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Table Of Contents This Issue It's truly amazing how fast time really goes. This time last year, GMTECH had released it's first issue. Look at us now, we have released our 10 th issue and are the longest current running magazine. GMTECH has now set a goal, a goal that we thought wouldn't be accomplished back when issue 4 was in production. But enough about how far we've come, let's talk about what we have in store for you. This issue we've got a number of great exclusives which you will want to check out. First we've got a preview of Barnstormer Beta 2 created by the BlueBind Development Team, and an interview with Jesper about the game. Next we have a preview of the latest version of Conflict Arcade developed by Rhys Andrews. We then have a exclusive interview with Mark Overmars, the creator of Game Maker, about the future Game Maker has. Finally we have a preview of the new MusicLib website and some insight into some new games. If that's not enough, this issue also has 9 casual articles and 7 development articles which will provide excellent reading material for you. So what modifications come with this issue? Well there are a few. For issue 10 we have given the magazine a colder, frosted look. We have introduced results for the User Opinion article and have added a new section: “Exclusives”. However we have some bigger news that isn't related to changes inside the magazine itself. As of issue 10, we have introduced a new service: GMTECH Wiki. This service is aimed at providing some of the magazine content online and allows for it to be commented on. Finally we have changed the website's host and moved our forum from the IPB software to the SMF software. What's next? Well we'll have to see what 2008 brings. We hope that 2008 will be a good year for Game Maker with it's upcoming updates. As for the rest of us Game Maker users, we should all aim to produce higher quality games. Doing so could raise the reputation of Game Maker and make it an even more popular game development tool. Lastly check out our slogan competition on page 38. By just making one banner you could earn yourself $5. Please send us your feedback from this issue. Gmjab Editor
1. ARTICLES What's Going On.....................................................................2 Beginner's Guide to the GMC..................................................3 2D Games – Are They Outdated?...........................................5 Tools of the Trade..................................................................5 10 Ways to Stay Motivated.....................................................7 Increase the Replay Value of Your Game...............................8 The Problem with Online GM Games......................................9 Clichéd Gaming.......................................................................9 Game Maker ActiveX – Your Active choice?..........................10 Mini-Games in Games...........................................................10 User Opinion-What do you think about GM porting to Mac?.12 2. GMDEV Making Better Game Graphics..............................................14 Level Design.........................................................................15 Why and How to use Surfaces..............................................16 Environment Variables..........................................................17 Create your own simple language in GML.............................17 Tutorial: Auto Write Text......................................................20 Tutorial: Arc Angled Text.....................................................20 Tutorial: List Files.................................................................21 Tutorial: Highlight................................................................22 Pixel Tutorial........................................................................22 Weapon Spriting with Paint Tutorial.....................................23 3. EXCLUSIVES Exclusive: Barnstormer BETA 2............................................24 Exclusive: Interview with Jesper about B.S..........................25 Exclusive Review: Conflict Arcade........................................27 Exclusive Interview with Mark Overmars..............................28 Exclusive: MusicLib...............................................................30 Insight Into: CSW.................................................................30 Insight Into: Oi.....................................................................31 Insight Into: Chalk...............................................................32 Insight Into: Schism.............................................................33 Insight Into: Purple..............................................................34 Insight Into: HexBall............................................................34 4. GAMES & REVIEWS Review: Megaman Paradise..................................................35 Review: The Demon Within..................................................36 Review: Pure Action CTF......................................................37 5. EXTRAS New Year's Resolutions.........................................................38 Money Giveaway...................................................................40 The Game Maker Race Results.............................................40 Comic....................................................................................41 Adverts.................................................................................42 Closing..................................................................................43
Staff
Gamez93.......GMTECH Owner gmjab............Magazine Editor Rup13.............Assistant Editor Medieval................Researcher GMmarine..............Researcher mememe.......................Writer TheMagnitude...............Writer Polystyrene Man............Writer Bendodge......................Writer
HalfMillennium..............Writer Christian Sciberras........Writer the9thdude...............Reviewer Paul23......................Reviewer Hiyukantaro.....Tutorial Writer Bob–11500K........Comic Artist NAL......................Proofreader eagleprof..............Proofreader
Online Website...............www.gamemakertech.info (gmtech.vlexo.net ) Wiki............www.gamemakertech.info/wiki/ (gmtech.vlexo.net ) Forum.....www.gamemakertech.info/forum/ (gmtech.vlexo.net ) Email............................................gmtech.magazine@gmail.com
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What's Going On GM Tech: Wiki The introduction of the GM Tech Wiki has come, there has been a gap in the top right corner of the GM Tech Website for a while, but it is now filled with the link to the Wiki, as planned a few months ago. The point of the Wiki is to allow you to view certain bits of content without having to continuously open up the whole issue. We also added it so that game/program creators can directly link to the review of their application, allowing game players to see how good it is. Furthermore, each piece of content that is on the Wiki has a separate ‘Comment’ system, where everyone can comment on each article, and have their questions answered by the writers of the article or review. Content will typically be added 5 –10days after the issue is released, and will not contain any images, so if you want the full formatting, you will have to check out the PDF.
GM Tech: GM Race Is Finished Since it started we all thought that it will be a great contest for many to enjoy and take part in. Luckily, we were right. GM Tech and MarkUp decided to join forces to create the ultimate contest – The GM Race. After head-to-heads and voting stages, we can reveal to you the winner of the contest. Turn to page 38 to find out the winner.
GM Tech: Staff Changes Over the last few months, there has been a lot of changes to the team members, some have quit due to giving up GM, or not having time to focus on the magazine, and others have joined, looking for new challenges to write and to entertain you. The staff list now reads as:
YoYo Games: Contest, Contest, Contest! Over the last few months, members of the YoYo Games team have been asking for us to vote for them in various contests. As always, the GMC was ready to lend a helping hand, and they got straight over there. However, someone was just a little bit too overexcited, and voted numerous times in one contest, breaking the rules.
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gamez93 gmjab Rup13 bendodge TheMagnitude paul23 Polystyrene Man HiyuKantaro the9thdude GMmarine mememe Bob - 11500k Medieval Christian Sciberras keysle NAL eagleprof
GM Tech: New Site and Forum Any of you who have read GM Tech Magazine for a long time, and visit the website and forum, will know that we have made a lot of changes in order to bring to you the best possible experience, so here are a few more… Our host was always going down from time to time, so we decided that the best thing to do will be to move host, so you can now access the new GM Tech website via this link http://www.gamemakertech.info , however it may take some time for the NS to fully update, so you may still see the old website. If you do, then you can visit the website on the sub domain – http://gmtech.vlexo.net. Not only do we have a new host, but we also have a forum system, so we host the forum under the domain, giving a more professional feel. We were unable to install a backup of the old forum onto the new forum, so you will first need to register before you can make contributions. Enjoy!
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Hopefully we will be back again next year, giving away more prizes. GM Tech: A Small Break Instead of releasing issue 11 at the start of February, we will be taking a break. GMT will be spending this extra time developing our magazine design further for 2008. So you can expect to see the next issue around March.
Because of this, on Dec 13 2007, YYG was disqualified from the contest, however a mere one day later, Mark Overmars posted ‘The people at Mashable have decided to move YoYo Games directly through into the final voting round, without having to pass through the current round.’ That’s the world on competitions for you. YoYo Games: Winter Contest The deadline for submissions for YYG Winter Contest entries ended a few days ago. There was just under 232 submissions, all of their creators hoping to scoop one of the large cash prizes (The winner receives US $1000, the second place US $500 and the third place US $250). There was much discussion about the rules, and how they will pick the winning game, many questions have been answered, but a few still remain in the air. Considering it’s the first contest, it's been a quite good one. If you missed this one, don’t worry, there is always next time. Pure Action CTF Source Discount For a limited time only you can get the source to Pure Action CTF for $5($20 off). To buy the source simply contact dmitko via PM or email with the promotional code below in your message. dmitko will then provide further instructions to donate the $5 via PayPal. Once the donation has been processed, you will receive an email with a link to the source. So get in quick before the offer ends. You can find a review of PACTF on page 33. Promo Code: “GMTPACTFDISC5”
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Beginners Guide To The GMC By bendodge Introduction The Game Maker Community is a very exciting and helpful place, but a new member shouldn't just jump in and start posting. Very large communities like the GMC must enforce a rather strict set of rules to maintain efficiency and order. The very best way to learn the ropes is to read the forum for about a week before you post anything, but nobody wants to do that. So here is a brief guide to help get you started. Rules There is a whole separate sub-forum for all the rules and regulations of the forum, and you are supposed to read them as well as the rules for each sub forum before posting there. Below are the three rules most commonly violated.
Signatures A signature is the little box underneath every post you make that always displays the same content which you can set in your control panel. Signatures are usually used as your personal advertising space but there are limits on how obnoxious you can make them. Signatures have a size limit of 550x150 and the golden rule is that they shouldn't annoy people. Moderators always have a right to remove or edit your signature and complaining about it will not accomplish anything. Special links and images that do things like log you out, give you points for a game, or show connection information (IP address, ISP, etc) are not allowed. Just try to keep it sane.
Q&A Asking a question in the Novice or Advanced sections is the fastest way to get unstuck but it can't solve everything. You should not ask questions like “how do I make a MMORPG?” That's what tutorials are for. Questions should be very specific and provide plenty of background information to help others help you. If you are a new user, you should probably post your questions and answers in the Novice Q&A first, instead of jumping to the Advanced Q&A. Unless you really know what you are doing and have made several complete games your question probably belongs in Novice. One thing that never belongs in Advanced is a question that starts with “is it possible”. It's not easy medicine to take, but most people (including the Author) learn the hard way sooner or later.
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Avatars Avatars are the little images to the side of your posts. As with signatures, you don't have to have one, but most people use them because they makes you easier to recognize. Avatars can't be more than 64x64, and naturally must follow the decency rules enforced on the rest of the site. The best avatars are not ones that you get from a fan game site but ones that you make yourself. Your own work will express you better than someone else's. And speaking of fan game sites, or any external site, make sure that the site allows hotlinking of images or your avatar won't show up correctly. Double Posting Double posting is when you you post two or more posts in a row. It is generally not allowed but there are a few times that this is acceptable. One is when you are asking a question in a Q&A forum and you have not had an answer after three days. (You really do need to wait three days, and this is enforced.) You can also post if you have some information or an update to add. The only other time you can double post is in a game topic when you have released a new version of your game. Far better than double posting is editing your previous post. This can be done by clicking the small Edit button at the bottom right of your post. The Community The Community subforum is for general discussions, sort of like an on-topic chat. You must keep your posts on topic and the topic must be Game Maker or GMC related. Most topics here are related to current events, game styles, forum problems, programming techniques, demographics, etc.
One thing that shouldn't be here is a host of topics complaining about problems with Softwrap. Nobody likes Softwrap, but posting in the community forum about it will get you nowhere. Only YoYo Games and Softwrap can help you with registration. Also, introductions and farewells are not allowed in the Community subforum. It's not because people don't care it's because there are far too many people on the forum to allow that kind of thing (imagine what would happen if even a small fraction of the membership started posting such topics). If you want socialization, get it by joining satellite communities such as the Game Maker Off-Topic or 64Digits. Another issue that you shouldn't complain about is server error messages. The GMC is run on a dedicated server and it is already expensive to maintain. If there was an easy fix it would have been done.
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Beginner's Guide to the GMC (Continued) WIP and Creations So, you've made your fabulous game and want someone else to try it? Here's the place to put it. If your game is complete, it belongs in Creations; incomplete games belong in the WIP (Work in Progress) section. Games that get the most replies are usually games with well-constructed topics. Rhys Andrews has written a complete guide to this, so I'll just mention some basics. ● ● ●
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Use screen shots (the more the better, but don't put huge images directly in the topic – use links). State the name, version, objective and controls. Be very polite and use correct grammar and spelling. This will have a major influence on your topic. Make sure that you use a reliable file host and avoid hosts that don't provide direct links. Use an attractive topic layout with a banner and sections marked off with the Drag 'n' Drop icons. (Click Show All under the smilies list when composing your topic).
Do not ask to become a staff member. This is a fast way to guarantee that you will never be one. Senior Members These are the people who have been around for a while and know the other regulars. Almost everyone enjoys delusions of grandeur after a few weeks on the forum, but you will quickly realize that it takes months or years to become wellknown. If and when you become a regular, you will know it because other regular members know you by name. Don't wait around for it to happen; start coding and helping others if you want attention.
Remember, the key here is a to cater to your players as much as possible, and don't expect more than a page or two of replies.
Sometimes someone will start a popularity contest in the Community forum. Just report them and ignore them. The GMC does not have a user ranking system, and it is not an accident.
Staff The Game Maker Community has a small army of admins and moderators dedicated to keeping a clean house. (You can see a complete list by clicking the link at the top of the “Board Statistics” box on the front page).
It's very tempting to PM a well-known person and ask for help. Some will help you, others won't. Usually people that don't mind being PMed will say so in their signature. Your best bet is almost always to ask your question in a Q&A forum, so consider that your first resort.
Moderators are tasked with patrolling all the topics throughout the forum and responding to reports. They are usually helpful if you PM them a question, but it is very bad etiquette to ask them for coding help. That's what the Q&A forums are for.
Close The Game Maker community is a fun and friendly place as long as you do your part to be a good citizen. This means abiding by the rules and helping others. So invite your nerdy friends and enjoy the wonderful art of game making.
Also, do not PM or email Mark Overmars with anything that is not very important. He will not answer scripting questions of any kind. You would contact him if, for example, you found a security hole or a bug in GM.
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A popular form of entertainment is arguing with staff members about warnings and other staff decisions. This is not very effective and will only get you laughed at. So don't do it. In the unlikely event that there is a gross misunderstanding, you might very politely PM a moderator and explain your situation, but one appeal is all you're likely to get.
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2D Games – Are Outdated? By GMmarine
They
The father of 3D games, 2D games, is sadly starting to show it's age, in the same way as your dad. 2D games are quite simply, getting too old. Everyone one has got to die someday, but this is not the case with 2D! 2D isn't human so it doesn't have to die. In my opinion 2D games have got a long life ahead. But to understand why 2D hasn't died yet, and are far from being dead, I will lay down the facts for you. At first we must get a little background information on 2D games. The first game to enter the 2D genre was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham. This game's layout was similar to tennis, or a kind of ping-pong, which involved two players trying to get the ball past the other person's slider. To us, this isn't really a game, but this game is prehistoric and was great at the time. But as we all know, 2D games have grown up since then, as Game Maker shows us. Now that we have a little background information, we can proceed. Of course we all know that 2D has its weaknesses, but most importantly it has its strengths too. The best one in my opinion is that 2D games are easier to program. Because there are only two dimensions.
These dimensions consist of the x axis, which corresponds to the horizontal line, and the y axis, which corresponds with the vertical line. 3D as we know has the third dimension, or Z-axis, for depth. Another one of the major points is that graphics for 2D games are usually far easier to create. Therefore less time is needed for the creation of graphics, which can then be put into other aspects of the game. Another major point is that the overall cost to create 2D games is reduced. This is because the company pays less for the graphics artist, coders, etc... because they have to work less time to get the game completed. Because of the reduced costs, they are more favorable for indie game developers. It is one thing to just list the strengths of 2D, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any weaknesses. The major weakness is the illusion of reality that can be created by a 3D game. Our world is 3D, not 2D. So it is quite obvious that 2D games create less of an illusion. We want the adrenaline, the feel, the sense that we are actually there in the cockpit of a plane or the battlefield of World War II. The other weakness is that if you fail, it hurts more financially. As I said earlier, 3D games are more costly to make, and if your game doesn't do well, you end up losing far more money than you would have if you had made a 2D game. So, quite simply, 2D games are not outdated, and 3D games are not the king... yet. I expect a long life ahead for the 2D genre.
