Issue 14

Welcome to Issue 14 of GMTech Magazine. GMTech has been up and running for over two years now. Our first release on November 30 2006 was an amazing time for all who were involved in the production, however since then we have come a lot further and are proud to be releasing this fourteenth issue. This issue, just like the others, didn't come without its problems that we did our best to overcome - delays mainly.

We didn't want to produce an issue that was 'boasting 50 pages of content' because we know that it isn't about the quantity but the quality. We didn't want to make an issue like issue 13, so long but nothing really special - we wanted to create an issue in which you will be amazed by the content. Forget about those pretty images that make a 600 word article span over 4 pages and actually read the fantastic content that the members of GMTech have so wonderfully put together. With this issue we could have easily made it span over 60 pages and made it the longest issue yet, however after spending two years in this 'game' we worked out that you are more interested in the what the words say than the length.

We arranged an Interview with Sandy Duncan, CEO of YoYo Games, we got some fantastic answers that you can find on page 21. We also got in contact with someone who has masses of experience with creating and selling games and he agreed to talk to us and explain a bit about what he does and his techniques, check out Russell Carroll’s interview on page 23. Along with those fantastic exclusives our writers have stormed up some treats for you to get your teeth into 'What Makes a Game Addicting', 'Game Difficulty', 'Getting your Game Seen' are just a few of the features that we have for you to read.

We have also arranged a massive giveaway of ten copies of GM7 Pro, to be in with a chance of winning a copy of GM7 Pro, then turn to page 4.

As always it is a great issue, we didn't focus on the past (that we are two years old) we focussed on the content, quality and the enjoyment of it. Hope you like it.

GMTech Team

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Website: www.gamemakertech.info Forum: www.gamemakertech.info/forum Wiki: www.gamemakertech.info/wiki

You waited so long for Issue 14, but now that wait is over and you have begun to tuck into it. The bad news is you're going to have to wait a little bit longer for Issue 15 to come round, as we are taking a break over Christmas. Production of Issue 15 won't start fully until February/March next year with a releasing a few weeks after that. We plan to return from the break with loads of new ideas and techniques to produce an even better magazine for you to read.

If you turn to page 4 of this issue you will we see that we are giving away 10 copies of GM7 Pro for free. All you need to do to win is read the rules and fill out an application form; the more interesting it is the better chance of you winning. For details can be found on Page 4.

After a long wait, the GM Mac beta has been released as a private beta a few weeks ago. For those of you without Mac computers, but are still interested in keeping up to date with the various testing on the beta you could take a look at Dangerous Dave's Blog, where he plans to keep on testing the software and write all about it .

By Timoi Since issue 1 gmjab has written for this magazine, and from issue 6 through to the 13th issue he has been the editor and graphic designer. He was responsible for putting the magazine together and producing some outstanding looking content which has helped GMTech become what it is today. He also created the design on the now closed GMTech wiki, so good was the design that it was featured on the Wikidot main website and was praised very highly for having such a brilliant look. However, as can happen to all of us, gmjab has become increasingly busy in his offline life and understandably could spend less and less time on this magazine. He has not formally resigned from GMTech but he has not been active on the GMT forums since September so from now on, me (Timoi), and GMTech owner gamez93 will be coeditting the magazine.

A blog dedicated to interviewing GM users has been created and launched to a positive reception. The website found a niche in the GM market and has gone full steam ahead to fill it. Despite only being around for a couple of weeks they are already receiving rave reviews from many visitors to the site.

YAIPP, Revel Quick Play, and GMArcade are just a few of the new Instant Play scripts and plugins that have been released within a few weeks of each other. They each seem to be dedicated to creating a system that can rival the YYG model. If you’re interested in features like hosting them game on your own server and not having any links to YoYo, then take a look at the different scripts and plugins.

You have been waiting for Issue 14 for some time and we have made sure not to disappoint along with the fantastic articles, features and exclusives we have arranged with Sandy Duncan (CEO at YoYo Games) a special give-away of 10 GM7 Pro keys. If you're someone who is unable to get the right amount of money or for whatever reasons you can't get GM7 Pro, then this is your chance to get a registered copy.

To be in with a chance of winning you need to go to the Entry Form, fill it out and click submit. It’s that simple and it will only take a couple of minutes maybe even less.

