High Praise For Game Maker, in The Escapist: Game Design Sketchbook Options

[xot]

Jason Rohrer tries Game Maker for the first time as a rapid prototyping tool and falls in love.

Perfectionism was supposed to be a 1-week prototype. To implement the game, I used Game Maker, and this was my first experience with the tool (I programmed all of my previous games in C++ and used OpenGL or SDL for graphical displays). I was shocked at how much I accomplished in a mere 16-hours of logged development time, and I'll just state it flat out: Game Maker is an astounding piece of software.

Doing simple things in Game Maker is easy, while doing more complicated things is always possible. It's not that making a game in Game Make involves no programming, since defining object behavior is close to impossible without some sort of program-like construction (albeit a visual, point-and-click kind of programming). It's that all of the bookkeeping, such as tracking object instances and their states, is handled for you in a very elegant way. The other impressive thing about Game Maker, given its complexity, is that it seems to be bug-free. Everything just works, and it often works in a more intelligent way than you might expect. Now if only Game Maker was open-source, or at least platform independent, I'd be in heaven. Yes, this is a Windows-only game, alas, and the first of its kind to emerge from my stables.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/v...k-Perfectionism

[MMORPGguy]

woot.

maybe if there were more articles like this around people would take GM more seriously.

[geel9]

He seems to ignore the code part of it, though.

E:He did well, for a first-timer! However, he used a TON of unnecessary code blocks!

This post has been edited by geel9: Mar 16 2008, 03:16 AM

[Foxx]

have you test out any of his games, i like 'em (yes i know that sentence didn't make a lot of sense and probably wasn't worth writing)

[xot]

He seems to ignore the code part of it, though.

You probably did too for your first Game Maker game. As a very experienced programmer first encountering Game Maker, I stuck to D&D simply because it was such an novel and interesting approach to programming.

This post has been edited by xot: Mar 16 2008, 03:18 AM

[enterstations]

i actually program in VB6 and DX8 and i made an mmorpg, and i found the features in gm are very great and easy to understand

GML>other languages

[Potnop]

Yeah, but he basically didn't even mention coding exists.

[erthgy]

You should seriously consider reporting this stuff to YYG, you say "how will that help" *grunts at me.* Well, if you remember that YYG NEEDS AND WANTS Game Maker to be more used, then this would be a pretty good example of actual programmers that CAN and DO use GM as a useful tool, and that it is SUPERBLY POWERFUL. Rather then some idiots going "ooh Game Maker, that's dumb duhrrr."

[MMORPGguy]

maybe GM8 should be code only... MWUHUHUHUHAHAHAHHA!

[Rixeno]

@MMORPGguy: Well then GM wouldn't be easy for beginners, would it?

[Tarik]

Awesome, thanks for sharing, xot.

[Qwertyman]

I was hoping Ben Croshaw did a review