Tools Of The Trade By bendodge
Many Game Maker users are people who love to program, but making a game isn't all programming; you must also have a good batch of resources. Some people are fortunate enough to have family members or friends who have a knack for making artwork and sounds but most of us don't. This means that we will either have to shell out cash for professional designs or bite the bullet and make our own resources. But you can't make resources out of nothing – you must have some tools. First, be warned that there are no “silver bullet” tools that will make everything a breeze, although there are some free tools that can make the job considerably easier. Graphics Most people (including me) use two types of sprites. For pixel art I use Game Maker's built in editor. I am not a very good pixel artist, and the built-in editor does everything I need it to. For high-color sprites, backgrounds and tiles I use GIMP. GIMP is a free image designer and editor that is the open-source counterpart of Photoshop. GIMP isn't as good as PS, but PS comes at a hefty price, and GIMP meets most standard graphics needs. Although I rarely work with video graphics, I do possess a few tools that I like for this category. For video editing I use Wax 2.0, which is a fairly simple graphical editor. For
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video conversions I use SUPER, which isn't really a video converter. It is actually a front-end for a suite of free codecs and encoders and it greatly simplifies all types of video conversions. A powerful addition to SUPER is AviSynth, which has an surprisingly robust (albeit complex) scripting language that allows editing, muxing, etc. I also use AVIQuick for assembling AVI files from bitmaps. Occasionally I need 3D models, and for this I use the simple tool Anim8or. Anim8or's capabilities are rather modest, but it's one of the easiest tools for beginners (like me). Advanced modelers will probably prefer a more powerful tool such as Blender. Sounds For editing sound effects, Audacity pretty much does it all, but I recommend that you download some additional plugins if you use Audacity (especially if you want to do voice effects). You definitely need to get the basic pack of 90 effects here . If you run Linux, you can also install the swhplugins package to get Steve Harris' massive library of plugins. For music, the free AnvilStudio is worth considering, but remember that composing music requires more than just a cool tool – you must have musical talent.
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Tools Of The Trade (Continued) Misc These are some recommend:
miscellaneous
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tools
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Particle Designer is invaluable when making particle effects, because you can instantly see the results of your changes. It outputs GML scripts that you can import directly into your game with little or no modification. Save early and often with this tool though, because it is notoriously buggy and unstable. InnoSetup, along with some third-party addons like ISTool, will let you make professional installers with powerful capabilities and no nag screens.
Paint.NET is, as the name implies, a Paint replacement. It isn't quite as powerful as GIMP, but it has a more traditional interface that some people will prefer.
HelpMaker and HelpNDoc are the only free CHM tools I have ever been able to find. Their interfaces can be a bit daunting at times, but it is definitely worth the effort to include a polished help file. HelpNDoc is only free for personal use, so be careful about licensing issues. HelpMaker is totally freeware and includes a handy button maker tool.
Beneton Movie GIF and Skeleton are two animation tools made with Game Maker. BMG is an extremely powerful animation tool that is almost totally unrivaled in the freeware world. Unfortunately, it is a resource hog, so don't try it on your Windows 98 machine.
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Skeleton is a stick figure animator that allows you to set images for different bones of your skeleton and then create and render tweened animations. I've also asked some makers of popular games what they use to create their resources. I hope this provides an interesting insight for you. Interview with FredFredrickson GMT: You have made some very polished games which have enjoyed great popularity with players. What are some of the tools that you use for making your game's resources, specifically graphics and sounds resources? FFN: “I'd say that two of my most used tools for graphics are Photoshop and Truespace. I've been using PS for a long time now, and I am very comfortable with how it works and am able to do just about whatever I need with it. Truespace has been a great help as well, allowing me to create models and animations quickly and easily. Combine the two (with a little help from UV Mapper, Marzipan, and some other tools), and you've got a nice graphics suite to work with. As far as sound goes, I mostly use the utilities that came with an old sound card of mine, and find my sounds on findsounds.com or sounddogs.com. Sounddogs.com isn't free, but you can get a great deal of quality sound effects for under $20.” GMT: So would you recommend that people trying to make high-quality games buy sound resources, instead of trying to make their own? FFN: “Well, if you're good at making sound effects, I'd take that route for the things you know you can do - anything that might net you some experience in a field you are interested in is a good thing, as far as I am concerned. Of course, not all of us have good recording equipment or guns to fire off in a sterile recording environment, so for those times, buying sound effects may be the right choice.” GMT: Is there any advice you would give potential buyers as far as license types go? FFN: “If you're going to pull an image or sound off the Internet, make sure you read the licensing agreement carefully (if there is one). Especially if you're planning on selling your creation.” Interview with Rez: GMT: Hello and thank you very much for being with us today. We're talking about additional tools for making games. What are some of the tools you use to make your games' graphics and sounds? REZ: “Game Maker's built-in sprite editor has always been my weapon of choice for pixel art, although I do occasionally use Paint Shop Pro for various effects and tile wrapping. I'm not really a musician or foley artist but I think Audacity is great for home brew sound FX.” GMT: Do you ever purchase sound effects? REZ: “Never. I figure those sound FX sites are meant for flash and the sounds they carry aren't very fitting for a GM game.”
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10 Ways To Stay Motivated By Polystyrene Man Motivation seems to be a common problem for anyone working on a game. Everyone has their high standards, the picture of a perfect game engraved in their mind. But how is it possible to stay motivated throughout game development, especially when other game ideas start to creep in? Here are some strategies:
Don’t set the bar to high The most paralyzing thing you can do is set the standards too high. Of course, sometimes it’s impossible not to think of how great your finished product will be. Don’t let yourself get away with this: Save the excitement for when the game is actually done. The effects of setting the bar too high are far-reaching, as well. In addition to slowing game development, they keep you from improvising during game development. Some games were destined for a different course (potentially improving motivation); with a predetermined idealistic goal, this is impossible. Attack it in pieces Games are made of small parts. There’s the movement engine, the AI, the physics engine, the HUD, and so on. It’s best to fine-tune these things in their own separate .gmk and then merge them into what will be the completed game. This makes testing easier and faster, as it is not necessary to load the entire game for testing purposes e.g. making sure the text in your HUD is aligned correctly. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time Take breaks Take breaks, and take them proudly. Don’t be “afraid” of setting your project aside for a while. I’ve done this myself and come back months later recharged and enthusiastic about my work. Don’t even consider this as a last resort. Breaks are healthy, and improve the overall quality of your finished game (how good could will your game turn out if you’re not even interested in making it?) Start small This ties in with not setting the bar too high. Start your game small. Really small. With no expectations except to add and add until you’ve decided the game is complete. A good example would be in creating an adventure game: if you start the game with the intention of creating a massive world map, the chance of you finishing is not very large. If, however, you begin by working on the first village, then slowly expand outside that, the game will grow until you’re satisfied. You can’t crack under the pressure if there is no pressure. Another example would be in creating games which have levels: Don’t decide on making a 100-level game. Rather, create the levels one-by-one, only stopping when you’ve decided that you’re finished working on the game. Also realize that no one’s going to play through all 100 levels of a Game Maker game.
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Get a friend interested Nothing is more motivating than having someone ask you daily about how your game is coming along. Don’t fall into the trap of working on a “secret project.” Outside support is a requirement when it comes to motivation. Preferably, choose a friend who is annoying and shares a common interest in game making. If you don’t want to tear your hair out every time your buddy asks you about your game, you have failed to find a motivational friend. Work with someone else Even better than getting a friend interested is working with that friend. Supposedly, this should halve the amount of work you need to put into your game. Realistically, it turns out to be quite different. As fate has have it, one person will take the role of the worker while the other inherits the job of the slacker. Working with someone else also means you’ll have to share credit. For some people this is not desirable. Just make sure you know your friend well. Enter a contest This is the easiest way to get motivated: Choose a contest with a relatively short deadline, good prizes, and a theme that you’re interested in. There’s more of an incentive to finish, and in addition to your motivation levels going up, there’s free publicity upon your game being published. Oh, and of course - there’s always that possibility that you might win. If this isn’t the most motivational thing you can do, I don’t know what is.
Turn off the Internet Log out of the GMC. Shut down Facebook. Get out of MySpace. Turn off the Internet. Don’t work on a game with the Internet open if it’s too much of a distraction. I speak from experience on this one: My most productive times have been without Internet access. If you’re anything like me, any time you get into a snag in programming, you open up the Internet “just to check in on things.” This is a motivation-killer; nothing ever gets done. Pray for a natural disaster Okay, imagine this: You’re stuck inside your house because some sort of natural disaster (or plague or something) has struck your town. You can’t go to school, you can’t go to work, you are unable to interact with other humans, the Internet is down, etc. What are you going to do? Probably work on Game Maker nonstop out of boredom. You’re bound to come up with something. Coffee Nothing is more motivational than a big cup of black coffee. It serves as both a fuel source and a reward. It also tastes wicked good.
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Increasing The Replay Value Of Your Game By GMmarine If you have similar tastes you'll occasionally put down your PlayStation controller and whip out the classic Starcraft and sacrifice your whole day for it. Why is that? To understand how a game becomes re-playable over and over is actually quite simple. This knowledge can be achieved in two ways closely observing a game which you enjoy playing over and over (Starcraft for me), or reading what I've learned. Either way you'll learn that, in order to get a game with good replay value you need to combine all the aspects of a good game - gameplay, graphics, and sound. So I suggest you turn down the TV and music, take a good sip of coffee and proceed reading. A pretty obvious way to give your game a higher replay value is to make it more random. Randomizing as many things as possible will ensure many different outcomes. If you fail a mission and have to redo it again, it won't be very much fun if you already know what's going to happen. It needs to be different. Say an enemy guard always patrols this area at this particular time then change the timing or just move the guard somewhere else. For instance, create a number of locations on your map where you want guards to be, let's say 15. When the room is being created one object will create guards with only 8 guards being placed in any of the 15 sites you picked. With this embedded into your game it will be a little different each time. As you see, it can really be this simple. What key performs the double-over-the-side-triple-kick? Or the regular punch? It can be questions like these that prevents players from playing a game. In layman's terms, if the controls are difficult, you won't want to put up with the game. Though it may sound unimportant at first, it is the simple things that make the difference in a game sometimes. Do you really want to use all 10 fingers to perform one action? No! And that my friends just proves the point further. Players want easy to use, simple controls that can get the job done, there really is no need for holding down 8+ keys, unless it is a game like Mortal Combat. You may have the best controls of all but if there is no wiggle room, it won't be as much fun. What do I mean by wiggle room? Well, by wiggle room I mean space to roam around in. No one wants to be stuck using a small area of space. I don't and I'm sure claustrophobic people don't either, as well as us gamers. For example, lets say you play paint-ball on the weekends. Though you like your yard, you want to try a place a little different. But when you get to your destination, there isn't nearly as much room as you thought. You thought you knew small, well, meet tiny. Getting shot is made easy, and it is almost near impossible to do any flanking maneuvers. Better yet, finding another hiding spot is impossible! Same with a game. Although this theory doesn't quite work with hallways as it does with open spaces, don't limit your room size, increase it! Make buildings a tad farther apart, and give way for more breathing room and, of course, fun. With more room to roam around in, the player wants to play the mission again, wandering around looking for hidden “treasures� or places they haven't explored yet.
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Ah! The beautiful sound of the birds chirping, the uneasy sound of the wind that gently sweeps the chirps away into the distance. All is well until the sound of the 21st century barges its way in as the tanks tracks crumble the unsuspecting dirt that surrenders without a fight, leaving only the trees as obstacles. In perfect unison, the guns begin the singing of the horrid song that brings mother nature's beauty to a halt, only interrupted by their smaller brothers that try so hard to make their voice heard. It is your time to act, wipe the sweat off and grab the bazooka... Honk, honk! The illusion is over, yet it seemed like you were there just minutes before reality snatched you back from the virtual world. Some great games include a variety of very realistic sounds that escape through your speakers to your ears(I don't know where else they would go) to create the perfect illusion. Adding random sounds is a good way to spice up the mood and is actually quite simple. If the real world has random sounds, like birds chirping (which one is doing at this moment) and the sound of wind vibrating huge sheets of metal, then hey, why not have them in your game? These random sounds can't really hurt your game, unless you have the birds chirping through the whole mission. What would the world be without sound? A rather difficult question, you have to depict a soundless existence in the air, does your world sound bland? To me it does and that is why sounds are so important in your game. I mean come on, would someone like to play a game over and over again if it is soundless? Of course not! You may have the greatest sounds of all, but if there is no creepy music to back it up, it is still a little bland. Though music sometimes may be unnecessary, it carries the moment along. Say you die, there needs to be a little dying music and anything would be great, you know like the good ol' Pacman dying music! We all know, or should by now, what dying music sounds like. Something as simple as that, which is easy to implement, and requires little or no effort at all. Aha, I have the sniper rifle! Now let me shoot that person. But after I fire, it turns out that the gun I was holding was actually a rocket launcher and now I'm dead. Tough luck. No one wants to play a game over and over if there are 20 guns available to choose from, yet it looks like your character is still using the same gun over and over again. An essential part to get players to want to replay your game is to have a variety of graphics. Like all the other parts you shouldn't skimp out on this one. One way to achieve a since of randomness in a game is to create different background textures since we don't want to look at the same grass over and over again. I mean, just a couple of different textures would help. Maybe even make some dead grass? Whatever you choose, different background textures can be quite easy with the tile feature. Now that you've been preached to (and I could've wrote quite a bit more), I hope you take my advice!
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The Problem With Online GM Games Submitted By Elmernite There’s a problem with GM made online games. A big problem. Sure, most of you remember trying to play one of GM’s online games. Waiting for a game to get started and the thrill of finding one... But when was the last time you played it? Have you played them in the last month? Two months? Six months? What happened to anyone who logged on wanting to play during those times? Can anyone play anymore? Or has all of the hard work the makers put into their game been wasted? Sure, online games like “Aces High” had games going for a while but then what? After 6 months, they’re all gone. Remember “Sapphire Tears”? When it first came out, I saw as many as three games running at the same time. Where are all of those games and users now? I even played some of those games for a while, but as servers and other players started to become harder to find, I lost interest. So have many other people who used to log on everyday and play. It’s going to happen, of course; it always does, even with normal games. The difference lies in the fact that normal games can still be played even if no one else in the world plays it anymore. Online games can’t. Online games have a unique property: they require other people to play with. This unique property is both what makes them so much fun and what kills them off sooner than other games – GM games, anyway. Sure people always mention the “pros” of adding online to your game. But what about the cons? Not only do online games require more than one person, they must be on at the same time. This is pretty easy when the game first launches, but after the newness dies off and only fans of the game continue to play, it rapidly becomes hard to find people. Once the fans fail to be able to find games to play they too are forced to quit or spend their time waiting and hoping that someone logs on. Once this happens, the game is as good as dead because the occasional player that the game will get now has a very slim chance of finding someone else on. Halo 3 has no problems you say. So why shouldn’t my Halo fan-game work? The reason such large scale multiplayer
games work is because if even a fraction of the total players log on each day, they’re bound to find people to play with. Take Halo 2, which sold somewhere above the 5 million mark. Now even if only .001 percent of the people who own Halo 2 are on at any given moment, that’s 500 people, which is enough to have some online matches. Apply those same numbers to a GM game, to which we’ll give the generous download amount of ten thousand. Now take .001 percent of that and you get 1. That, I’m afraid, isn’t enough to have online matches – unless you like playing with me, myself, and I. Is it, then, worth the work and effort to make an online game, or even add multiplayer to your offline game, if within a few months it will be worthless? I guess to some degree that depends on whether or not online programming is hard for you or not. For someone like FredFredrickson, who has written online games, and is good at it, he might consider it worthwhile because for him it’s not that hard. Take me, for example: having never made an online game I was trying to add multiplayer support to my platform shooter. Is it worth the months of effort and work to learn multiplayer coding for a few months of online play? For me, it just wasn’t. The more and more time I spent working on it – tedious and confusing – the more and more I found myself thinking about the other projects I had been planning those “new, great ideas” we all just can’t wait to start. That new graphic idea, that new story, that new character, that new style or old style you hadn’t tried yet – the things that fuel many independent freeware game developers like me and maybe like you. So, remember to ask yourself before you start coding that multiplayer: is it worth it? Is it worth several months of tedious coding and testing for a few months of game play, or would you rather finish up the game and move on to your next great idea? For you, it may be the simple answer “yes.” But for those of you who find yourselves giving another answer, remember the pros of not having online multiplayer in your game.
Clichéd Gaming By Polystyrene Man When video games were first being developed, programmers didn’t have to worry about some of the same things that modern-day game designers do: Graphics and sounds were limited and the gameplay was restricted to simplicity. Oh, and being pioneers in the industry, they didn’t have to worry about clichés. Nowadays, familiar ideas are being used and reused. One could argue that this is the natural flow of things - someone has a good idea, others copy it and improve. Certainly, Sim City 4 is an improvement on earlier games such as Populous. We now have game companies that push graphics, gameplay, and sounds to the limit. The Halo series is a prime example - anyone who’s played Halo 2 or 3 knows of the incredible graphics and physics. Indeed, games are evolving. But here’s the thing: Game companies do not use Game Maker. Game Maker is relatively slow and not suited for “serious” games. This, coupled with the fact that most
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Game Maker users opt to go solo, means that we have a unique situation. Game Maker cannot necessarily take part in the evolution of older (now clichéd) games; it's games cannot compete with the productions of large game companies. Game Maker has nothing new to offer in terms of graphics - it is still primarily suited for 2D game creation. Its sound editor is hardly anything special. GML is a high-level language. The point is this: No one is going to make a Halo 3 clone in Game Maker. Nor should they. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, it’s a good thing. Because we are using this “limited” game creation program, we are forced to do something that game companies are not forced to do: Be creative. We are at the bottom of the game-creation food chain, just as the early video games were. Time has shown that ideas – the stuff of survival - are produced at a low level, then passed on and magnified by the bigger animals. There’s a reason indie game making is so celebrated.