We have put together a quick list of questions that you are probably thinking right now, if your question isn't answered here then get in contact with us via the contact form on the GMTech website.

Once - If we find out you entered more than once then you will be disqualified.

It’s not down to luck, you need to impress us (the GMTech team) with what you write in the form. We aren't just looking for length, we are look for quality - a bit like the issues of GMTech.

The closing date for entries is 20th December, the winners will be announced on 21st December and will be contacted. It will be the perfect present to end the year.

Once the winners have been chosen, we will send them an email with full details on how to obtain their copy of GM7.

Click here and fill out the form on that page.

You will be contacted on the email you used to apply, so make sure all the details you filled in are correct.

We plan to give away 10 copies of GM7 Pro, we will give out us as many as possible and the rest will be saved up for another contest.

Read through the rest of the issue and enjoy it, then get down to business and enter the contest to win a copy of GM7 PRO. Remember, if you have any more questions then feel free to get in contact with us via email or by PM.

In a recent topic at the official Game Maker Community a user asked members which characteristics they thought made a game addicting.

The poster rightly pointed out that some high-quality games don’t pull you back to play, whereas a number of lower-quality games manage to have gamers coming back for more.

In order to attempt to create an addicting game it is important to consider what it is that turns people away from a game once they have made the choice to start playing it.

Long game load times, looped music that cannot be turned off without touching your speakers and awkward keyboard configurations which would make the manufacturers of Twister proud will drive gamers mad. Menus that make starting a new game more complicated than you thought possible, screens that must repeatedly be clicked-through will have the same effect – as will a glitch that makes a level impossible to win or a bug that causes the game to crash midway through.

Picture in your head a game with none of these problems - a slick game without any of the above annoyances. If a user enjoys a game and are skilled enough they may well play it to its conclusion. But then what? Will they start a new game straight away?

Will they play again tomorrow, next week, in six months or never again?

You need to consider whether it is worthwhile for someone to replay a game that they have already won – if there are strict winning criteria and little room for freedom within the game they will probably have already made use of every aspect of your game.

Randomisation is a vital ingredient which will keep your game fresh and ensure that every time it is played it is slightly different. Consider, for example, the basic puzzle games that have long been bundled with Windows.

Every game of Minesweeper or Solitaire is always different which means whilst the gamer has some idea of what will happen after a few games there is always a unique aspect -something they haven’t seen. Imagine what would happen if mines were always placed in the same locations, or cards always dealt in the same order – after you’d won the game once there wouldn’t be any point in playing again!

One of the suggestions made at the forum was that the inability to complete a task which you feel you should be able to do will have people playing for longer. Whilst a slight level of frustration should be imposed upon gamers it is hard to strike the right balance between making a game challenging enough but not ridiculously hard which will have the effect of driving players away. You can minimize the risk of this happening by having multiple levels slowly increasing in their difficulty. Level codes in arcadestyle games or a save game feature can also be used to enable a user to resume from a place they have

worked hard to get to, without forcing them to waste time slowly replaying levels or rooms they have previously completed successfully.

Including multiple game modes, for example, having a central story as well as individual playable missions, can make people consider playing when they might not otherwise do so. Who knows, they may enjoy certain levels and despise others – better to let them play the ones they like than have them avoid them all.

Rewarding gamers for their achievements through a top scores or best times board can encourage them to play again and compete against members of their family to be crowned King of the Game. Better still, make use of an online high-score table through which players from around the world can compete. Having a weekly table as well as an all-time list also ensures that users are not too disheartened when they glance at the top scores that have been achieved – then there is a real chance that their name could be on the list for all to see!

It is also important to respond positively to user feedback. Sadly many Game Maker programmers seem only to care about the number of downloads or the rating their game receives. Reacting to and learning from criticism of your game will make your game more enjoyable to those playing it –would you continue playing a game you didn’t enjoy? Many flash games do this well as revenue for the sites they are on depends on the number of times they are played, and the adverts that surround them are viewed or clicked.

The most important factor when attempting to make your games addicting is to consider playing them from the gamers’ perspective. Get your games tested before you release them, take the feedback on board and don’t disregard things you don’t see as a problem if other people do.

