Gamemaker Goddamn

[guest509]

Recent updates to the Gamemaker scripting program have fucked almost beyond repair the engines I've created.

The engine I wanted to use for my 7DRL, which I put together during last year's 7DRL, are now obsolete.

So I either use an archaic and unsupported program or I rebuild my engine with the new Gamemaker: Studio. I dislike either option. But it's better than learning the T-Engine or Python.

The good thing, I guess, is that my new engine will be a ton faster and more portable to everything (web, mac, windows, windows 8, android etc...)

It will also have an easily edited sprite sheet, which I wish every game had.

Still. I was looking at a very easy peasy 7DRL this year, about 3 days of work for a game my nieces could play. Now I'm looking at another 2-3 days to rebuild the engine. Lame.

[Quendus]

It's sad that they don't value backwards compatability more.

[guest509]

Yeah. There were certain issues with the old way of doing things that were causing incompatibilities or something. Have to expect that when you are going from a windows only design to one that supports many operating systems with the same code base.

No biggie. I'll clean it up and go from there. It looks like the messaging system was the issue, which can be cut out of the engine easily.

[theloon]

Yeah.  Game Maker has never been the same after Overmars gave up control.  I still use GM 5 because it plays nice with WINE.  I have a friend who uses Studio and even HIS recent projects get broken by updates.  The final nail for me was the hack-ey iOS support and weak support for Ouya.

[guest509]

Yeah. T-Engine or Python + Libtcod are looking good.

[CaptainKraft]

There are some alternatives to GameMaker that you could try. Of course, you would be learning a new engine but the transition from GameMaker to another graphical engine would probably go more smoothly than going from a graphical engine to writing your own engine. You could also support open source projects by using their software instead of YoYo's proprietary software.

ENIGMA is a project that is meant to be an open source alternative for GameMaker and many pre-Studio games made in GM can be compiled using ENIGMA. It also produces faster games than GameMaker and works on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Another good option is Godot engine which recently went open source. It was used by a game development company to create their games and seems to work really well. Godot has 3d and 2d capabilities and it is also cross platform.

It's too late to use one of these for 7drl but it would be great to see more people embracing open source projects. Especially those projects that make a point to allow their software to run on many platforms. Good luck!

P.S. This might not be of interest to you, but one of the major reasons I don't like GameMaker is their spotty history. The other reason is that they don't support running the engine in Linux.

[guest509]

I'll likely switch to T-Engine after this.

[Zireael]

T-Engine is a good choice - just look at Zizzo's ToME 2 port, for example.
The only modules which have compatibility problems now are really old ones, made for beta 20 or something.

[guest509]

I think the big things for me, Z, are 3 things:
1. I'd like my stuff to be truly open source, with Gamemaker you probably need to buy the program to do much with my games. You can see and use and do anything you want with anything I make, no problem, but to compile anything you need to spend money. The free version won't compile my games.

2. Gamemaker's increasingly money driven nature since the buy out (sell out?) has been alarming. Used to be geared towards noobs, with advanced functions for pros. Education was the focus. Now it's trying to be Unity or something, I dunno. It used to be that the free version was almost fully functional, the only real limit was that when you ran a game the loading screen said 'made with gamemaker' or some such.

3. Engine: I can make my own engine, sure, but I prefer not to. I'm not a programmer. I'm make games. Programming is a secondary skill, just like visual art is a secondary skill. Sure wish I was good at one of those 2 skills though. 

[UtilityFrog]

I've played around with GM a bit recently (read: I've followed through some of the tutorials). I got it with the recent free giveaway. So, my impression of the product is based on it's most current state and not how it was in the v8 and older versions. The following points are my mostly disconnected impressions, and I admit to not having spent that much time with the engine:

• The interface feels really janky and flaky and overall poorly organised. Just having tabs for multiple code editors would improve it a lot. Some elements of the interface in the default dark theme are almost invisible. The theme however looks pretty good.
• On the pricing, I don't think it's too unreasonable. Assuming you only want to target desktop (minus linux) the fully featured version is $100. Compared to Unity at $1500 or whatever it is, this is a bargain.
• GML is just kind of icky. Coming from experience with Java (which despite it's faults i would at least describe as a solid language) and Python, GML just seems kind of primitive. I mean, proper short-circuit evaluation isn't in the language yet, but will be there in the upcoming 1.3 release.
• While GML is icky, the built in API seems to be quite extensive and wholly geared around 2d sprite based games.
• The impression I get from their tech blog is that they're trying to position GM as a more serious professional game engine. They seem to be aware of some of the limitations and awkwardnesses of the engine and are trying to address them. As I said before, they're introducing proper short-circuit evaluation and there was also a big post on them re-doing the way surface rendering works so that it's more sensible and also works the same cross platform.
• As far as I'm aware GM is one of the few (only?) entirely 2d focused game engines around (yes I know there are a lot of 2d frameworks around but I'm talking about engines). I think its the closest thing the 2d world has to a Unity equivalent. Having said that, Unity (my only other point of comparison as far as engines go) is a far more solid and well designed engine. In particular, scripting in C# is far superior to using GML.
• The most troubling thing about GM is the DRM debacle in late 2012 that CaptainKraft pointed out. That was really quite sickening.

[guest509]

Yes there was a big shakeup then, they have since dumped the company that was handling licensing if I'm not mistaken.

The old v7 and v8.1 Gamemaker's were nearly identical in practical terms to what we have today but they only targetted Windows. The interface was the same. The changes have been mostly under the hood, a different color scheme for the interface is the only thing you would notice until you see that it runs a bit faster and it has the ability to target different platforms now (after a complete internal rewrite I think).

GML does what it is supposed to do. No complaints there.

The old windows only v7 cost $20, I got v8 for $29.99. Spelunky was written with that program.