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Clichéd Gaming (Continued) This is the problem with clones in Game Maker. The program itself does not have the ability to make a better game than the original - or at least not make a better game than paid programmers, musicians, and artists could. In the grand scheme of things, there’s no improvement. There are no new ideas. There are no graphical breakthroughs. There’s no enhancement. There’s no evolution. In Game Maker, clones are a dead end.
Game Maker is a perfect tool for hobbyists and indie game developers and it should be used as such. Just as indie music is often more original than the music of formulated big bands, the potential for original games should be celebrated. Let sheep be cloned, let good games be. Dear Game Maker user, this is the best possible opportunity for you to get your unique ideas into the world. Take advantage of it. Here’s a good cliché: Think outside the box.
Game Maker ActiveX Your Active Choice?
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By Christian Sciberras (Project coordinator) What is GmX? GmX is a new way to let people play your games inside browsers – yes inside them. It offers unique features for the game developer and the gamer alike. Basically it is like YoYoGames' InstantPlay, but with a difference: it offers real game-in-browser embedding and it could be used just about anywhere (including XP and Vista), as long as it is installed. Also, isn't it nice seeing your own game's loading screen while GmX is loading? Yes, it also supports the use of custom themes. How did it start? As with all programs, there is a reason how this started out. Some time ago, the creator was criticized because of his idea (of running GM games in browsers) not being practical. After some time he decided to take the challenge. Some problems with it delayed enough to let YYG develop their own. Well they do get credit in making the first working one... What are the features? Now this is the best part. What makes it so unique such that it is far from near to a YYG clone? Everything, starting from
the very simple yet powerful game manager, simplicity of use and dynamic. It is dynamic because it uses a master file system to connect different but related data and files for one game. This results in the possibility of using different theme files, multiple downloads and even an installer based game, which makes GmX download the required files. Other features include: online based website and game filter, and multiple file compression, so that it pinpoints the perfect compression method for your game. The last but most important feature is: GmX is free! What are the challenges the team is facing? The largest challenge of all is beating time. This feature-rich software is constantly under heavy development. In fact some functionality is disabled due to testing reasons. One of the main problems encountered was the need to create many sub-projects out of it, making it rather difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, we received some very good remarks on the released betas from various highly respected members giving us the spirit to move on. Lastly, I would like to publicly thanks these persons and all on the development side, including the faithful beta testers.
Mini-games In Games by Polystyrene Man A popular technique among some game genres is the use of the minigame. A minigame is a small, simple game embedded inside a larger game which usually involves some form of coordinated “button mashing” or puzzle solving. Many turn based games, especially console games and games which have more than one person at a display, are in danger of boring players who are waiting for their turn to come around. A popular solution to this has been the addition of the minigame, which usually draws all players back into the game for a few minutes. Some single-player games also use minigames, such as puzzles that the player must solve to advance. Overall, minigames often provide much-needed breaks from gameplay that might become monotonous or boring. The design of minigames is as important as their presence: it must be consistent with the rest of the game. The Nintendo Mario Party series does this very well by using comical minigames in the midst of a cartoony board game. Minigames should use the same graphical and audio styles of the main game, although the perspective often changes.
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You also need to consider when and where your minigames appear. Most genres that use minigames are predictable in that the players know when a minigame is going to happen. You probably don't want to confuse your player by having no apparent reason for the switch, so unless a surprise is vital to the game's flow, try to make the minigame's appearance pattern-driven. Another small aspect is transitions: how you make the switch from the main game to the minigames and back. You could use a simple graphical transition, or you could have text, audio or a video clue the player into what is going on. The key is that unless you are specifically trying to surprise your players, let them understand what is happening. While not suited for all types of gameplay, minigames are an oft-overlooked feature that many Game Maker games could greatly benefit from. Seriously consider the pros and cons of minigames when planning your game.
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User Opinion - What Do You Think About GM Porting To Mac? By GMmarine Staff Opinion: GMmarine “Porting GM to mac seems like a nice move indeed, but being a part Linux user( Ubuntu distro ) I would favor a Linux version far more. It's pretty simple logic to me, Linux free, and OS X $100+. Even if it was being ported to Linux, I think they should have focused on adding more features; but at least they're doing something at YoYo Games.” User Opinions: TerryAllred “I do not use MACs, however I would make Game Maker available to Mac if it is marketably (is that a word) feasible and affordable. Why? Because I feel Game Maker is one of the most motivating educational tools I've ever seen. Game Maker is like learning to play a guitar. Within minutes anyone can have success! With a guitar you can play dozens of songs within hours. In Game Maker I can have created my first game within hours. Other programing languages are like a piano, it takes months, if not years to have a success playing anything. Last night I spent several hours on a project I'm working on, with a 15 yr old and a 19yr old. I was in their home, so even their 9yr old and 6 yr old siblings got into the discussion. These younger ones, including the 6 yr old, proudly explained their logic as they demonstrated the games they had built in Game Maker. I was impressed! They are Home Schooled and use it there. Today is such a highly competitive, computerized world. Making Game Maker available to even an even broader group of students, schools and Home Schools, by porting it to the MAC, you will serve society in furthering the education of our children. Hopefully, in the end, you'll earn a profit too. I have taught basic computers and Database classes in the past. If I were to do it again I would use Game Maker as the platform for "Introduction to Programing" In this day of Object Oriented/Drag and Drop I feel it to be one of the most motivating teaching tools I could use. Students want to learn using it. This may not be exactly what you were looking for but it is what is on my mind this morning, after having a 6yr old show me his game, that many adults could not have created. My hat is off to the Creators of Game Maker!” sn0wb0arder381 “I am personally a PC person. It would be good to have a wider player base for my games, and especially stop all those "will this work for mac" questions from popping up in the Community section, but I don't think it would be best for the program's development. To make it Mac compliant it would most likely take a whole rewrite of Game Maker in order to do it. Not only would this take a long time, it would most likely hinder the development of the program as a whole. I am a very impatient person, and I would not want to wait longer for them to finish both versions. It would slow the updates of the what will most likely be more popular PC version in order to update the Mac version. Well, that's just my opinion.”
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OpticalLiam “To be honest, I believe it is a waste of resources that could better be spent elsewhere right now. The Mac gaming sector is already known to be very small comparatively with Windows, along with the fact that the audience reach of most GM games is relatively low to begin with, it basically means only a small number of gamers overall are going to benefit from what's likely going to be a pretty large and costly undertaking. Though I do believe that at some point it would be best for GM to become open and platform independant, this should really only be thought about when more pressing issues are dealt with first - such as GM's terrible security for instance.” Dragonos “I have recently switched to an iMac and have been rather pleased with its performance. Now one of the only reasons I still use XP via boot camp is to be able to play DX games and create gamemaker software. The port to mac will almost completely eliminate my requirement to develop on XP and make development a breeze for us Intel mac users. Some of the downsides to it may be the fact that yoyogames make take longer to develop upgrades to the maker that are compatible with both versions of the maker. In the screen revealed by sandy on the "GLOG" you can see that in the path editor the lines have anti aliasing. This may create a nicer interface but will it slow down the already slow loading times of the IDE? Perhaps the new processing architecture of MacOS X could ultimately speed up the gamemaker IDE? The only thing we can do is wait and see what awaits us.” Destroyer “To be honest I think it would be a great idea. It would increase the number of people with GM and allow a much wider variety of people. That way maybe some of MY questions will be answered USEFULLY. Anyway, do it, what's the worst that could happen?” Aertcz “GM being able to port to Mac is a great thing. Why would this be a detriment at all? Developers who use GM can now be able to share their work even further. Commercial games will now be available to a whole new community of gamers (which may be considered a monopoly with Mac :D ). If you ask me, the possibility for this gets a two thumbs up from me!” kevmister “I think that porting to macs would be a very good idea. It would get more people to use it therefore we would have more people on the forums. Since macs aren't known for running games as much as windows this might make people change their minds if they see that good games are running on it. In all, yes game maker on the mac would be sweet”
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User Opinion (Continued) MrJackSparrow2 “I think porting GM to macs would be a good idea, and would bring in MANY more users to GM and the GMC. The only issue I can see in porting is, (GM) users need to know the file structure of mac (if they use Windows), and vice versa. For example, in XP you can write:
gamer1224 I think it is useless and more features should be made instead. With bootcamp for mac you can run windows applications so there's no need for a port. More sound formats would be better for gamemaker and maybe better surfaces that work in d3d.That's my personal thoughts.”
file_text_open_read("C:\Program Files\My Game\Save.sav");
ev149 “As everyone knows, Mac® doesn’t have too many games to play. If YoYo Games™ were to make GM available on Mac,® more people with a Mac® make more games, and in turn play them. But it probably wouldn’t catch on right away. Plus, it would reduce sales of Microsoft,® too. So, in my opinion, YoYo Games™ should make Game Maker™ for Mac® and if it doesn’t work, then stop, if it does, then keep on goin’!”
I, being a Windows user, have no idea what so ever about how to write the equalivent for a mac. Setting aside file structure/DirectX issues, I think GMmac would be HUGE. (Possibly opening the gaming market to macs finally! )” Dr. Watz0n “Porting Game Maker to Mac has some good and bad points. First off, its going to be quite a daunting task for YoYo Games to port both the runner and the IDE over to OS X, mainly because they need to switch from DirectX to OpenGL graphics rendering. Secondly, YoYo Games could really aide game developers by adding some of the latest technologies integrated into Mac OS X, including Core Video, Animation, and Sound, to help us to make our games more professional. The drawback to some of these things? The games made on Mac OS X can only be played on OS X with these technologies. If they just decide to port it over to OpenGL and leave it at that, I can't wait to see how Game Maker works on my Mac.” Homebrewpc “In my opinion, Game Maker being ported to Mac is a small leap forward. I for one, hate Macs with a passion, but for the few amount of people that benefit, it is good. It might open the realm of Mac gaming to freelancers rather than big companies. In this way, smaller companies might be able to find actual profit, unlike the dominated Windows environment.” jec_critic “As a mac owner I think it's a good idea... Aside from that though, the gaming market for the mac is growing; games like Halo, Sims2, and World of Warcraft are for the mac as well as the PC. Even though it might be trickier to buy mac games from game retailers, there is still a large amount of games that can be downloaded online. This is a good thing for indie game developers. I would personally prefer to develop games for a mac. The software that you can buy for a mac is superior for graphic design (so it's not surprising that macs are standard for most businesses involving some form of graphic or multimedia based work) and the graphics cards for macs are on the whole better, particularly for the power mac G5's.” TKM “I don't use Mac myself, in fact, I rather despise Mac. I think it would benefit me personally a lot more if the GM staff just worked on improving the program and adding features; basically just keep striving to make the program better for PCs... but I do happen to know that some very creative people use Macs, so it may be interesting to see what they do with the program. I would prefer, though, if you just focused more on the functionality than the demographic.”
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DyerG “I would love that Game Maker also went with Mac because my brother has a Mac that might take Game Maker. It was interesting to me the first time I heard about it. I think this is awesome. I don't know what OS of Mac it takes? If you know PM me. Thanks” Mini “While never really hearing about YoYo Games porting Game Maker to Mac, I've heard various rumors about this happening, hoping that this would happen one day, yet hoping it wouldn't. While porting Game Maker to Mac would expand Game maker dramatically and expand the popularity of Game Maker, it would be a very hard and long task meaning time that could be used improving Game Maker would be spent porting it to Mac, thus slowing the development of Game Maker. Do I think that YoYo Games should port Game Maker to Mac? Though question, with both pros and cons, on one hand, they could not do it, and development would continue as normal, and on the other hand, they could port it, and bringing tons of new members into Game maker, thus funding Game Maker more from new registrations. I believe that if they want to, that YoYo Games should go ahead and port Game Maker to Mac, although halting development for a while, it will fund Game Maker enough to gain back that lost time fairly quickly.” Mr.Chubigans “I think it's a good idea, but in all honesty I'd value a C++ rewrite and looking into console distribution first. I know it's happening, but I can't see the purpose for Mac programming at the moment.” Pokefan200 “I think it would be good. It would be nice for other people to know about it.” StrikerGames “I believe this is a great idea. I love the idea of a multiple OS game creation software. Personally I use Windows, but with the concept of my games on a PC, Mac, XBox, and other systems suggested is really great and thrilling. I would love to see the outcome. Many people are turning to a Mac instead of Windows and it needs some pure GM spirit. Once again this would a great idea and I think it should go through.”
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Making Better Game Graphics By Polystyrene Man You don’t need to be an incredible graphics designer or seasoned pixel artist to create good game graphics. Where Game Maker is largely a tool for hobbyists, some of the best games have been created with simple, homemade graphics. The key to making a visually appealing game does not rest solely on the ability of the artist. Anyone can make a stylish game simply by following a few “rules”: Do not use gradients Gradients are a cheap, unrealistic approach to shading. In real life, there are no “true” gradients. And it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to make realistic graphics- anyone with a basic knowledge of computer art knows that gradients are the tool of choice for a quick, cheap fix. In reality, they give your game a sloppy PowerPoint-esque appearance. As with any rule, there are exceptions. The point is to use sparingly, if at all.
useful are the shortcuts of Graphics Gale: To select a color from the canvas, one needs only to right-click on the color (in MSPaint, this must be done with the eye dropper tool). The selection tool is also only a right mouse button drag away, making it easy to move things about. It is also possible to use layers and create animations in Graphics Gale, other tools that cannot be found in MSPaint. Do not pillow shade This is a square that has been pillow shaded:
Note that the edges are darker, and get progressively lighter towards the center of the sprite. This represents an unrealistic style of shading that turns otherwise good drawings into bad drawings. The fact is this: Light almost never hits an object exactly above it. This is what makes pillow shading so ugly. When in doubt, never pillow shade. Do not use the default colors of MSPaint As a matter of fact, don’t use highly saturated (or “bright”) colors in general. They are ugly and painful to the eye. They are distracting. There’s no better way to explain this. Even if you’re looking to make a bright, fun game, the default colors of MSPaint are much too fluorescent. Generally, a good saturation level exists between 120 and 180, but it is also good to contrast between higher levels and lower levels. Just be sure that all of your colors don’t exceed 200that’s the “pain zone,” where people have lost their vision.
Those are the major “do-nots” of making game graphics. Now let’s be a little more positive and list some good things that you can do to improve your graphics. Make small sprites Large sprites can be overwhelming to draw, and the larger your canvas is the more opportunity you have to draw something out of proportion. It also becomes difficult to shade large sprites realistically, and fluid animation is near impossible without a good deal of practice. No one is going to think you’re cheap for making a 16x16 sprite. In fact, the old-school style is celebrated by many. However, if you’re set on having large sprites, you can always set the resolution or change the scaling of the view (set the “port on screen” size to double the size of the “view in room”) such that your sprites appear larger onscreen.
Note that to change the saturation level of a color in MSPaint, you must double click a color in the color tray. A box will pop up which allows you to edit the colors. Click on the button that says “Define Custom Colors >>”. A new saturation level can be entered into the second box of the first column (appropriately labeled “Sat”). Do not use MSPaint On the topic of MSPaint, don’t use it. Some pixel art purists will probably disagree with me here, but the idea is to make your life easier. Spriting in MSPaint is difficult- more difficult than it needs to be. There simply aren’t enough tools to work fast and efficiently. I suggest using Graphics Gale . It’s a free download, and is much better than MSPaint. Others promote Paint.NET and Photoshop, which are also good choices.
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Graphics Gale comes with a much more eye-appealing default color palette, and the interface (though it may not appear so at first) is very similar to MSPaint. Particularly
Shade The idea of shading might be intimidating, but it’s not overly difficult. Let’s assume that we want to shade a circle. Only three colors are needed: A dark shade, a medium shade, and a light shade. From here, it’s only a matter of choosing a light source. This is where the hypothetical “lamp” or “sun” is assumed to be; generally it is in the topright or top-left corner of the sprite. Using the medium shade, fill the entire circle. Use the darkest shade to color the portion farthest from the light
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Making Better Game Graphics (Continued) source, and the lightest shade to color the portion closest to the light source. It should come out like this:
Use less colors Using more colors does not result in a more realistic game. A minimalistic approach is suggested: It cleans up the game and keeps things consistent. It limits your time with the color palette, meaning less opportunity to create clashing color schemes. Stick to what you know Drawing takes practice. A lot of practice. If you haven’t got the time or attention span to commit, then stick to what you know. A well drawn, nicely shaded geometric shape will always be more attractive than a poorly drawn cow.