Written by Phil Gamble

Keeping games challenging can be a difficult task for aspiring game makers. In most cases, especially in independent work, the challenge to a particular game sways one way or the other - easy or hard. Finding that balance in the middle is important, though. You could have the best idea and implement it well, but if it's too hard, it won't be played. Same goes for if it were too easy (which usually isn't the case in independent games). These are a few thoughts as to exactly why it's so frustrating to find that perfect center.

Firstly, by definition, games should be challenging.

This is in direct response to any game that offers itself as "easy" or "basic". Games are for players to play either for fun or satisfaction (or both, in a lot of cases).

I'm sure you've seen a movie or read a book in which the character has everything they want. It sounds great, right? That is until they realize it's actually more of a burden to get everything they want and then go back to regular life. Same goes for any sports team it'd be great for your team of choice to go a full season without a loss, but after a few years of never losing, they actually lose the whole reason to play the game, and that's competitiveness; either player versus player, or game versus player. So why would you play a game that you never lose at? You'd have fun at first, sure, especially if you're used to losing more often than winning. Keep playing, though, and you'll lose the desire to pop it in or run it.

In contrast, games should never be impossible, as that would ruin the point of playing. Of course, having a so-called "impossible" game would attract a lot of attention, and you'd get a lot of people wanting to give it a shot to see if it's true or just a rumor. You might even get a few devoted fans that play it as much as any other game, always looking for a way to win.

However, to the casual player, an "impossible" game would get old quick, and it wouldn't survive in their library. Not only does it seem hopeless to play when you know you're going to lose, who wants to feel like a loser?

So game makers are always looking for good ways to balance the game to where it's not too easy, yet not too hard. If you know anything about game design in general, you'd know balance is the key to basically anything, and you'll get nowhere without it. There's no reason why anything should be totally one way or the other, including difficulty. Now, to be fair, there are definitely valid games that are too easy and too hard.

A lot of games try to appeal to younger players, or more casual inexperienced players, and the game prides itself on being easier than most. There are games for hardcore players that go for the difficult feel that aren't just for anyone, but the ones that can devote a lot of time into it and have that natural skill.

My point, though, is that if you're looking to make a game for anyone or anyone, you're going to want to balance it as best you can.

A good way to do this is different difficulty levels. You see this a lot in previous generation games (My main memories of difficulty levels was from the Playstation era), but not so much anymore. One modern game, though, that does it very well, is the Guitar Hero/Rock Band series. Levels of difficulty range from Easy to Expert, allowing new players and hardcore players alike get into the game. Easy to pick up, difficult to master is the phrase that passes through my head every time I think of it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say

these games perfect the balanced difficulty levels.

When I first picked it up, I never thought I'd get far with it, neither did probably most players. Now, if you look hard enough, you'll find mass communities of players all going for just slick scores. Looking back, most players probably never thought they'd get this good at the game.

Another attempt I've been seeing lately is changing A.I. The artificial intelligence changes itself to match you, always trying to keep a balanced level of difficulty. This hasn't really proven itself to work completely, at least not to me, but it's a step in the right direction. The only problem with this form of difficulty level-balancing is that you can never do well and never do poorly. If the system works flawlessly, you'll always do average. Once you start doing well, the game increases difficulty to match and sets you back down to a level line. If you start doing badly, it lowers the difficulty to get you back up to the default

difficulty. So, it doesn't work 100%, but it's a nice idea, and I'd like to see more from it.

Games are difficult to balance out because there are so many different kinds of players. No player is the same. One player might be good at any given game, another might not. Games might be too hard for one, but too easy for others. Trying to balance a game to one single difficulty level just doesn't work anymore, especially in such a critical gaming society. Simply put, games absolutely need more difficulty levels to appeal to anyone wanting to pick up and play. It's imperative that games be balanced nowadays, because it'll get murdered by reviewers if it's just slightly too difficult or easy. Nothing's worse than pouring hours and hours into a game, only to get stuck at a certain part and never playing it again.

Broken controllers everywhere speak for themselves games should be balanced in most aspects, even difficulty level. There are plenty of tried and true ways already out there, and new theories all the time. Get out there, do some research, and put together a game that's fun to play for everyone.

