Game Maker HTML5 Export – Addon for Pro Users

Over the weekend more information has emerged about the recent HTML5 proof of concept video showcased by YoYo Games.

Although at the time of the official blog post announcing the video YoYo Games had not yet decided how they would commercialise the Game Maker to HTML5 converter, yesterday evening Sandy commented stating “we have already assumed that the HTML5 version of Game Maker should be a product. Unlikely we’ll have a Lite version, more likely an add-on for existing, Pro users”.

On his blog Mike Dailly stated that the Poker Squares game demonstrated was “a standard Game Maker game converted “automatically” into HTML5.” He added that they had not rewritten the game to make it look any better on the web and that the version is the same as that currently available on iPad.

Regarding game security Mike has stated that each generated game “will be obfuscated differently”.

“The idea is to be able to get to as wide an audience as possible. If you can do that with a single game and multiple exports, then where’s the harm? It does mean other folk (like Linux users) could get these games as well.”

The HTML5 runner was the first written from scratch by existing members of the YoYo Games team. Russell Kay added “work on the Javascript compiler has given us more confidence with the prospect of compiling/translating GML into other languages and targets, we still have a few issues to overcome, the first one being turning all the Drag and Drop into pure GML script, this will help considerably with any further efforts on compilation”

Mike doesn’t see a public release of a GML to HTML5 converter as a threat to YoYo’s publishing agreements with Game Maker users. He blogged, “Running this on an iPad or mobile device is still gonna be slow – really slow. These devices aren’t optimised for this kind of experience, so don’t think that once this is out you can do your own iPad games. It’s just a bit pooh. This means our iOS and Android runner still has a place, and is still valuable to us. This also goes for windows and Mac though. Anything that will run in HTML5 should run MUCH faster natively. So native runners are still valuable there too”

Game Maker 8.1 should be the next major release by YoYo Games. Sandy has stated “Personally I’d like to get GM8.1 out of the door first and I usually end up getting what I want round here” and Russell “Any of our future efforts will hinge on getting GM 8.1 out, it will be the start of exciting things in the future.”