Of course, this is an oversimplification. Realistic shading on some objects can be difficult, but the same rules apply: Those portions which are farthest from the light source should be darker, while those closest to the light source should be lighter.
Level Design
By TheMagnitude
Without adequate level design the player would get bored very fast, and since there is thousands of games in direct competition with you're game, then your going to want to keep players interested so they play your game more. What you will get out of this article is a, hopefully, more widened or initial knowledge of how to design your levels with varied environments and layouts. Professional games such as Call Of Duty and Super Mario Bros have been hailed again and again due to their unmistakable brilliance and varied environments, that push the gamer to the limits put the to the test in every possible scenario of the game, which is what good levels or maps should do. Now let me explain the difference between levels and maps, levels are usually a series of environments in which the player progresses through one after the other normally following some sort of storyline. Maps are environments that are inclusive and offer the player to wander round freely in any direction; maps are often used for various multiplayer modes. These definitions are not solid but are what is thought in general.
The more varied environments a player finds himself or herself in the less samey the levels will be to the player. If the levels are samey, then in most circumstances the player will get bored quite quickly, so the player needs to be thrown into some original and varied surroundings or else they may lose interest. A varied environment could consist of different backgrounds and sprite schemes, i.e. just changing the sprites with the same objects, and this would certainly give the player a more graphical aspect of the game to appreciate, but by doing it this way the level objects would essentially be the same. Different environments should contain unique objects that are only found in those environments, to give the game more of a trick.
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Those are the basics of making better game graphics. If you’re looking to really improve your skills as an artist, the Internet is full of pixel art and Photoshop tutorials. Otherwise, I hope this article was able to point you in the right direction.
For example in New Super Mario Bros for DS the different environments not only looked different but also had their own features, such as: lava which you could fall in; jungle which had more ropes to swing on; snow, which had slippery ice that made the game a lot harder, volcano which literally summoned meteors right above you which you had to quickly dodge. So different environments should each have their own "thing" that defines them and excludes them from the rest, so not just a graphical touch, but twisting the gameplay also. Players would usually want to change the environment or feel its reaction. This is when we start focusing on making a level interact with the player as well as the player interacting with the level. Basically, as well as the general gameplay going on, the player needs to be able to interact with their surroundings such as pick up useful objects, or simply destroy parts of the environment. In some way the player should be able to change or modify the environment for their advantage or passage. This will give the game more than just its normal gameplay, it will also give the player dynamic control of their experience. And to make the environment a responsive one, the player needs to know that the game knows what the player is doing. This includes rustling of bushes when a player walks through them, and then leaves could come out of the bush to show that the player is indeed in the environment rather than sitting staring at a computer screen. Wading through water is another graphically nice effect, where when a player journeys through water, ripples, splashes and possibly reflections could be implemented. All these features that I have described above are key, and if you follow my guide you should have some well-designed levels and environments. Let's look at the key points I've made in this article: GOOD ● ● ●
BAD ●
Varied environments Dynamic, responsive, and reactive environments Environments that have unique twists on the gameplay Static, non-responsive, and non-reactive levels of all the same scheme of graphics
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Why And How To Use Surfaces By TheMagnitude First I'll just explain what a surface is, a surface is a canvas that can be drawn on and, saved, added as a sprite/background, or just shown later in the game. Thats it at its basics. Why use surfaces? Surfaces are very powerful if used technology of surfaces objects can surface, and then surfaces are stored the surface is freed. Many applications here are some fundamental uses: ● ● ● ● ●
draw_surface(id,x,y); Adding a surface as a sprite
correctly. With the be drawn onto the in the memory until of surfaces exist but
Motion blur or blur in general. Rendering sprites and backgrounds in-game without the player realising Speeding up gameplay by sticking immobile sprites together Taking an in-game screenshot and displaying it without needing to save it as a file. And many more...
Surfaces don't stop there, in the advanced side of things surfaces can be used to take a text string, take an image, and draw the text but with that image as the text which I'll explain later. So heard enough? You want to know how to do it yourself, well it's your lucky day cause I'm going to tell you how to do just that. How do I make Surfaces? I've foolishly assumed just now that you know how to use the in built GML editor and are capable of programming in GML. If you don't know how to do those things I have just said, you're not going to understand the rest of this article. To start using surfaces you need to create one by using the function surface_create(width,height) < now this function actually returns a negative number if it fails to create a surface that big. This is usually because the graphics card of the computer running the game or program does not have enough memory to store the surface in. Now here's the interesting part: all you need to do then is set the surface as the drawing target and draw away with normal GML draw_ functions. But don't forget to reset the target of drawing to the screen after you have drawn everything you need on a surface. Don't worry, you can always come back and edit a surface later on. Below is some helpful code to get you started. Creating and drawing on a surface
var n; n=surface_create(w,h); // creates a surface with width of w and height of h if n<0 exit; // checks if the surface has been successfully created surface_set_target(n); // sets the drawing target to the surface // Draw code goes here, remember // Draw functions are exactly the same surface_reset_target(); // resets the drawing target to the screen
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Showing a surface on screen
sprite_create_from_surface(id,x,y, w,h,precise,transparent,smooth, preload,xorig,yorig) Saving a surface to file
surface_save(id,fname) // saves a surface to a file in BMP format Surfaces are very easy to use once you've learned the basics which I've explained above. Now I'm going to explain how to apply the technologies of surfaces to your game. In this example I'm going to explain how to draw textured text. Two surfaces will be needed for this, one of the image, and one for the text alpha mask, all we do is draw a black rectangle over one surface, then draw white text over it; and then with the other surface just draw the image on the surface, and then create sprites from both of them. Apply sprite one as an alpha mask for sprite two and then draw sprite two. And heres how it's done: Create Event
// Create both of the surfaces su1=surface_create(200,50); if su1<0 exit; su2=surface_create(200,50); if su2<0 exit; // Draw on surface one surface_set_target(su1); draw_set_color(c_black); draw_rectangle(0,0,200,50,0); draw_set_color(c_white); draw_text(10,10,"Textured Text"); surface_reset_target(); // Draw on surface two surface_set_target(su2); draw_sprite(spr_texture,0,0,0); surface_reset_target(); // Create sprites out of the surfaces sp1=sprite_create_from_surface(su1,0,0, 200,50,0,0,0,1,0,0); sp2=sprite_create_from_surface(su2,0,0, 200,50,0,0,0,1,0,0); sprite_set_alpha_from_sprite(sp2,sp1); Draw Event
draw_sprite(sp2,0,0,0); And there you have it, a nice text texture example. They're are lots of other uses of textures as I pointed out earlier which can have very nice graphics touches to a game. This concludes my article, thanks for reading.
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Environment Variables By Gmjab There are many functions found in the Game Maker manual. Most functions are easy to find and well-known amongst Game Maker uses. By reviewing over the functions contained in the manual regularly you may find new functions to use in your games. This can sometimes make things easier and quicker to develop. One function that many have yet not found or don’t know how to use is environment_get_variable() .
developer. The list is as follows: ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
The “environment_get_variable” function is a very useful function which can obtain system environment variables. This information can include: the number of processors the computer has, operating system type, system directory path, username and the temporary directory path.
● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Using the function is very simple and isn’t any different to the way you use other similar functions. There is only one argument for “environment_get_variable”, and that is, the name of the variable as a string. The function will then return the result value. See code below for example:
● ● ● ● ● ●
NUMPROCESS = environment_get_variable(" NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS"); show_message(string(NUMPROCESS)); // Show result
There are a quite few variables available to use. I have provided a list of variable that will be useful to any game
● ● ●
ALLUSERSPROFILE APPDATA HOMEDRIVE HOMEPATH LOGONSERVER PROGRAMFILES SYSTEMDRIVE SYSTEMROOT USERDOMAIN USERNAME USERPROFILE WINDIR ComSpec FP_NO_HOST_CHECK NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER PROCESSOR_LEVEL OS Path PATHEXT TEMP TMP
Using these environment variables you can find out information about a computer without using a DLL. Hopefully this article has given some insight into how to use the environment_get_variable() function. For more information on what these functions do, click here .
Create Your Own Simple Language In GML By Christian Sciberras
This fairly simple language is going to be interpreted not run through an emulator or virtual machine. As every programmer should do, we will divide large tasks into smaller ones. First of all we need a script that returns a word from a sentence according to the word's position. For example:
find_word('if a>50 then b=1',1) = 'if' find_word('if a>50 then b=1',3) = 'then' The find_word() script contains: // Name: find_word // Description: Cuts a word from space to space // argument0 - string - text // argument1 - integer - word number (must be >=0) // returns - mixed - (<=0 word count) (>=1 word) // Example: find_word('hello there', 1)='hello' and find_word('hello there', 0)=2 return find_string(argument0,argument1, ' '); It contains a call to yet another script. This new extremely useful script returns a string from a whole sentence which is separated by any type of character. It is very useful because find_string is used for many purposes such as parsing math expressions.
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Here is the code of this script: // Description: Cuts a word from char to char // argument0 - text // argument1 - index // argument2 - delimiters (char) // returns - mixed - (<=0 word count) (>=1 word) // Example: find_string('hi there',1,' ')='hi' and find_string('hi+there',1,'+')='hi' var result,word,i; result=argument0 i=0 do { if string_count(argument2,result) then { word=string_copy(result, 0,string_pos(argument2,result)-1) result=string_delete(result, 1,string_pos(argument2,result)) }else{ word=result result='' } i+=1 if argument1!=0 then if argument1=i then return word } until (result='') if argument1=0 then return i else return word
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Create Your Own Simple Language In GML (Continued) Next we need to create the code parser. This is simply one script with one argument, which is the code to execute. It is also the main instruction set, that is, the language's most basic code and variable types. Here's an example of the parse() script: // Name: parse() // Description: Run the entered code // argument0 - One line of code // returns - string - parser result // Example: parse("parse_test") if argument0="" then return "Error: No code found." switch (find_word(argument0,1)) { case "parse_test": return "The code parser is working." }; return "Error: Unknown code ["+argument0+"]." All instructions that the language will support should be put in the switch statement. There is already a command in the script, it is 'parse_test' which is used simply to check that the parser script is working as it should. The next thing to add is the support for variables. There are two best methods for doing this, either storing the variable names and their values in an array or use GM's variable system. The first idea is much more powerful, you could even add custom data types and allows the use of variable structures and objects. But it's too difficult to explain here and could get awfully slow, so we'll have to stick to the second and simpler method. First, to avoid conflicts with GM's variables, the variable's names shouldn't be converted to GM's directly, instead the variable names should be prefixed. Look at the following: In GML code
The Language
Both Values
global.mylang_foo
foo
423
First the variables need to be declared, so we will do this by using the define keyword ex: define foo. The most important check in making variables is that their names start with a letter. So to do this, we need to add another statement to the switch in the parse script: case "define": { if string_length(string_lettersdigits(find_word( argument 0,2)))!=string_length(find_word(argument0, 2)) then return "Error: Bad variable name." variable_global_set('global.mylang_'+find_word( argument0,2),0) return "Created variable "+find_word(argument0,2)+"." } Note line 4, it works by comparing the variable name's length with that passed through the filter, which returns letter and numbers only. This means you can't use special characters, even '_'. Of course some additional coding may remove this inconvenience but that is past the point of this article. Next, it is useful to make the parser return a variable's value. This will be done with keyword echo, (like PHP's) ex: echo foo returns 0. That's fine and simple, but how are the variables detected? Using the prefix system gives another advantage here. In fact, each variable in this language could be detected by simply using:
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variable_global_exists('global.mylang_'+varia ble_name) The following code does this (put it in the switch statement): case "echo": { if variable_global_exists('global.mylang_'+find_ word(argument0,2)) then return string(variable_global_get('global.mylang_'+f ind_word(argument0,2))) else return "Error: Variable "+find_word(argument0,2)+" does not exist." } Next, we need to make it parse calculations with variables. This will be done using the parse_expr() script. Now this is some advanced stuff so make sure you do everything as it should or else you could get some nasty bugs. You could make it parse statements like foo=foo*25/100 but it needs some advanced coding, so lets start with a more simpler solution. We will use the let keyword, (more or less like BASIC). The syntax for using this will be like ex: let foo 100/25. Which contains 3 words: 'let' (the command), 'foo' the variable receiving the value and '100/25', the expression to evaluate. Thus add the following code to the parse() script's switch statement: case "let": { if variable_global_exists( 'global.mylang_'+find_word(argument0,2)) then { variable_global_set('global.mylang_'+find_word( argument0,2), parse_expr(find_word(argument0,3))) return "Variable "+find_word(argument0,2)+" was set to "+variable_global_get('global.mylang_' +find_word(argument0,2))+"." } else return "Error: Variable "+find_word(argument0,2)+" does not exist." } Unfortunately this makes the language's syntax pretty strict, you can't use ex: “let foo 100 / 25” but “let foo 100/25” instead (without spaces in the expression). Now let's look into how parse_expr should work. Now this sure needs some explanation! The most basic rule here is passing through correct precedence ex: “5+3*2” returns 11 not 16. The simple system to help in this is using “BODMAS” (Brackets, Of, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction). Both D and M has the same precedence, which is also the case with A and S. To make it run more smoothly, the script runs itself (iterates) to evaluate every possible piece especially when it comes to the brackets. Here is a sample list of what the script should do (in chronological order): Action
Example
Script 0 Input
(foo*3)+bar*2
Translate Variables
(5*3)+4*2
Sprite 1 Input
5*3
Script 2 Input
4*2
Results in Script 0
15+8
Result
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Diagram
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Create Your Own Simple Language In GML (Continued) Now, having a precise objective, it shouldn't be extremely difficult to put this into practical GML. First of all, you will agree that the objective could be separated yet into two other script, thus it will end up having parse_expr (the main script) and parse_part (this separates numbers). Hopefully you will understand the basics of both scripts. Also, a note of importance, the script was designed so you could easily add any other arithmetic symbols like '^' (power), '\' (root), '%' (modulus)... Hint: these take different precedences, so look them up before adding the code. // Name: parse_expr() // Description: Evaluates the entered expression // argument0 - One line of code // returns - string - parser result (if any) // Example: parse_expr("10*2")=20 parse_expr("10==10")='true' var pos,anm,bnm,i,br,r,rt; r=0 if string_count('(',argument0)! =string_count(')',argument0) then {math_error='Error: Incorrect brackets in '+argument0+'.' return 0} if string_count('(',argument0)!=0 then{ // Solve Brackets for (i=1; i<=string_length(argument0); i+=1){ if string_char_at(argument0,i)='(' then br=i if string_char_at(argument0,i)=')' then{ argument0=string_replace(argument0,string_copy(a rgument0,br,i-br+1), parse_expr(string_copy(argument0,br+1,i-br-1))) return parse_expr(argument0)}}} if (string_count('/',argument0)!=0)and(r=0) then // Evalutate Division {parse_part(argument0,'/') rt=global.Number1/global.Number2 r=1} if (string_count('*',argument0)!=0)and(r=0) then // Evalutate Multiplication {parse_part(argument0,'*') rt=global.Number1*global.Number2 r=1} if (string_count('+',argument0)!=0)and(r=0) then // Evalutate Addition {parse_part(argument0,'+') rt=global.Number1+global.Number2 r=1} if (string_count('-',argument0)!=0)and(r=0) then // Evalutate Subtraction {parse_part(argument0,'-') rt=global.Number1global.Number2 r=1} if r=1 then{ argument0=string_replace_all( argument0,global.Replace,string(rt)) return parse_expr(argument0)} return argument0 // Cannot be parsed anymore Basically, the script could be divided into three parts, from line 7 to 15, from line 16 to 23 and the rest. The first part runs multiple copies of this same script but with the values inside the brackets. The second part runs parse_part to solve the expression's operators. The rest does the changes to the remaining parts of the expression and if the expression doesn't result to a single value, it reruns itself. If it does return one value, then the script ends there and returns the value. The simple approach to how this works is using the “x operator y” rule. Every expression in fact consists of many of these, even “invisible ones” like 2x (2*x) and -5 (0-5). The most important thing in solving this is precedence, which in fact is how the code above works. Note that lines 16/17 are for division, 18/19 for multiplication, 20/21 for addition and 22/23 for subtraction. The next script, parse_part should be simpler to comprehend. But there is one huge difference here, the script must return at least three values, so how does it do that? In fact it doesn't return anything at all!