Written by Brandon

There is a never ending torrent of unfinished, pointless, and frankly rubbish games that get uploaded to YYG (YoYo Games). The 'Featured Games' is a small museum of gaming gems and delights, and sorting by 'Most Popular' filters more of the best games into sight. However, the main sewage pipe is the 'Most Recent' category where all games start off. I can bet not many visit here as games of the lowest possible quality are found living out their pitiful and wretched existence. Fortunately many fantastic games are rescued from the waist-deep piles of steaming excrement and staff picked. But those are the lucky ones. Some are never found again.

It can seem like an injustice of biblical proportions when this happens to your game, your months of hard work being flushed down the drain with perhaps one comment of “it's ok.� and 3 1-star ratings with only 2 plays. If you don't get noticed in the 'Most Recent', you have little chance of being found again, so I'm here to help your game be seen and to prevent it catching horrible diseases from the surrounding awful games.

First of all, a question. If someone saw something shiny in the gutter at the side of the road, would they check it out? Social pressures not-with-standing, they probably would. By the same reasoning, it pays to have a neat looking game image. Make sure it's not pixelated, unrelated, or a screenshot where it's impossible to see what's going on. By making a dedicated image you can design it to be readable at a glance and to completely fill up the space allowed. A useful tip is to make your image the same size as the frame, not just in proportion, so that you can check it doesn't become undetailed when shrunk. You only have a couple of seconds to grab a potential players attention, so make the most of it.

Now that they have decided to check out the shiny object mentioned before, they take a closer look. Bad news, it looks like it might just be a milk top. While there's no social pressure (unless someone's watching you while your on the PC), your time is precious, do you want to risk wasting your time taking the shiny object, it might be worth nothing after all.

First impressions are the most important, but second impressions are also vital. Make sure all screenshots adhere to the rules I stated in the previous paragraph, having as many as you're allowed isn't any harm either.

Why would the person even be walking down the street? Because they're going to work of course. YYG start on Mondays and finish on Friday evenings, so never post on weekends. The optimum time will be 8:30am GMT on a Monday. There's time for it to be virus scanned and converted to Instant Play, so when the YYG staff come in to see what's been posted over the weekend, they'll see your game first.

The person sees a copy of Vogue in a shop window with the same shiny object on the front cover, the shiny object the person is holding is clearly prestigious and valuable. Submit your game to be reviewed to a magazine, encourage others to review it, find any sites where you can link to it. Post on forums with a link to the YYG page, blog about it, embed it in all the social networking sites you're on and send a message to all your social network friends with a link to the game. Get your family to play it, get your friends to play it, tell them to spread the word to everyone they know. Put an image advertising it in your signature as large as is allowed, implant a virus that when opened will send a message to everyone in the recipients contacts list which advertises your game. Do that, and the plays will come flooding in.

Apart from the last one, that was a joke, we don't support filthy criminals here at GMTech or even ones that have had a good wash.

After much thinking, the person washes all the muck off, and brings it close to inspect it. Congratulations, they're loading and looking at your game! It's now your responsibility to have made sure the game is polished and enjoyable to play. There's hundreds of places where you can get advice, help, and feedback, so use all the resources available to you to make your game a success.

Written by Timoi

Sandy Duncan: YYG goes back to the time when I first left Microsoft in 2003. James North-Hearn (who had just quit as VP Publishing at Infogrames) and I were discussing how we could create a publishing business that was more “streamlined” than the existing games publishers. We came up with something called “Thin Publishing”, which is essentially a business that outsources as much as it can. We looked at buying one of the UK based publishers, but I got offered a lucrative job outside of video games in the middle of these negotiations and couldn’t resist taking the big salary on offer....

When it comes to file hosting, we all usually have our little site that we trust completely. I know I do. At the same time, though, that doesn’t mean we should ignore the others. There are a vast number of filehosting sites out there, for every kind of file. Some are good, useful, and honest – others are sly, deceptive, and not actually that useful at all. So how do you know which are valuable and which just waste your time? Well, you could go through and ask all of your contacts what they use, why they like it, what they don’t like about it, and so on, and have them never talk to you again because you’re just using them for information, or just read this.

Now, I want to make a few notes first – I only had one Firefox window up at the time, with just a few tabs (related to what I was working on). I have a T1/Lan connection. I didn’t have any torrenting or instant messaging programs open, and I wasn’t downloading anything. So, in essence, my connection should be as fast as can be. I uploaded the same 9.3MB .zip file for every site, and when I could, I uploaded a ~150kb screenshot file. Finally, I

did all of these one after the other, so they should all be close to the same in terms of my connection’s speed (nothing should’ve changed).

