YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan has written a long post on the YoYo Games Glog in which he recounts recent achievements and provides an outline for the future development of the company.
The full post is well worth a read for the official word on all things GameMaker and YoYo Games Publishing related and amongst other information reveals the following:
- Game Maker Studio Edition, which will allow developers to export their creations to platforms including iPhone and Android publish them independently of YoYo Games, will not be released “with a rich feature set this year”.
- YoYo Games will have 12 employees at their offices in Dundee by the end of next month
- There will be a “new release” of Simply Solitaire this week (whether this is a minor update to the current version, the addition of new features or a completely new app based on Simply Solitaire, think Poker Squares, I don’t know).
- Integration with social networking features provided by OpenFeint will be coming soon to YoYo Games’ published Apps. OpenFeint was itself purchased for $104 million last month.
- Publishing of apps has been slower than anticipated due to the amount of testing it is necessary to perform before publishing to the iTunes store due to the long lead time between YoYo finishing an update and it being accepted by Apple.
- The YoYo Games store will “realistically publish fewer than 100 games a year”.
- Work has begun on identifying areas of YoYoGames.com that most need to be fixed. Very few changes have been made to the website since it first launched in 2007. In our March interview Sandy stated that this was one area that had lagged behind development elsewhere.
- Game Maker’s C++ runner will eventually be ported to more platforms
- Game Maker Studio Edition will unify the Mac and PC versions of Game Maker, provide access to the various C++ runners and feature a Game Maker IDE rewritten in C#
- Mike Dailly and Russell Kay are working on a HTML5 Game Maker product. However, in contrast to earlier comments by Mike Dailly which stated that a HTML5 export option would result in games running “just a bit pooh” on iPhone, Sandy writes “we’re hoping that HTML5 games developed in Game Maker will have superb performance and will also work well in browsers on Mobile devices such as Android phones and iPod Touches”.