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// // // // //
Name: parse_part() Description: Evaluates the entered expression argument0 - Expression argument1 - Operator to check for returns - there is no result but feedback variables are used: // global.Number1 global.Number2 global.Replace // Example: parse_part('9+3','+') -> 9 | 3 | '9+3' show_debug_message("parse_part("+argument0+","+argu ment1+")") var pos,anm,bnm,i,ii; if string_count(argument1,argument0)!=0 then{ pos=string_pos(argument1,argument0) i=pos-1 anm='' bnm='' repeat(pos-1){ if (string_digits(string_char_at(argument0,i))! ='') or(string_char_at(argument0,i)='.') then anm=string_char_at(argument0,i)+anm else break i-=1 } ii=i i=pos+1 repeat(string_length(argument0)-pos){ if (string_digits(string_char_at(argument0,i))! ='') or(string_char_at(argument0, i)='.') then bnm+=string_char_at(argument0,i) else break i+=1 } global.Number1=real(anm) global.Number2=real(bnm) global.Replace=string_copy(argument0,ii,i-ii-1) } As you see, instead of returning a value, it sets three variables Number1, Number2 and Replace. So for example if we use “parse_part('6*3+5/2','*')” it will set “global.Number1=6”, ”global.Number2=3” and “global.Replace='6*3'”. Here's a quick summary of this code's capabilities: ● It can allocate variables ● It can return variable's results ● It can use 5 types of operators (brackets, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction) ● It can have input of unsigned decimal or integer numbers. Next time we will be passing through some harder stuff, so make sure you re-read this and practice some GML, especially on the demo program source which can be found with the resources provided with this issue.
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Tutorial: Auto Write Text By Calle Ekdahl This was a question which was sent to me, and rather than trying to explain to you my task I might as well write it out to you: How can I make a text field and have it type a sentence that I already made up while I'm typing something totally different? Like, I can press any letters on the keyboard but no matter what it's gonna type something like, say for example: "I like to go jogging". And it will always type that, for every letter I type no matter what letter it is, it types whatever sentence I put it to type to. I duno if I'm explaining myself?? I'm not familiar with strings at all but I'm also not a beginner in gm but if someone can help me out with this? ... I made an example out of it, but I will also try to do some explaining, as this does use strings... Create Event mytext = "Sir Winston Leonard SpencerChurchill, (30 November 1874 ? 24 January 1965) was a British politician and statesman, soldier in the British Army, orator, and strategist, and is studied as part of the modern British and world history. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his writings on British and world history.. ## Source: Wikipedia.org"; In this first part I assign the text to a variable. mytext is henceforth a variable containing this string. It will be the content that I write out.
Draw Event draw_rectangle_color(0,0,room_width, room_height,c_ltgray,c_ltgray,c_gray,c_gray, false); draw_set_color(c_gray); draw_set_alpha(0.8); draw_rectangle(20,40,room_width-20,room_height, false); draw_text_color(20,5,"Tell me all you know about# Winston Churchill!",c_gray,c_gray,c_black,c_black, 1); draw_set_alpha(1); draw_set_color(c_black); This code above here is just some layout stuff that I put together, you don't need to care about. This which I will show you next is the important stuff... draw_text_ext(25,45,string_copy(mytext, 1,string_length(keyboard_string)),-1, room_width-50); draw_text_ext will write out a string will write out a string at a suiting position, with correct width and separation. The string will be what the user sees and it needs to be as long as what he has written himself. What the user writes is automatically stored in a variable called keyboard_string, which makes this pretty simple. We simply copy as many letters from the variable mytext as keyboard_string consists of. string_length(keyboard_string) is the number of characters the user has input, so now we copy that many characters from mytext, and that will be what we write out: string_copy(mytext,1,string_length(keyboard_string))
Tutorial: Arc Angled Text By Calle Ekdahl
In PowerPoint you can find something called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Word artâ&#x20AC;?, that draws good looking text with all sort of colours and shapes. One shape is like an arc, like a parabola. There are several ways to produce this same thing in Game Maker, and I am going to show you one. Without colour and stuff though, that is something you can add yourself. Choose A Function Choose a function to decide how the arc should look. Any parabola will do, but often you look for something special. In our case we want a arc, a parabola that is turned upwards. The general formula for a second degree equation is:
but we don't need to define all of those variables. For us this will work:
If we wanted an arc that's turned downwards we could have used:
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Now you just have to choose a value for b. The larger the more sharp upwards it will go, if the value gets to high then the text will not be easy to see, and therefore we choose something not too large, not too small:
Derive the By deriving will indicate angle every
Function the function we can get the coefficient, and it how sharp the curve is. It can decide how much single letter should have, this is how we do:
If you are not familiar with derivation you don't need to care about this, like you don't have to care about the next step if you do not know of trigonometry; as long as you can see what we want with each piece of code. How to calculate the angle for the n:th letter In the code each letter will correspond to one x, therefor we can use the derivation. The derivation tells us show sharp the curve is, therefore it can be expressed as the following:
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Tutorial: Angled Arc Text (Continued) We can now do the coding Since we now have a plan, we can do the code. First of all there are a couple of things that we ought to decide; for an example the constant b, the spacing between each letter and the text we want to write. text = "THIS IS AN EXAMPLE"; space = 10; h = 20; Then we create a loop which will be used to write all letters. The condition for this loop will therefore be to do this until it has been done as many times as the number of letters': for (i=1; i<=string_length(text); i+=1) { And then we calculate on which x position the letter should be drawn at: xx = x+string_width(string_copy(text,1,i-1) )+space*i; We start out from the object's x-position when we draw, then we work towards the right by counting the spacing for every letter and the width of the letter themselves. The angle is calculated using the derivation: angle = arctan(b-2*yy)*string_length(text) +180
+180 doesn't belong to the trigonometry, but must be there because of the way Game Maker sees angles. I multiply with the number of letters since I have earlier divided with with the number of letters when I calculated yy; which I did because it had to work the last stage, but here we don't really want it. Last stage is to draw everything, and it is nothing strange about it, everything is just as we have calculated it with the function as the y value of the letter: draw_text_ext_transformed(xx,y-(b*(yy)sqr(yy)),string_char_at(text,i),-1,-1,-1,-1, angle); And this is the entire code: text = "THIS IS AN EXAMPLE"; space = 10; b = 20; for (i=1; i<=string_length(text); i+=1) { xx = x+string_width(string_copy(text,1,i-1)) +space*i; yy = (b/string_length(text))*i angle = arctan(b-2*yy)*string_length(text)+180 draw_text_ext_transformed(xx,y-(b*(yy)sqr(yy)),string_char_at(text,i),-1,-1,-1,-1,angle); } I hope someone found this interesting. Note that there are several other ways to do this same thing, but I wanted to use this math and that's why I chose it. Trigonometry only will work also.
Tutorial: List Files By Calle Ekdahl
If you have ever created a game or program that saves files, then you have probably also encountered another problem: how to load a file. This article will not deal with how to load the information itself, but it will deal with how to give the user a chance to select a specific file. It is very common to use slots; because if the user selects slot one you know that you're supposed to load slot1.sav, sometimes this slot-based system doesn't work, and you want to be able to save an infinitive number of files, maybe with custom names.
It will get all names of the files in the files folder that got the specified extension. I am doing this with two loops: the first one is using my mask and attributes to find all the files, it sorts them into an array. The second will go through that array and add them to a list and it will also add a new line character, this way I will be able to draw the list as one. That is what I do in get_integer. It will look something like this:
I use the following code to compile a list of all my save files and present it to the user:
name 3 user selects 0 we can figure out what file that is back at the array:
c = 0; extension="extension"; file[c] = file_find_first("files/*."+extension, fa_archive); while !(file[c] == "") { c +=1; file[c] = file_find_next(); } file_find_close(); d = 0; exi_files = ""; while(d<c) { exi_files += string(d) +". "+file[d]+"#"; d+=1; } selected_nr = get_integer("Choose a file and then enter the number below (use unexisting number to cancel):#"+exi_files,"");
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0. Custom 1. File2 2. Custom Etc. If the by looking
name 1
if (selected_nr<=c) { file = file_text_open_read("files/" +file[selected_nr]); } I add an If statement, with proper condition, because we do not actually know that the user will enter one of the numbers that are displayed. He might enter any number, by mistake perhaps, and if we try to open that file it will cause an error. This will work though. Note that you may also use the first part of the code, this last open-up-file code, but present it anyway other than in a pop-up. This method is highly sophisticated and it's possible to present the info in anyway, as you got it in an array.
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Tutorial: Highlight By Calle Ekdahl The question, â&#x20AC;&#x153;how do you make it such that someone may highlight and copy your text?â&#x20AC;?, inspired me to make an example. As nothing else were defined I chose to assume the one who asked used the draw_text function, but it will also work at other kinds of text as long as you know how wide it is and how high. Also important is that although highlighting literally means to put importance to something, in computer terms we often say it and mean the visual effect as when you select a text. I will do the visual effect. It may also be used to select a text, and then the program will know which text. This example has several advantages. If there is something you don't understand how to do with this example, just ask on, by commenting preferably. Here is the property of the single object that I use: Create Event highlight = false; offset = 5; some_text = "This is the test text!"; Global Left Mouse Button Event
Draw Event draw_set_color(c_blue); if (highlight == true) { //This is a visual effect, which may be removed! draw_rectangle(x-offset,y-offset,x +string_width(some_text)+offset,y +string_height(some_text)+offset,false); } draw_set_color(c_black); draw_text(x,y,some_text); As you may see in the code there are a few places where I have commented and said something like that the following piece of code can be deleted. It could also be replaced by something custom. Keep that in mind. The visual effect could be changed for an example, and maybe you didn't want to copy the text to the clipboard, so you could replace that with anything else that you actually want to do. Good luck with your creations, instead of explaining how this thing works (you'll have to figure that out yourself, or ask).
if (mouse_x<x+string_width(some_text)) && (mouse_x>x) && (mouse_y<y +string_height(some_text)) && (mouse_y>y) { highlight = true; //Now I copy the text to the clipboard, can be removed: clipboard_set_text(some_text); } else { highlight = false; }
Pixel Tutorial
By Hiyukantaro
Getting Inspiration This time you won't see any pictures or explanations about how to make anything, because this tutorial is about how to get inspiration, how to use it in your work, and how to get it anyway. I hope this will be useful to you, for most artists it is. 1. We want to have inspiration. No music in the background, this distracts you, because if you listen to music and do something else your brain tries to focus on 2 different things. We can turn on some music while pixelling though. 2. Think about what you're going to make. Is it for a game? Then ask the developer what he needs. Also, think about a style to fit that object. If you're doing a piece for yourself think about an interesting subject, and choose a style that fits the piece of art you want to make. This is also important for Drawing, Painting, Brushing And Computer Designing. Believe me, I have some experience with all of these types of art. 3. Now, if you want to do it the professional way... first make concept art. Take a sheet of paper and draw what you want. Make some designs, and be creative. Choose the best one, and try to pixel it. These steps will help you in getting your ideas onto your
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screen. If not I'm a complete fool, you are not made for using this way of working. You're not paying close attention. When you decided to become an artist, you were excited, and wanted to do rather a lot in your new job. You took every job, and you screened the GMC Graphics section for some work. After a while you get in a game development team. And you just don't feel like doing the GMC Graphics requests that much anymore. You get all those jobs for your new boss... which is good. When I got into a team, I can remember it very well. It was the team of my friend Michael (who is a programmer) called MediYama Games. I'm still in the team now. Fast after that I joined ISI (Ice Spark Interactive), and did some other projects (one-game teams). Then I got in this state of being stuck in all my pixel work, which is a very common thing in art. The projects were done, but I was still in both teams. If you feel like you're in that state of being out of inspiration, and feeling like you're doing the same thing all the time, then challenge yourself, and try some new things. I have noticed that everyone who does this gets back on the right track. If you want to do something new, maybe try using the steps above.
2. GMDEV
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Weapon Spriting With Paint Tutorial By Medieval Firstly open paint going through Start > All Programs > Accessories > Paint. That shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to assume in this tutorial that you know how to draw with a pencil in paint, zoom in and out, and select colours from the image. The next thing to do now that you have paint open is to find a picture of the weapon you want to sprite on the internet or from some other resource (this is a good way to start off and once you get good you'll be able to make your own weapons). Then copy and paste the image into paint. This will be a reference to you when you are pixelling your sprite underneath and you will probably be finding yourself constantly looking back and forth from it. Next thing to do before you get started it to rip a pallet from somewhere so that you can quickly grab a particular shade of a colour from there. This will prove useful in most circumstances. It's also useful to have, if you are making the weapons in a series (maybe for a particular game), another earlier made sprite of another weapon so you can make the new sprite relative to the size of the last one you did.
Now your ready to start, i recommend zooming in 6x when pixelling but if you have a steady hand 2x is good enough. The first thing you should do is draw a careful outline of the weapon on the screen with a definitive black colour. It should look something like this:
Once you have done that you just fill in the appropriate sections with the appropriate colours, which you can select from the reference image. Like this:
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Now it's starting to look like something good, but here comes the hard part, the shading. There are two methods I can suggest to you here. Dithering This is when you make a checkered bunch of dots. This is often used for textured surfaces or rough surfaces where the light is reflecting off it at different angles and It looks something like this:
Smooth Shading This is when, on curved surfaces the colours fade lighter or darker depending on the amount of light that reflects off. Since this is sometimes hard to see, just copy where the weapon is darkest and lightest from your reference image. Smooth Shading looks like:
What you get in the end once you've shaded in everything should be something like this:
And then you can just remove all your reference images and pallets and be left with a very nice sprite. :) This method is very effective and I have made 10+ weapons with it.
3. EXCLUSIVES
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Exclusive: BarnStormer BETA 2 By Gmjab Good 3D Game Maker games are extremely rare to find. This is because of the limited 3D functionality Game Maker has. However despite these limitations, a team has gone ahead and made a game that is quite good and somewhat addictive even in its early stages. This game is Barnstormer, a stunt pilot game set out on a farm. The aim is to earn enough money by flying to save your farm. For a Game Maker game, Barnstormer has excellent graphics. The terrain is nicely detailed with smooth hills and shadows. However this beta has large seams in the skybox on level 1. Two things I like about the graphics in this game are the sun and clouds. The sun is quite realistic in this game because of it's glow. The sun also has a lens flare and if you fly towards the sun the screen lights up. Next the clouds look great. They are very smooth and when you fly through them they still look like clouds. However due to depth issues some clouds do look like walls. The models in this game besides the default plane are not highly detailed. However it's been said that the models will be updated in future versions. Now the menu has been slightly updated in this version. The menu now feels more complete and you can get an idea of the way the game will look when its finished. As for sound, there was not a lot of it. All I heard was the same song loop over and over and the sound of the plane's propeller turning. So this game needs to be upgraded in this department. Now the gameplay is very good, however the plane physics could be improved. The plane didn't feel like it was loose enough. When I turned it felt like the plane just stayed on the same angle while turning. Compared to all the other GM flight games, this game however, does have the best flight physics. I'm sure many of you have played games in which if you go off the map it shows a countdown before throwing you back onto the map? Well this game has a countdown also which I was very surprised to see. Now the FPS this game runs at is quite high even when running at a high resolution. I experienced no lag whatsoever during the game. As good as this game is, it has bugs. One bug I found was when doing a barrel roll. Instead of just spinning the plane around which works without bugs, I held down the left arrow button and the down arrow until the plane turned over half way, then pressed the up arrow for the rest of the flip. The game then said I did a forward flip instead of a barrel roll. The second bug I found was when I was trying to land. When I was coming down onto the airstrip I moved the plane on an angle and hit the ground. Instead of blowing up the plane got stuck in the ground. However attempts to re-create the bug failed. This game is quite a good game that still has a few kinks in it to be worked out. Beta 2 will be released on January 2 nd . Some new things in beta 2 I saw were: - New sunset Level - Menu finished - Birds - Refreshed HUD - Updated â&#x20AC;&#x153;My Barnâ&#x20AC;?