I’m going to look at a short list of five file-hosting sites, all based around indie game hosting, and I’m going to grade them on a simple rubric. Speed, for both upload speed and navigation speed (have you ever had to upload a ton of files, and spent more time navigating the menus and waiting for the pages to load than actually uploading the files?). Reliability, both for how often the servers are up and if your files are deleted. Maximum file size for how much you can upload at once and how much your account can hold, ease of use for both the layout of the site and the file manager system they have, design for the design of the website (which shouldn’t really matter too much, but no one wants to look at an ugly page, right?). Features, because everyone likes nifty features, and whether or not you have to register (which can be a pro or con in your opinion). So, without further ado, here we go:

The first site I visited was Gamecake.net. It’s a nice little site with a lot of useful features I found interesting. The pages loaded quickly and the file uploads were extremely fast. Of course, I haven’t had a file uploaded for too long, so I can’t say if files last, but the site seems solid and reliable – I would trust important files to be kept there. The file size limit is 35MB, but you can upload as many 35MB files as you’d like. The site was easy to use, and when uploading, all the information you needed was right there (title, file, screenshot, info, etc.). You have to register but what I found neat was the register boxes (username, password, and e-mail) were all right there when you went to upload, just in case you missed the registration link on the main page. The thing that separates Gamecake.net from the rest is the information features available. You can add a message that describes what you’re doing now (if the game is in demo stages) and what your plans are, it gives a list of updates on the game (like when you upload a screenshot, etc.) for everyone to keep track of what you’re doing, and it even has an up/down button to rate games (which is a nice change from the usual star average rating). All in all, after my short time with it. I plan on using it in the future. It’s more than just an upload and link to kind of site; it’s a full-on page dedicated to your game. I would go as far as to say that you don’t even need to create your own webpage for your given game, as this gives pretty much any information you’d want people to know.

Second on the list is host-a.net. Now, unlike some of the others, I’ve been using this for years. I remember finding it a long time ago, and using it for personal file uploads ever since. The speed is quick – not blindingly fast but it gets the job done without any complaints. The most exciting thing about it is the reliability. In the years I’ve been using host-a.net, I’ve never had a file deleted. This is especially nice, considering some of the files may not be work-safe!

I’ve always felt safe with my files there, and I always will. Now, the only thing that disappoints is the file limit. Not per size (you can actually upload 1GB files), but you only have 30MB total space. You may

ask why you’d upload a 1GB file with only 30MB available space overall. I have an answer. After a bit of research, the site explains that, with paid upgrades, the account with the largest amount of spaces is 1GB. It goes on to say that if that changes, the file upload size limit will change accordingly.

Now, I would never pay for more storage spaces, but host-a.net does allow you to purchase more space.

The prices are a bit steep (for me, anyway), ranging from 125MB extra space for $5USD to 1GB to $25USD. You can also add bandwidth. The site is very plain and ugly (plain isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s a black background with gray and white Arial text), and the layout is just as plain (navigation bar to the left, info in the middle/right). It’s easy to use and that’s what counts. You do need an account to upload files which may turn some away, but with the reliability and insurance of file safety I don’t mind at all. There really are no extra features that make it stand out. You can upload almost any kind of file which may count for something if you’re doing things other than game-making, and it does generate a nice pie chart that illustrates your available space, but past that – nothing. I like it, but I may be biased because of how long I’ve been using it, I would recommend it to anyone, even with the ugly layout.

Next is Willhostforfood.com. Now, I’ve never been a user here, but I know a lot of people that upload there religiously. I gave it a look-over and was thoroughly impressed. The uploads are fast and it seems very reliable. You’re allowed 100MB uploads if you’re registered but only 10MB if you’re a guest (that means you don’t have to register here). It’s very easy to use too – along with a simplistic look comes a simplistic navigation bar. Very minimalistic, it has only 8 links and a Paypal donate button. The look is welcome for me, as I don’t need a ton of links for everything – but this also means there are almost no features past uploading, which may turn some away.

One nice thing was it gives you HTML and BBCode links right after uploading, for quick copy-pasting for others. I would use this, maybe as a last resort. It’s very basic, which is nice for quick uploads, but it doesn’t offer much past that – it’s just a very solid, reliable host. If that’s what you’re looking for I suggest you give it a try.

