it is basically a blog which takes its posts from several sites. It’s basically a blog that takes the place of several sites.

Planet is a middle-man. It doesn’t create content it displays it. Kind of like YoYo Games and YouTube I suppose in the way they benefit from the work of others (this is not an anti-YYG post). The difference between these user generated content sites and GMPlanet is that often material found on YYG and YT cannot be found anywhere else – a member of the public has chosen to upload and showcase their Mario clone or happy slapping incident – whereas all the content on GMPlanet can be found elsewhere. On the sites from which it was taken.

.info sends a fair amount of traffic our way, it is the third biggest referrer to Game Maker Blog and we are also their most popular site. The biggest difference between the concept of the two sites is that .info results in a user clicking onto your site to find out the full story, whereas Planet shows the surfer the full story from the comfort of their own webpage.

Whilst it is too early to see the true effect that planet could have on GMB and other sites this isn’t a doomsday scenario, despite what I said yesterday. Individual sites will survive with traffic from existing users, links ins and from search engines. Unless of course the aggregator sites start achieving higher search rankings taking away surfers who would have otherwise found the original gmnews or gmtech website.

Why am I concerned about a possible decline in traffic? Firstly traffic is one of the few ways we can judge whether or not people like what we are doing and changes in traffic levels can help us decide if we are going down the right road. We also get feedback through comments, planet includes the textual content of our articles and not the comments form, and votes and sinks – again which can only be done on the direct site http://gamemakerblog.com. Obviously it is also better for us financially if someone views an article direct on our site because of the possibility of increased ad revenue. I will unashamedly admit that the income from GameMakerBlog alone covers all my hosting costs, however only just.

Obviously some sites saw the possibility of sites like planet coming, the GMTutorials.com posts for example only show the first few sentences of article content before trailing off because, says Robin, they have “set their rss feed to be ‘teasers’” before explaining that it is a technique used by publishers “to sucker users into their sites”. Fair enough in my opinion, but I actually think GM Tutorials are doing themselves a disfavour by providing so little of the article as a teaser.

It’s an interesting issue. One that I will certainly monitor in the future.

Interesting too is that whilst I was drafting this post at 11:30 pm on Friday night (don’t I know how to have fun!), a couple of people commented on the whole gamemaker.info/gmplanet issue. Firstly Blijbol as a response to the first mention of GMPlanet asking what was wrong with GameMaker.info and secondly Dan Eggers from GMTV who wanted to know more about the GMPlanet site and why I said GameMakerBlog was ‘doomed’.

Hopefully this post will have explained those questions.

GMPlanet Dilemma is taken from: GameMaker Blog