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3. EXCLUSIVES
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Exclusive: Interview With Jesper About BS By Gmjab GMT: Tell us a bit about the BlueBind team, its members and their roles. The team just had its anniversary recently, when did you first form? How did the idea for Barn Stormer come about? JSP: “BlueBind was set up by ThatGamesGuy, a well known member from the GMC, in August 2006. Back then, we were called ‘TGG Team A’. Shortly after TGG posted the application topic, some people joined pretty quickly. The number of members in the team was growing very quick (at one point we had 24 people on the team), but that did not mean everyone was active. So as a result of lots of people being inactive, there were “exclusion rounds”. Everyone who was inactive would be excluded from the team. This way, we tried to form a solid team without inactive people. The first project we started was based off of an idea TGG thought of: ‘Stunt Pilot’. In the game you play as a farmer, who has taken up barnstorming again because his farm wasn't doing very well. That project, now better known as “Barnstormer: 1920” was liked by everyone on the team and progress was made very soon. The first demo release was in January 2007, on the GMC. Soon we posted it on other sites (GMG, 64Digits), and at all places it was very popular. Another major event for the team happened in April 2007, when TGG decided that he would quit the TGG forum, and therefore also the teams. He did that because he didn't find it fun anymore, and fun was one of the reasons why he set up the forum (I don't have any more information on that, sorry). As lots of users enjoyed it there, and wanted to continue this nice community, we decided that there should be a new forum. The name was decided upon, ‘Reunited’, which name you can probably understand. There at ‘Reunited’, the teams and contests were continued, and after a poll, I was chosen as the new team leader for the ‘Reunited Game Development Team’. Because TGG excluded lots of inactive people just before he closed the forum, we were left with a small, solid group of 8 team members. That was one of the causes that meant everything started to run a lot better and smoother. With the new group, we continued the work on ‘Barnstormer: 1920’ and made lots of progress on the game. We also changed the name to the ‘Reunited Game Development Team’. We have never really liked this name because it was too long, so after some polls we decided on a new name, ‘BlueBind’. As we didn't want everything to be just like it was at the TGG forum, where people could just apply and then never come back again, we wanted to have a team of people which we could rely on. Therefore, we changed to a recruiting system, but that didn't work as well as we at first thought it would, so we had to think of maybe a combination between those two systems. That is why we changed to an applying system, where it would not be as easy as just posting a post in a topic and getting in. I made a sub-forum for the applications, so people would have to post a topic after a form was set up. Maybe that doesn't sound like it would work better, but looking at the results it proved it did. From that point, out of 4 applications, 2 people have joined, who have proven to be valuable for the team.
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The roles for everyone in the team are not totally specified. On the TGG forum, people were only allowed to work in their own department, but that's not how it is anymore. People can now work outside their own departments, and be of worth for other ones. This is the team currently and everyone in their main departments: Jesper: Team leader, Programming and 3D graphics. Edge: Programming, 2D graphics and 3D graphics. Turvas: 2D graphics (the “artistic side”, menus and stuff like that). Gompen: Level design. Dr. Eechmen: Story and cut-scene design. DJ_GLiTCH: Music and sound effects. Andyops: Programming. DarkDepths: 2D graphics and 3D graphics. L4nt0m: Programming. Joshuaallen64: Programming.” GMT: As a 3D flight game in GM, did you even think it would be possible to create a quality game like it has turned out to be? JSP: “No, not at all. Believe it or not, ‘Barnstormer: 1920’ was first supposed to be a 2D side-view game. I actually think nobody on the team (at the time of the game idea coming out) had full confidence that we could manage to make it 3D, let alone with the quality of gameplay and graphics it currently has. But I really think we have a great, solid team now and because of that we did manage to get to the point that we are now.” GMT: Barn Stormer uses GM's built in d3d functions, has this caused problem during the development? Would it have been better to use a 3D dll? JSP: “It hasn't caused us any “problems” because we didn't use a 3D DLL, I'd rather call it “challenges”. On the question whether it has given us challenges, I am glad to answer that it did. Not using a 3D DLL for a 3D game with high quality graphics is hard, but not impossible. This subject has been brought up several times by different people, and there are several things that have kept us from using a DLL. But the main reason is that we want to push the 3D in Game Maker to its limits, without the use of any 3D DLL's. With Ultimate 3D for example, we would have been able to get more detailed 3D models, running at a better speed. But what would people said if they saw the graphics of this game then? Probably something in the range of: “Nice graphics, but that's not really special because you're using U3D.” Now people are amazed by the high quality graphics, running at pretty decent speeds because they didn't think this would be possible without using a 3D DLL. Pushing things to the limits also inspires you to go as efficient as possible, doing as much stuff as possible to get even the slightest improvement on the performance, which I really think gets the best out of people.”
3. EXCLUSIVES
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Interview With Jesper About B.S (Continued) GMT: What has kept your team motivated during the development of this game? JSP: “I think that it was a combination of several things, from which a big one probably is that we all really wanted to finish the game. Really wanting to complete the game and make a high quality game is great motivation in any project. But another thing that kept us motivated was that we were working on it as a team. One problem when you are working on a game alone is that you have no one to motivate you to continue. In a team, you have. There are always two thirds of the team who are active and accomplice things that gets other members of the team inspired and active too. If you are very busy for some reason or another, you don't have to worry that there is no work done because other people continue working on the game and keep the progress going. The work on a game almost never stops, because there are always people working on it.” GMT: What software was used for creating the high quality resources BS has? JSP: “The 2D graphics are almost completely made with Adobe Photoshop, which Turvas, Edge and DarkDepths use. L4nt0m however, uses Corel Paint Shop Pro X, with which he can do pretty amazing things. The sound tracks are being made by DJ_GLiTCH, who is a DJ and has won several awards with making music on his computer. He uses lots of high quality programs, which he gets from the person who has got him a record deal. For 3D graphics, I use Blender 3D and EDGE uses 3DSMax. I'm not sure what DarkDepths uses though; I haven’t had the chance to ask him yet. The storyline of ‘Barnstormer: 1920’ is also of high quality in my opinion, and is completely written by Dr. Eechmen. He uses no great program other than his own imagination, but I don't think that could be called a program.” GMT: What do you think makes the 3D game look better, high quality models or large textures? JSP: “I think high quality models are part of how good a model looks, but only in combination with high quality textures. The size of the textures doesn't really matter when the texture looks good, 128x128 or 256x256 (I prefer 256x256) looks very great. What also determines whether a 3D game looks good, is detail. In models, for example, simple things can make the model much better than they did before, using only 2 triangles. Another thing that is really important for me is that everything fits together. Everything has to be the same style and not for example, partially realistic and partially cartoonish.” GMT: As a 3D Game Maker game, you probably would have had to overcome game lag in areas, what techniques were used for better game performance? JSP: “It indeed is a very big challenge to get as little lag is possible. We save as many triangles as we can, and try to use as little memory as possible. We especially try to save as many triangles as possible on the models that are used lots of times. The tree model for example, is used about 50 times. That means that every triangle you save in the model, saves you 50 triangles in the game. Therefore models that we use a lot of times are as low-poly as possible.
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For example, every model that is used several times is not defined for every instance again. We load the model to a global variable, which is used in all the instances. So instead of doing this for every instance: modelID_rock=d3d_model_create(); d3d_model_load(modelID_rock,'rock.mod'); We do the following in another object (of which only one exists): global.modelID_rock=d3d_model_create(); d3d_model_load(global.modelID_rock,'rock.mod'); One thing that has really caused major performance improvement is pre-calculating as many things as possible. A good example of this is the shadows. The shadows are pre-calculated at the start of the game using surfaces and then they are saved to a sprite. Then we get the texture from the sprite and make a model with the calculated dimensions. The model is a floor based on the terrain height, which therefore only consists of 2 triangles. As the shadows are affected by the sun, they also are not recalculated every step. One time is enough, and that saved us for example about 5 FPS. For smooth gameplay, we also used a DLL/engine GearGod made, the HighResTimer DLL. It has smooth delta-time which has been of great help for us to have smooth gameplay, even when suddenly the FPS drops for example.” GMT: BS looks like it has a lot of lines of code, roughly how
many lines of code are there which makes up BS? JSP: “Now I found out how to get all the code at once, and pasted it to a text editor, I got some statistics for you. The code used in ‘Barnstormer: 1920’ consists of 278029 symbols/characters, 44793 words and 10619 lines.” GMT: How were the plane physics done? Did you use an engine from an example or is it custom built? JSP: “Runivo, who was a member of the team, had already made an engine for this. That's the engine which we used (after making many changes to it so it would be perfect for ‘Barnstormer: 1920’). So you could say it is half-engine, half custom built.” GMT: BS is a freeware game; do you think the team will make any shareware games in the future? JSP: “I've thought of that, and other people (probably everyone in the team) have done so too. This project is very likely to stay freeware, but for further projects, I have no idea whether they will be shareware or not.” GMT: What do you think the future of the BlueBind team holds? JSP: “Even better graphics, innovative coding and qualityprojects. We'll see.” GMT: Thank you for doing the interview with GMT, are there any final things you would like to say about the project? JSP: “It was my pleasure to have this interview. I hope you have all enjoyed the read and I also hope to see you on the Reunited forum, a nice community and home to the BlueBind team. We will continue our work on ‘Barnstormer: 1920’ and hope to release it within a month so make sure you check the topic out. “ Reunited forum
3. EXCLUSIVES
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Exclusive Review: Conflict Arcade By NAL When I started playing Conflict Arcade against the bot, I was hit by four things in a set order. First – the graphics are amazing. Second – the AI is amazing. Third – the AI is VERY good. I was in the tutorial, and I was killed 5 times before even killing him once. The fourth thing was that when complete, Conflict Arcade is going to be absolutely fantastic. When first running the game, I was hit by an extraordinarily professional main menu. With no complication I’d set up an account with my personal controls and graphical preferences, and was being tuted by a clear tutorial. It taught me the controls, allowed me to showcase a machine gun, then threw me into combat with an AI-controlled bot. “Ah, this’ll be a walk in a park”, I thought three seconds before a sniper-rifle wielding bot came and shot me through the head. After a couple of goes I had it down to a tee, and was ripping his head off. The satisfaction of simply beating this first enemy was high. It reinforced the fourth thing I thought – when this game is complete, it’ll be phenomenal. The graphics are incredibly polished. Detail is given to everything, shooting creates realistic effects in both the bullet and the gun, blood spills, chunks fly out of buildings, and much, much more. If your computer is high-spec, you can appreciate it further, as RhysAndrews has provided graphical options to optimize performance. Not revolutionary, but it’s an aspect that all high-quality PC games have. Gameplay-wise, the game is good, not yet great. Although it is solid and fun, it’s a little hard, and a few quirks (such as the over-responsive camera) make aiming difficult. These don’t destroy the otherwise fantastic gameplay, just detract from it a little. It can be forgiven, especially as the game is still a work in progress, so things like this can be ironed out. Sounds and background music are both appropriate to the game. There is not a huge amount of variety, but it really does not matter. In fact, it’s a good thing. If the game was filled with ambience, footsteps and suchlike, it might distract the user. Simple music and gunshots/impacts are fine. The other thing that makes this game special is the details. The one that made me smile was a certain bot that was called Pvt Parts. This is going to be an awesome game when it is complete. I personally look forward to playing the full version very much, and so should you.
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3. EXCLUSIVES
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Exclusive Interview With Mark Overmars By Gamez93 We caught up with the creator of Game Maker, and asked him the questions you want answered. For those of you who aren't exactly Overmars is, here is a little biography...
sure
who
Mark
My name is Mark Overmars (not related to the soccer player, whose first name by the way is Marc, not Mark), I live in Utrecht, in the center of the Netherlands. (This means that independent of what direction you take, within 2 hours by car you reach the sea or the border.) I am working as a full professor at Utrecht University in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences. There I am scientific director of the Center for Advanced Gaming and Simulation. I will write more about the work that is done in the research center in future contributions. I am doing research on path planning and animation in games and virtual environments. I am teaching a course on computer game design. And of course I am the creator of Game Maker and one of the directors and shareholders of YoYo Games. Also I am, as an advisor, involved in some game companies in the Netherlands. Here is a picture of my, although I hardly ever dress that formally. For more information on my university work, check out my web page there. People often asked me what computer games I played when I was young. The answer is simple: none. There were no computer games those days. There were hardly any computers. I saw the first computer in my life when I was 16 years old and a friend of mine took me to the place his father worked where they had a big computer (probably with the computing power of a modern watch). I remember how impressed I was when they showed me the core memory. For those who do not know, core memory consisted those days of a huge block of little metal rings (the cores) through which wires were run (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal). Each core represented 1 bit of information. One 16×16 cm card represented 1 or 2 kilobytes and the memory consisted of a large number of such little cards. It was huge, heavy, and very expensive. Probably because of that visit I became interested in computer science. But it took until the 80ties while I was working on my PhD before I really got interested in computer games. In particular when the Atari ST appeared I got hooked on it. I played many games, created my own (more about that some other time) and started to write game reviews for a Dutch Atari magazine. Also in those days I wrote my first paper on what is a good game. Something we still do not fully understand. I hope my glog will shed some more light on that. Source: Mark Overmars Glog http://mark.glog.yoyogames.com
Now, the interview, we have split the questions into categories to allow you to easily find the question your looking for. Enjoy the interview.
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YoYo Games / General GMT: If you were to retire, would Game Maker continue to be developed by YoYo Games? MKO: “I do not plan to retire any time soon. But the development of Game Maker is independent of me being there or not. I am not doing it myself anymore but (partially) supervise the work. So there is no need to worry about this.” GMT: Do you think 2008 will be a successful year for YoYo Games in accomplishing some of its goals? MKO: “Yes I do. 2007 was a year in which we had to start up a lot of things. In 2008 we will see the further fruits of that. Also with the additional funding we expect to secure the coming months we will be able to achieve a lot more. Expect an extended website, new version of Game Maker, further support for developers, etc.” GMT: On the "glog", you mentioned that you planned to invest a large amount of money into Game Maker's development. Could you tell us some more about that? MKO: “I cannot reveal the financial details of YoYo Games at the moment. But we expect to secure considerable additional funding in the coming months.” GMT: YoYoGames.com received a huge boost when you switched to the new server, but it seems to be slowing down again. Is this from the increased traffic? MKO: “Partially it is due to increased traffic. Partially it might be due to the increased amount of data on the servers (there is not one but actually three, each with their own task). We are currently investigating this. It is top priority to solve this. This is also related to the server architecture. As we want the number of visitors to become 10-fold the coming year we definitely need to extend the server setup. We are currently discussing how best to do this.” GMT: Has YoYo Games lifted a burden from you that GM once had? MKO: “It has removed a number of daily tasks from me (for example handling registrations) and it has removed the pressure of working on new versions. It has replaces this with other tasks in the management of YoYo Games. I am still spending as much time on it as before but it is rather different work.” Game Maker – Future GMT: Game Maker has come further than you originally planned, do you think Game Maker will become much more advanced in the years to come? MKO: “We are discussing the plans for future versions of Game Maker but we have not made any decisions about what extra features to add. Currently the focus lies on writing the runner in C++ and porting the package to the Mac. Only after that we will discuss further features. I am sure this will make the package more advanced on one hand, but actually part of the focus will lie on making it even easier to use.”
3. EXCLUSIVES
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Interview With Mark Overmars (Continued) GMT: A lot of people have fears of Game Maker's securities issues; Does YoYo Games have plans to fix this in a later GM release? MKO: “We will definitely look into security issues. However, as you know, almost any piece of software can be cracked/hacked. Actually, it seems many of the Game Maker users use illegal assets that are obtained this way. It is even more difficult to make a tool like Game Maker secure as there is not one game but thousands of games produced with it.” GMT: A lot of people have high hopes for GM8, is there going to be one? And can you tell us any information on what we should expect. MKO: “Sure there will be one. But at first sight it might be disappointing. At the moment we are not adding new features but simply rewriting it. The first important change will be supporting other platforms. First of all the Mac and later our plan is to make it possible to create games for various consoles. Only after that we will look into new features.” GMT: As a lot of people have said, GM 3D functions are in short supply. Will newer versions of Game Maker have new functions? If so, what would you say they would be? MKO: “Game Maker is not meant as a 3D game development platform. And to be honest, many of the 3D games created with it are not very good. (They do get rather high ratings on the site but I guess that is due to the fact that other developers find it amazing that people manage to do it. They are not really rating the game play.) As it stands currently we do not plan to turn it in a 3D game development platform. We might add more 3D graphics functions, but that is something else.” GMT: In years to come do you think that Game Maker could be considered as a serious game development tool? MKO: “I think Game Maker is already a very serious game development tool for 2D games. Many great games are created with it. The fact that they might not be professional quality is not due to Game Maker but is due to the limitations in the possibilities and time of the creators. Most of the “issues” you see with existing games can be solved with the current version of Game Maker, in particular by doing more careful resource management and by using DLLs and extension packages for certain tasks.” GMT: Game MKO: about
In newer versions to come, do you think the price of Maker will go up, down or stay the same, why is this? “I don’t think it will go up. But we have not decided this. “
GMT: MKO: YoYo plans
Do you ever plan on stopping the development of GM? “As I said above, in some sense I already did. But Games has taken over. And they definitely have no to stop.”