Next up is gmarcade.com. To be honest, I’d never even heard of this site before being it being suggested for this article. I must say – I can see why.

The first thing I noticed was the look. It was polished, but not realy nice. I can tell someone put a lot of time into it, but the colors (white and purple) didn’t mix at all, and are just nasty. The navigation bar was cluttered beyond belief, and it took me a while to find the upload button (where I had to register before I could upload). I didn’t think it’d be a big deal – I’m not superficial, right? Oh boy, it got worse. The file took forever to upload, and I sat around forever waiting for something to happen. I don’t know if the server was just slow at that moment, or if it’s always that slow, but I’m thinking this site is prone to server problems, therefore I wouldn’t consider it too reliable at all. The maximum file size is 25MB, which is modest, but in all honesty, when deciding between two file hosts, and one offers 35MB, even though you know you’ll never upload a file that big, you’re going to choose it anyway. It wouldn’t be so bad if at least the files uploaded quickly. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it, even as a last resort. There are plenty of other faster, more reliable hosts with more features to keep you uploading. NOTE: It has a Java instant player sort of feature, but it didn’t work for me – check it out, it might be something worth looking at.

upload. I’m not sure if it was a one-time glitch but I wasn’t about to sit another five minutes waiting to see – the upload speed was abysmal, and waiting for pages to load took ages. Again, I’m not sure if the server was just slow (because I don’t recall this problem from before) or if it was just that moment, but it was drudgingly awful. The limit is 100MB, and that’s pretty good for a game host. It’s pretty reliable (I found images from a year or two ago in my file manager list), and I know a ton of people that upload there and trust it, so I don’t see any reason why you’d fear uploading important files. The biggest thing about 64Digits is the community – the forums are huge and there are a ton of people behind it. Some hosts don’t have any kind of forum or community and if you experience a glitch, you’re screwed. Not to mention 64Digit’s categories – Games, Examples, and Works In Progress make it easy to find what you’re looking for. I’d recommend it, I just don’t use it because I’ve always had random issues (file uploading, finding my way around, etc.).

So, there you have it – a nice little list of file hosts (primarily for Game Maker), and maybe now you can make a more informed decision on what you’re going to use to show the world your creations. I know there are more out there, and probably a bunch that deserve to be on a list, but I just chose the first five that I could think of or that were recommended to me.

If needed, I could always write a second article with more hosts. Please, feel free to contact me and alert me of other hosts that deserve to be reviewed and I’ll certainly give them a look and write about them here.

Written by Brandon

Finally is 64Digits.com. I’ve known about this for a while as well, and I have an account, but I never really liked it too much. I don’t know why, it just seemed like it was fit for more hardcore game makers (I’m just sore that one of my examples got rejected!). The look is nice – very basic but polished, and the colors all work together (it’s mostly white). It’s rather easy to use if you can ignore the small text all grouped together that makes some things hard to read. The only weird thing is the difference between File Manager and Submit Game/Example. You have to upload the file in the File Manager first, and then submit a game and choose the uploaded file from a list. It’s a little odd at first, but probably smoother in the long run. My only problem was that my file didn’t

Humor is beauty. Some of my fondest memories of gaming involve ridiculous situations and witty oneliners. The most beautiful thing is that good comedy will never get in the way of your game play, and rarely requires pro-level programming. When making your game a few guffaws in an otherwise serious adventure can be all that’s needed to flesh out your game and gain more enthusiasm from the players. At the same time, it’s a great way to take away an otherwise tedious development.

First off, I’ll be honest; video games rarely make me laugh (with the exception of online multiplayer). It’s possible, but when putting jokes into your game, you shouldn’t be aiming for making players roll on the floor laughing. Instead, humor should be injected in a way that pulls color out of your world. It helps make your game more compelling to play and allows you to really frame your game’s atmosphere.

For example, let’s look at some average RPG that I’m making up right now for the point of this example.

