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YoYo Games Resource Sharing: Dismal

There have been a number of comments in reply to YoYo’s post about GameSpark, in which they endorse the video tutorials and game resource store on offer, critical of YoYo’s decision to support the third-party commercial store.

When Mark Overmars announced that he was partnering with YoYo Games for the future development of Game Maker one of the things he said that YoYo Games would be working on was a system for sharing resources. Yoyogames.com does include a very basic resource upload, browse and search function but it really is not, nor has it ever been, fit for purpose.

The search box is below the fold, lots of ripped resources are present, there aren’t even previews or screenshots of resources.  In the 3 years since the resources section of the site went live there have not been any visible improvements and the rating system has long been broken.

There are numerous third-party sites that list Game Maker resources, but these are never going to be able to attract the levels of support that a well implemented official resource sharing mechanism would.  Stencyl has the integrated StencylForge resource sharing area whilst Unity has its Asset Store. Game Maker has a neglected list.

Good games do not necessarily have to boast amazing graphics but I can’t see how making the sharing of game resources, libraries and tutorials easier could hinder the quality of games uploaded to YoYoGames.com

What do you think?

4 Comments

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  1. Yeah, I don’t really support the idea of sharing resources. The problem is that most times you are designing a game around what your character can do. If you go onto yoyogames and find a sprite sheet for a character then you are going to limit the game to what sprites that character has. If the sheet is rated high then it is probably too good for you to draw more frames of.

    However, if you don’t have resources, you could think up any character you want and use your own skills to create it, which makes sure that the style is consistent as everything is at your skill level.

    Plus it would just mean that there would be lots of noobish games all with the same sprites/backgrounds (the top rated ones).

    -Dan

  2. “Good games do not necessarily have to amazing graphics but I can’t see how making the sharing of game resources, libraries and tutorials easier could hinder the quality of games uploaded to YoYoGames.com”

    Using resources made by someone else(legal of course) doesn’t necessarily raise a game’s quality. I think the disadvantages are even greater, because of weird combinations of graphics(eg cartoony and pixeled), and things like that.

    If you use a resource, lets say, a character, with a walking and combat animation, from a sheet, you actually have to make your game completely using resources by that person(imo).

    I think resource sharing(except libraries and code) isn’t that good for a game’s quality.

    But that’s just my opinion.

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