GMT: Have you enjoyed developing GM for all this time, or has it become a burden? MKO: “It is amazing to develop a tool like GM and see what all the people create with it. Seeing the 10,000 games on YoYo Games makes me feel very proud that I created the tool with which people did this. (Although of course it really is the work of the creators that led to the results, not my work.) Sometimes it is a burden. Programming in general comes with ups and downs. And in that sense I am happy with the new situation. The responsibility simply became too large.”
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GMT: Do you plan on making any other programs that you want to make a profit on, or become popular? MKO: “I have no plans for anything new at the moment.” GMT: Will there be an update to fix bugs for Windows Vista? MKO: “I am sure that bug fixes will be made in the next version. “ Game Maker – Version 8 GMT: Will there be any other versions, after ‘8’? MKO: “Yes. We will continue the development the coming years.” GMT: Will it be called Game Maker, or are you going to change the name of it, to appeal to the older generation more? MKO: “I don’t see a reason for changing the name. It is very well known throughout the world.” GMT: Do you have any screenshots that you can give to us, run along with this interview? MKO: “As indicated above there is nothing really new. You might want to use the mac picture at the glog ” Game Maker – Mac Support GMT: Will new version of Game Maker for Mac always be released on the same moment as the PC Game Maker? MKO: “No idea. We will first port version 7.0 to the Mac. After that we will think about how to continue.” GMT: Will the interface of Game Maker for Mac be as identical as possible to the PC version? MKO: “Yes. Although there are of course the typical Mac aspects (like one menu at the top of the screen. (See the picture.)” GMT: Game Maker for Mac, have Mac only features (e.g. spotlight support) MKO: “We try not to. Our goal is to make sure that games created with the Mac version with also run on the PC. We will aim for the same the other way around, although that is more difficult as there are certain features in Game Maker that cannot or are too difficult to emulate on a web. (For example support for DLLs.)” GMT: What is your vision for Game Maker and YoYo Games' future? MKO: “Our vision is that Game Maker will become a tool used by a huge number of people to create games and that it will rival Flash at some moment. For YoYo Games our vision is that it will really become the YouTube for Games. That it will attract ten times as many visitors as it does now (and even more), being primarily players rather than creators. And that it will become the ultimate resource and Web 2.0 community for people that want to create games.”
3. EXCLUSIVES
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Exclusive: MusicLib
By Gmjab
This month we got a special preview of the new MusicLib website. MusicLib is a site which allows users to upload/download music for their games. The update will come out soon. Until then, have a look at the screenshots below:
Insight Into: CSW
By GreenNex
The game is about a character, which he has no name yet, has to travel through different locations, for example, planets, desert, a lake called LakeView, Planet Pyro, and other amazing locations. He reaches these locations through paintings on the walls of a chamber called Art Chamber. The game is based on art. I don't really have a storyline yet, but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working on one. I got my ideas while playing Cave Story and The Legend of Zelda. I was inspired, and felt an urge to combine the both games. You should expect to see many different locations, amazing boss battles, amazing graphics, many weapons and "tunics" to use. Also, during the game, the player will run into "warriors" that will give you a mask, containing his powers, only if you defeat him. The hard part is that if you lose, you will never have another chance to challenge him, so be careful not to die.
This platform game is different from other platformers because it will contain great platforming elements, and an actual storyline. This game is not only a platformer, but it also feels like an action/adventure game. There's going to be many different objects that would be used to change your gaming experience. From weapons to tunics, and from items to masks. One main object, which acts as the mouse, is a pencil that will be used to overcome many objectives and challenges. Just wait into I have a demo. I didn't have enough time to put one together, especially because I am also working on some other games. For example, one called Toxic-Active, Invaders Invade, Droplet, and Gum Remake.
Here you can view the add-ons menu; able to equip anything you want. Just showing how the cane and pencil work.
One of the mini-bosses being attacked by the laser gun.
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Bam, and the enemy is dead. The triangles are to level-up your weapons.
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Insight Into: Oi
By 2D Cube
Introduction I started work on Oi in the beginning of October last year. I wanted to make a game with original gameplay, which could be enjoyed by many people. Oi is a platformer game with a very particular setting and in it you play a little guy who got his girlfriend taken away from him. It’s all very mysterious, and the game starts in a jungle deep down underground. The graphical style and the music help setting this special atmosphere, which I’m really fond of. However, don’t be misled, because the focus of the game is the gameplay, and not the graphics. The graphical style however does have a huge impact on the feel of the game and also the storyline. The story, how little it may be, fits the overall style and was implemented last.
So, when I decided on this graphical style, I started doing a little research. I searched for mysterious looking plants, looked into books about the jungle, and started drawing a lot of them. I draw everything in Flash, and I have a ton of different plants now. Some of them only show up one time in the whole game. Gameplay Oi starts out as a standard platformer. And it does look like a standard platformer which just happens to have an interesting style. This is understandable, because by looking at screenshots you can’t see there’s more to the gameplay. When you start the game, all you can do is walk and jump, all with the arrow keys. Shortly after you learn to bounce. This is done pressing the down arrow key. By first jumping and then bouncing, you can reach higher up platforms. A little later you get the “magical” ability to fly by defeating a bat-like enemy. You can only fly for a little bit each time, but it helps you cross long gaps. Pressing up again after you jump does flying. All the controls are fitted into just the arrow keys, and it works.
Graphical style The graphical style isn’t really anything new. The black silhouette style is a common thing in graphic design but hasn’t been implemented in games a lot (especially not in GM games as far as I know). The game Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet actually inspired me to use this style (search it up on YouTube, it looks amazing). The advantages of the graphical style are that they leave something for the imagination, because all you see is the silhouette of everything. This helps creating the mysterious atmosphere. And, not unimportant, it doesn’t take a lot of time to draw. Before I chose this style the game looked very abstract (just colored tiles) and the other objects in the game weren’t explainable within a logical context. That’s not a bad thing, and can actually be a good thing sometimes. This is because a more realistic style often comes with gameplay restrictions. After I chose for the silhouette style I had to make sure everything fitted in with it, and that it still made sense within that style and the story as well. However, that has not been a problem so far, but it does limit me a little to what I can do.
So there are 2 special abilities: bouncing and flying. These have to be used (together with jumping) to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. If you know my games, you may remember these abilities from Blopper. That game I once made uses the same abilities, but has a very abstract setting. The abilities are the same, but the way they’re used for puzzles are often different in both games. Design process So let me tell you a bit about the way I design games. Most of the time it starts with one or more little ideas, and I try to build a game around that (in my head or on paper). Then I start making a little engine so I can try out the idea. This is what I like about Game Maker, because it’s really easy to set up a small prototype of your idea. This immediately lets me know if it was actually a good idea, because sometimes, things I think up turn out to be a little boring. This first prototype actually lets me know a couple things: Is the basic idea fun, is it possible to build a whole game from that, and how difficult is it to make (in terms of programming).
So, it all starts with a little idea, and most of the time this is a gameplay mechanic. Graphics and sounds come later, and I make them so they fit the gameplay, not the other way around. I am always looking for original, interesting gameplay mechanics, because the rule-set underneath a game is what interests me the most. It’s a mysterious thing, because nobody has been able to define what good gameplay actually is, and this intrigues me. There is no
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3. EXCLUSIVES
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Insight Into: Oi (Continued) 12-step plan to design good gameplay. It’s mostly trial and error, but I believe that I am getting a better idea of how to design gameplay. Still, there is so much to it I don’t understand yet. One of the reasons I am just as much interested in 2D games as 3D games is because the number of dimensions is just a limitation to the rule-set behind the game. The ruleset is what interests me, and often I think 3 dimensions actually give too much freedom. I think gameplay is (among other things) a balance between freedom and a rule-set. Too much freedom is bad, and too many rules isn’t good either. However, I am now getting away from the main thing I’m trying to tell, which is my design process. After I made an initial prototype and decide to go on with it, it’s a matter of working and working. More often than not it turns out to be more work than I thought. During the design process there are ups and downs. Sometimes I don’t work on a concept for weeks or months before continuing it. The danger there is that you lose interest, and may not want to finish it anymore. The more time it takes, the more new ideas I come up with that just NEED to be made into games, haha. The same happens with Oi, but as with other games I’ve made, I’m sure I will keep working on it.
Insight Into: Chalk
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Final words So I’ve talked a bit about my game Oi. But I haven’t told you about the sound and music yet. It depends on the type of game, but I think music and sounds are a very important element to let a game “come to life”. At the time of writing there are no sound effects in the game yet, but there is music and it is actually made by my dad. The music really helps setting the atmosphere; it’s a bit weird, yet exciting and mysterious. Plus, it’s original music you won’t find anywhere else. I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and if you haven’t tried out Oi, please do so and look forward to the final game.
By BlueboyX
The name of this game is Chalk. It's basically about a chalkdrawn hero who must save his board before it gets taken over by the dark forces. As you go through the levels you will gain power-ups like being able to shoot mini-bullets out from your mouth. You go through different types of environments and maybe even different forms. Expect to see many different types of enemies and many bosses as well. This game was mainly inspired by my brother GreenNex, who is also a game maker, and one of his projects that he never completed. At the time I was lacking inspiration and needed some kind of creative game that no one has ever seen before which lead me to create this game Chalk. I have never really seen another side-scroller game before made in Game Maker and I did not want to create another platform game so I went with side-scroller. In my opinion, this game is going to be great, considering its originality.
One of the many levels in the game.
You see, the “magic” of the game, for me, sometimes died down a little. Often when I start work on a new concept I think it’s the best idea ever, and later on my opinion changes and it becomes “just a fun idea” but nothing more. This can be a little depressing, and is the reason I take a break on the game. It gives me time to come up with things to make it fun for me again to work on it. It’s just the way it works for me I guess.
There will be many different enemies and environments.
Oh snap! A boss.
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Insight Into: Schism By Anaglyph Gaming is played as a platformer). Of course, this varied gameplay poses problems- switching between gameplay styles could easily become erratic, disorienting the player. We believe that we’ve solved this issue by giving Schism a consistent control scheme. Throughout the entire game, you’ll be moving your character with WASD and aiming/firing with the mouse (although in a few cases some of the commands are omitted, and the gameplay is completely mouse based).
From the beginning, Schism was intended to be a complex and unique endeavor. Our team’s previous projects suffered from lackluster storyline and oversimplified gameplay, issues that are not easily remedied in game that’s already been in development for some time. We wanted a game that challenged player’s minds as well as their reflexes, but not in the usual way. Simply put, we wanted to add more depth to every possible element of our work. Although little of Schism’s storyline has been settled, several key factors are concrete enough to be revealed. Centuries into the future, two thirds of humanity is wiped out when a colossal asteroid smashes into our moon, sending shards of rock raining down on the surface. The remaining humans attempt to colonize any planet capable of supporting their biological and economical needs, realizing too late that they had intruded on the politics of an incredibly unstable galaxy known as the Chronos system. Each of the four alien races inhabiting this system will play a key role in the game’s storyline, some more significant than others.
There will, however, be key differences regarding how this setup affects your vehicle. Another type of mission is the tank mission- these missions are similar to the tracked space shooter missions, expect that you have the ability to roam freely around your environment, and aiming is more simplistic. In tracked shooters, aiming is much more complex. Your fighter is controlled completely by the mouse. A triangular aiming field is displayed in front of your ship, and moving your mouse along a horizontal line inside the field will adjust your ship’s aim. Moving your mouse outside of the field will bank the ship towards the position of your mouse. Thus, a balance is achieved between guiding your ship’s fire trajectory and moving out of harm’s way. In order to pander to player’s preferences, however, there has been talk of an adjustable aiming field width: players who prefer a wide aiming field will be able to aim better but will be slower to react to enemy bullets; a thinner aiming field allows much quicker movement, but less aim.
The most important element of the story stems from a human cult that had disappeared from known space thousands of years ago, reappearing in the midst of this tense period as the game’s main antagonist: the Angels. The Angels wield technology unlike anything any living creature has encountered before. Although they have not actually attacked the Chronos system, they plunder resources from any planet that interests them, and all races are helpless to stop them. They are simply too powerful. It goes without saying that the gameplay is the most important aspect of any game. We wanted Schism to be unique in this area, too- we’re incorporating multiple types of vehicle-based shooter gameplay along with some platforming elements. With the currently planned setup, different “missions” you are asked to accomplish will have varying gameplay depending on the specifics of the mission; for example, near the beginning of the game you’ll be asked to spearhead a counteroffensive against the Marenox fleet (a mission that is a traditional top-down tracked space shooter). But later on, you’re asked to sabotage a Marenox capital ship that’s guarding an asteroid field (a mission that
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Two often neglected but equally important elements are the graphics and sound. Anaglyph traditionally shines in both of these categories, and we hope to outdo ourselves here. We’re putting more emphasis on particle effects and atmosphere throughout the entire game, and the original soundtrack (composed by PowersWithin and ConsciousAutomaton) will provide the appropriate moods. Samples of the music have been posted in various Gamemaker forums, GMC included. In closing, we’re hopeful that Schism will mark a turning point in our ambitions to become professional-level game developers. Keep track of our progress on our website for updates, and watch for the first demo by the end of the year!
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Insight Into: Purple By King_Bowser Some of you may remember me from my 100 level platform game Colorblind FIX 3 I finished 2 years ago. Since then I started many other platform projects but they all got scrapped at some point because I didn’t like how they turned out. Making them helped me improve greatly in Game Maker and I finally thought to make something big. I always wanted to make a game like Super Mario World – in that style of gameplay. So I started Purple 4-5 months ago – I thought the yoyo/frisbee/disc idea was cool and original. In the game you play as a purple ball with a frisbee-like weapon that can destroy different blocks and enemies. It’s kind of like a yoyo too – it eventually returns to the player. It plays a bit like a Super Mario game (you can destroy enemies by jumping on their heads), but I tried to be original where I could. So far I’ve only released a small demo of Purple, with a small level – to demonstrate the basic engine. Sometime around Christmas there will be another bigger demo that will be a lot better and interesting than the first one… for now, you can check the game’s progress site at: http://kbg.awardspace.co m
special way for coming up with ideas; they just come in my head without much thinking about it. I’m crazy, that’s why I’m coming up with crazy ideas. I even came up with a character in the game (the devil mini-boss from the video on my site) from a dream. I love weird/surreal games that have their own strange and interesting worlds to explore - like Super Mario, Megaman, Zelda, Earthbound (I’m in love with this game!) and many other old games for the Nintendo consoles… They inspired me to make my own game with my own world. I’m not a fan of the new popular games – they stake only on beautiful/realistic graphics and don’t have interesting and original ideas like the old video games had. When I make something with Game Maker, I always want it to look and play perfectly, if I don’t like something, even if it’s small – I change it until it’s “perfect”. I often criticize games by other people and I learn from their mistakes. I like to ask my friends what do they think about different aspects of my projects – it’s important to hear other people’s opinions.
Many have asked me how I come up with my game ideas. For me, thinking of ideas and concepts for my projects is the most interesting thing in the game making. I love thinking about games. When the idea for Purple came, I thought out all worlds in the game, all bosses at the end of each world (I love video game bosses!) and thought about many obstacles, powerups, bonuses, etc. I don’t have a
Insight Into: Hex Ball By Cammieman10 Hex Ball is an adventure/platform game, the main goal of the game is to collect all of the GloBalls scattered across all the different worlds and levels. There are 3 different colors of GloBalls, blue ones stay where they are, green ones move randomly and bounce off of walls, and orange ones just bounce off of walls. I don’t quite know yet how many worlds I plan to have in the game but I know there will be a minimum of 4. Each world is a fairly large level that branches off into all the different levels of that world.
There will also be a large room that connects all of the worlds. In the game you can also collect and use special “abilities” that allow you to access certain areas of a level or world, one of these is the Magnetism ability that lets you stick to magnet tracks on the walls and ceiling, and then you can get Magnetism Upgrades that allow you to shoot yourself off of Launchers, and other upgrades I won’t mention. Another ability is the Air Control ability (Note: These names are not final....I hope I can come up with something better) that allows you to hover in mid-air, and with an upgrade, perform a small mid-air jump. I hope to have 1 ability per world plus a final world, and I have 4 abilities so far plus upgrades, but I am planning on having more. You can use these abilities anytime with no limitations except for one, you must have the Shadow Rod lit. The Shadow Rod is a rod with a dark crystal on top of it, there is a Shadow Rod in every level and every world, as long as it is not lit the room is covered with a vale of darkness. It takes 20 GloBalls (Again, not final) to light a Shadow Rod, and once you do, the shadow will be lifted from that room and you can then use your abilities in that room. Hex Ball will feature a unique and original control system, but you will have to wait for the demo to figure out what it is. I hope you enjoyed reading about Hex Ball and I also hope that you all try it when I release the demo
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4. GAMES & REVIEWS
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Review Megaman Paradise Created By: Mixahman Reviewed By: NAL As fan games go, the vast majority of efforts by GM users are utterly dire. Then, occasionally, one will crop up that is brilliant. This is that brilliant one. Since I have scarcely played Megaman, I cannot make conclusive comparisons between the original and this, but I do know this is one heck of a clone. It looks, plays and feels like you should have paid for it. It also looks, plays and feels like it was made by Capcom. As graphics go, they are direct rips from original Megamans. The animations are tied together ultra-smoothly, and fit together perfectly. The backgrounds and tilesets also flow with the game, with nothing ever looking out of place. The only thing that prevents graphics getting full marks is, of course, the un-originality, but in fairness it isn’t that much of a matter, especially when it all boils down to the gameplay… …Which is very good, and very hard. I’m sure Megaman veterans will find this game a walk in the park. I didn’t. I got stuck on the second stage for ages, before realising it is fairly easy (thanks to the lenient health) to just avoid the enemies and leg it to the end. That and the difficulty are what puts the gameplay factor down a little, but not enough to ruin it completely. As with the graphics, a 4 is what I believe fits the game. Audio is pretty much exactly the game as the graphics, in that they are all taken from Capcom’s original games, but are implemented into this version pretty much flawlessly. I cannot say much more than that. One of the best parts of this is the obviousness that Mixahman has poured effort into it. Nothing feels unfinished. Apart from a couple of issues with the in-game text (grammatical / punctuation errors), this game is as professional as game making gets. I’m sure that if Mixahman removed this from the Internet and re-uploaded it with a price tag, he’d make a bomb. Put simply, the game is great, moreso for Megaman fans. It’s not my cup of tea personally, but that doesn’t mean I cannot see this game is fantastic. Download it, and have fun.
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4. GAMES & REVIEWS
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Review The Demon Within Created By: KingDiz Entertainment Reviewed By: NAL Game Maker is capable of doing great things, but unfortunately too few people are willing to dip their toe into the genre that is the RPG. The main reason for this is they require numerous variables to handle such things as HP, mana, leveling up and suchlike. Luckily for The Demon Within, KingDiz has this nailed. The Demon Within is very polished, and the variable system is brilliant. Killing enemies brings up your level, and when you level up, you can pick a magic upgrade or a health upgrade. Fair enough, nothing spectacular. Collecting such items as scripts will regenerate lost health/mana (when the player decides to use them), and books will increase the maximum you can have. Enemies are also fairly well made; warriors patrol the area, following you if they see you, ghosts appear out of nowhere to launch an attack, and suchlike. It’s also nice to see they face the direction they’re moving (well, a selection of up, down, left or right). There is a downfall to them though – their attacks are boring. Warriors do not swing their swords when attacking, they simply hold them out, no movement. Gameplay is generally OK, but gets repetitive. It is mostly just wandering around, hitting Ctrl to swing your sword, and sometimes using Space or Shift to use magic. Some enemies are immune to certain attacks, so you have to learn what to use and what not to. Generally, your sword is the way to go – free to use, a fair range, and provided you time its swings right, it won’t let you down. Graphics were the up-point in the game. Menus are really nice to look at, and in-game graphics are consistent. Blood is not overdone or underdone, damage numbers are not intrusive, and you can in an instant recognise what everything is. The heads-up display is in style with the game, gives you a LOT of information clearly, and is rarely obtrusive (it got in the way a couple of times when the path I was taking was at the top or bottom of the view, and it occasionally made it unclear as to whether the path ahead was a dead end or not). Sound is nice, if not very varied. Both SFX and music fit well with the game. The storyline was OK. It didn’t keep me riveted though, I only wanted to play on to kill some more enemies and acquire level-ups. There are a couple of annoyances I found in the game. When I first levelled up, I got the box asking whether I wanted to level up magic or health. While I was deciding, another enemy had appeared, and was attacking my character. I couldn’t retaliate until I’d chosen my upgrade. If I’m going to nitpick, the rocks in the cave were not traversible. I simply walked into them helplessly, often with an enemy after me. Also, if you’re walking diagonally your character does not, he retains an up/down/left/right stance. My only other niggle was the fact the game forces your resolution lower. Otherwise, this is a good, if not remarkable, game. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it does everything that’s been done before well, and with style. One of the better Game Maker RPGs out there.
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Review Pure Action CTF Created By: dmitko Reviewed By: gmjab Pure Action CTF may not have the flashiest name around and it doesn't have the most flashiest graphics or gamplay. It is infact a pretty standard game that you would find on the GMC and on YoYo Games. As said above PACTF doesn't have flashy graphics. Its graphics are of low quality, however because of this you can expect it to run at a good frame rate. The game has just standard walls, buildings and trees with a low quality texture. There were some things that I did notice. When shooting the screen shakes and the aim cursor gets larger. The game also has some nice lighting on the guns and a light flashes underneath you when you shoot. There was also some dust and dirt effects when the bullet hit the ground. The sound is alright in this game. Some of the sound effects were really good and some weren't. I didn't like the one song that came with the game as I didn't think it suited it. The game runs without lag, however, contains a few bugs. The movement of the player could do with a touch up as I find running is almost as slow as walking. The animation of running needs improvement as the AI look stiff. The game has a few different guns that can be used, however it would be much better if you could have reload packs on the map. The AI of the enemies isn't very smart and just seems to use a simple procedure: seek and destroy. The game would be much better if the maps were larger and if the game had more objects the hide behind. The same goes for the AI: it needs to be much smarter then it currently is. One thing I didn't like was that I have to shoot many times at the AI to kill them. Besides these improvements the game functions well and it's good to see that it's not an edit of Mark Overmars FPS example. PACTF has a lot of improvements that can be made. At the moment PACTF is an average game with nothing special popping out at you. The creator has put a decent effort into the game.
You can get the source of this game for only $5 for a limited time only. See page 2 for more details.
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New Years Resolutions By Gamez93 The start of the New Year, promises us more games, programs and a little more excitement, we may even hear some more information about the next version of Game Maker from YoYo Games. That sounds all good, but what are some of the GMCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s well-known creators, going to do this yearâ&#x20AC;Ś
cactus Starting this December I will be starting work towards going commercial. I've been in contact with a programmer who I will be working together with. He's got enough resources to fund an attempt at making a game that'll let us get closer to being able to support ourselves as independent developers.
Staff Resolutions [M]edieval It's a bit standard I think.. I plan to study GM a bit more, learn to do the more advanced stuff, start a project, finish that same project a while later, and maybe sell it (after setting up an e-commerce system). I will find out what else I'm going to do, trying to fit my shoes in the trails of the more expert GM users (YoMamasMama, Cactus, Srehpog, etc)
Right now we're trying to figure out what platform to choose, and what kind of game we want to make. This requires research and checking out the climate of the different markets.
bendodge My resolutions for 2008 are somewhat mundane, but here are my GM-related resolutions. First off, I want to get done with school before July. (I am homeschooled and have to go until I finish my books, and getting behind is easy.) I need to be done with school so I can get other things done. I also want to release my almost-done game Bouncy, and finish my nowhere-near-done game ToyTanks2. The latter will force me to learn multiplayer programming, so that's on the list too. I have also started learning C#, but progress on that is slow. Another is to learn Blender, which I love using. User Resolutions dino-cool With Game Maker the possibilities are endless. I hope to complete the main part of my game Squeebs and begin another project. Some new ideas I have for my games and GM are: 1. 3D, this could only be possible thanks to great DLLs such as Ultimate3D. 2. Physics Games, physics games have proven to be stunningly fun to play, so I hope to please people by making some awesome physics games. I hope to continue using gm until I go to University, and possibly beyond that, who knows with gm. Anything is possible. phubans Well I certainly have a lot going on in 2008, I daresay. Aside from having submitted my game MADHOUSE to IGF (The Independent Games Festival) I've also been in contact with the president of a game-developing studio here in San Francisco. We've been talking about getting MADHOUSE published as a Nintendo DS game. Aside from that, I'm currently working on a title for the YoYo Games Winter Competition along with GM user Dead_Heat and I'm also doing a side project on my own. RhysAndrews What it was for the past billion years - finish Conflict: Arcade! Looking a bit more plausible but it's difficult with all the obstacles. That, and I do have a project with a very large concept in my mind but whether I'll have the motivation or not to get it going, or the resources, is another story. Other than that, it's just the old "do whatever comes my way" thing.
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XBLA was one of our initial thoughts, but after checking up on it, it seems like a real gamble. We first assumed that the hard part would be finishing a game, and then getting Microsoft to approve it. But apparently, even if you get your game onto XBLA, it doesn't guarantee that you'll be making enough money to cover your development expenses. Other alternatives that we weren't so sure about seem to have better opportunities, but it's becoming apparent that there's no real easy way of ensuring that your work will pay off. As for GM I will keep using it to make a few freeware games every now and then, and definitely for prototyping. I want to branch out into a few genres that I haven't really got represented in my back catalogue. Furthermore, I've been working together with another developer to "convert" a few of my games to Flash, and I'll probably be creating a few games exclusively for the platform together with him. All in all, it will be a very exciting and stressful year, I believe. I'll either have to cut down on my game creation time and get a job or start being able to get a decent income off of what I create. Will definitely be going all out to make it big. Game Fortress I've been working on getting our site up and running for quite some time now, which is one of my biggest goals for 2008. Hopefully we see that in the early months of the new year! As far as Game Maker is concerned, I've got several projects planned for 2008. From completing current projects, to sequels, to completely new games, I've definitely got my hands full for next year. Early in the year I plan on releasing Pokemon Twilight, but immediately after that projects such as Curse Of Kaumaha2, and Aquartist are brought to the table. After those games are released with a professional shine, I plan to move on to some of my completely new projects: The Alchemists Secret, and an MMORPG. Both of which have been in planning for quite some time now. Game Maker is only limited by our own lack of knowledge and experience. Personally pushing the limit, in reality, is what creates a true masterpiece. My goal, is to eventually do just that. Mr.Chubigans This new year I want to finish Ore no Ryomi 3, get some more free games released while transitioning to the commercial market, and keep using GM for the immediate future. I've yet to use anything better for non-code junkies like myself, and I look forward to an awesome 2008!
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New Year's Resolutions (Continued) Srehpog The main thing on the calendar for me is Umbrella Adventure, a far-too-large exploration platformer I've been working on since June 2006. Things have been pretty quiet at far as demos and screenshots go with this game, reason being that I'd like to keep it reasonably low-key until it's done, as well as avoiding committing to any early, unrealistic deadlines for release. Its biggest 'feature' as far as I'm concerned is that it's grown far larger, more complex, and more time-consuming than I ever expected, so finishing it will be something of a weight off all round though probably not before halfway through the year. What's more exciting in the immediate future is the response at Eo Community to the YoYoGames winter competition. A couple of demos were posted and I thought I might be able to guess who was in with the best chance immediately, but recently it seems everyone's pitching in something - and something good. I seem to be the only one missing out, but I'm too busy with Umbrella to dedicate time to anything else, and after playing some of the games, I'm glad I didn't - I wouldn't have stood a chance. That's basically what my resolution is, in terms of gamemaking; after Umbrella, things are going to be a lot sharper, shorter and more condensed, both in terms of design and execution. I've learnt quite a few things since the beginning of the game, and as it was with Ark 22, it's now mostly too late to actually apply any of it to my current project. So I guess my aim for 2008 is to consolidate better designs into smaller, more 'immediate' games. That doesn't mean I'm going to be aiming for a release every two months and not putting effort into the details, just that I'll try not to need 50Mb+ of data and several hundred rooms in which to show them off.
FredFredrickson 2007 proved to be quite a busy year for me, and I wasn't able to do as much with game-making as I wanted to. For next year, I really want to get on the ball with Game Maker more, and devote more time to finishing up some of my projects. Despite my current lack of time to actually work on things, my mind keeps coming up with interesting ideas for games, so whenever I have the time I should be able to hit the ground running with something fun. I'd also like to make a few additions to the Reflect Games system, so I guess I've got my work cut out for me! Tahnok It seems like I always have more GM projects than I can handle, and 2008 will be no different. I've started development on Skeleton 2, the full re-write of my 2D animation software of the same name, and that will carry on well into 2008 as one of my main projects. I'm also hoping to release some smaller side project games in a few months, to expand Tahnok Game's selection and variety. Speaking of which, TahnokGames.com is getting a little dated, so I'll be doing a complete overhaul when I find the time. The idea is to make it easier to keep up to date, including making the new developer's blog a prominent feature with regular additions. Looking into the far future, after Skeleton 2 is released, I would like to finally start work on a game I've been planning for quite a while, an online action platformer. It's been on the drawing boards since before development was started on Aurora, but other projects have taken priority. Right now, it's looking like it will most likely take shape as a hybrid of Aurora and Gemini Chill, combining the best mechanics of each. Also, if anyone is curious, development of Aurora has been postponed indefinitely. That's not to say though that the title has been dropped, it's just yet another project I hope to find time for in 2008. So I think you can agree, that there will be a lot of new projects being released this year, and quite a few more started.
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Money Giveaway By Gamez93 This is a GM Tech Magazine first; we are giving away money as part of our new Giveaway section. Since this is the first one, we are hoping that things will run smoothly, here is some information on the first GM Tech Magazine Money Giveaway. You can win $5 USD, if you can come up with a slogan for GM Tech Magazine, the slogan will be used on ad pieces and in many other places to help get people talking about the magazine. The contest will run from now, until January 25th 2008. Introduction GM Technology Magazine is holding Giveaways, where we will give away money, or other prizes, the contests are done from time to time. .
The Challenge To come up with a slogan for GM Technology Magazine, it has been without a proper slogan since the start, and now is your chance to change all that, by spending a few minutes to think of a slogan and enter it. Prizes $5 sent to the winner via PayPal, that small amount can go towards something big. How it All Works ● You are allowed an max of 5 entries, if you submit anymore, they will be counted as void. ● This contest will end on January 25th 2008, however GM Tech can change that date. ● Slogans must be original. ● GM Tech has the right to end this contest if they wish to do so. ● The winner will be announced in the next issue of GM Tech Magazine. You can enter the contest and see the full Terms & Conditions by visiting the contest page .
The Game Maker Race Results The Game Maker Race is a competition started by GMTech Magazine and MarkUp Magazine. It was first announced on October 15th 2007, and now after a month of making, many weeks of head-to-head battles and voting, the winner has been announced. Votes
Game
Percentage
16
Mount Contradiction
8.6%
114
The Meltdown
61.2%
8
Orbiter
4.3%
45
Triton
24.1%
3
Freeze, Melt, Vaporize
1.6%
The Winner is: The Meltdown – by Jelle Straatsma
All Top 20 Games! For all the top 20 games submitted, the candidate will receive a free copy of AKUCHIZOKU, by cactus! All Five Finalists All five finalists will get one USB Flash Drive each, with a capacity of 1 GB. The Winner In addition to the 1 GB USB Flash drive, the first place winner will also receive a 2-year free domain, in addition to free cPanel hosting for that domain. Not only that, but the winner receives two PC games, out of this selection: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
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Fifa '08 Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Deluxe Bioshock Company of Heroes The Sims 2: Bon Voyage Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Hard Evidence Sega Rally Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08
5. EXTRAS
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Comic
41
By Bob - 11500K
5. EXTRAS
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Take A Look
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5. EXTRAS
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Closing Well, it's all over now. Issue 10 is finished and we will be back with our next issue soon. We hope you found this issue to be a good read. Remember, if you learnt something new from one of our issues, send us a letter. We enjoy listening to any experiences people have had with GM or with this magazine. Thank you for reading and look out for issue 11 in 2008.
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Next Issue - Interview with REZ - Building a basic website - Building a level editor - Resources - And much more...
Freelance writing Some of you don't have time to join the GM TECH team, however you may have great writing skills, and if that is the case, then we welcome you to write articles freelance (where you work independently and on temporary contracts) - so you can write articles when you want, and have no deadlines.
Feedback Good or bad, we value your feedback. Your feedback lets us know how we should improve to satisfy all the Game Maker users. Your feedback can be about (although not limited to) articles, reviews, gm tips or the magazine in general. You can leave feedback in either our GMC topic or on our forum. Submit to us Yes, we at GM TECH will take almost any submission for a chance of it being published in the next issue. To submit to the magazine, simply go to our forum and submit in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;submitâ&#x20AC;? section, registration is required and you will get a fast reply by one of our friendly staff.
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If you like the idea of being a freelance writer, check out more information here . Creative Commons The Game Maker Technology Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons license. This means you are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work. This work is for NonCommercial use only. You are NOT allowed to alter, modify or build upon the work contained in the magazine.