Let’s call it Zeppelin Wars: Triumph Under Bleeding Roses, just cause it sounds awesome. Since the player will be creating his own character, we already have a base to begin creating some dimensions in an otherwise average process. While the player can make his own amusement by naming his/her character FARTS McGEE, it would be smart to compliment such a creative name by adding some ridiculous customization options. Give the player the option to let his/her character wear an Epic Beer Drinking Hat, or maybe overly revealing/tight spandex (you can still put more serious wardrobe options in the game too, and of course, make all of this available from the start, don’t force the player to unlock it). Just by giving the player the ability to customize his

character, you are adding humor and accessibility into the game right off the bat. You could even take it a step further and provide some commentary on each item. Regardless of how far you go, by injecting some lighthearted options before the game even begins you are going to make the player take notice of his character and encourage him to press further into your game.

Looks like FARTS, with two fresh beers tucked in his cap and a sword that makes offensive gestures during epic combat is ready to hit the town! So let’s give this town some color. When making a game, you probably already had a general idea of what the story and setting is going to be like, so basing your humor around the general atmosphere is a great way to immerse the player. For example, if this town was under attack by malevolent pterodactyls, the towns people beg you for help. Well, you’ve already got a quest right there, so as long as the gameplay is solid (I won’t go into that, however, just keep the FESS method in mind: Fun Effective Simple and Satisfying), some lightheartedness in the wake of such catastrophe can work like magic. The amount of humor you inject into this quest is balanced with how many issues the town has run into that you show.

Want this to be a more serious moment in your story?

Add more examples of hardship (for instance, this would be a perfect time to kill off the player’s parents!). However, a little black comedy shouldn’t detract from the moment. For example, with all the pterodactyls flying around, you could have a vendor selling umbrellas due to all the you-know-what that would be raining down from the sky. Just a simple

stand like that takes the quest up a few notches on the believability ladder. You don’t even have to stop there, after all, it’s your game, so you get to decide what to do with it. All the graffiti and artwork, all the villages, all the monsters, everything the characters say is up to you, have fun with it, and even if it’s cheesy, it could still keep players hooked in. All it takes is a little brainstorming and you’ll be amazed at how creative you can be!

Injecting humor does more than add substance to your game. It’s a great way to stay productive during development, and at the same time, your brainstorming, could come up with more than a few gags. A lot of the time you may find yourself adding whole quests or features and not be aware of it! This is especially true when working with teams, because it eases off a lot of the stress associated with development, and again, you could be building on your ideas in a humorous way when one of you might come up with a plot twist, or even just a better way of working with a character that doesn’t have to do with humor. It gets you thinking about how you want to build your game and can be far more enjoyable too.

Okay, so you might consider yourself the funny type. It doesn’t matter! Remember, you’re not aiming to make people laugh, the wit you put in the game should, at best, make the player admire how clever you can be.

If you truly feel that you don’t have a funny bone, then just keep the jokes subtle, no matter how corny your jokes are, the game is still gaining those crucial

IsmAvatar - “The senior members have a lot of mixed feelings, but I think the fact that we've been with the project through so many changes as it is, speaks volumes about how "resistant to change" we are. Now granted, you have a few who have jumped ship, most notably being GearGOD, and they were not without reason, because there have been some disappointments brought with YYG, most notably being the amount of propriety that they have added to GM, through DRM, encryption, blacklists, and the likes. Most of which harmed normal/legitamite/wellintentioned users of GM and only being a minor hinderance to the black market users. I think the guys could learn a little from Ben Franklin: "He who would

dimensions that make the game immersive. A lot of developers (even some triple A console dev-teams) put too much focus on only a few aspects of their game and end up creating a half-empty experience because they failed to develop the atmosphere in the entire game.

It’s important to always keep the setting interesting, give a character a candy bar addiction, make an airplane out of cardboard, or clog up a toilet as long as it sticks to your universe, your just improving your experience, and developing your own creative muscle. If you're truly feeling uninspired, then play games that are known to be funny, study how humor got Portal it’s own cult following, pretty much everything done by Tim Schafer confirms the philosophies I’ve written about here. I’m repeating myself a lot on this, but don’t be afraid of cheesy jokes, everything you put into a character is going to add to him/her. Humor is the easiest way to build a foundation for the character and make him someone players can relate too.

The best advice I can give anyone is if your developing your game and it is becoming too boring, then you’re going to end up with a boring experience.

Keep the ideas flowing even the dullest quests can become something the player is going to look back on. And who knows? You might end up making ME roll on the floor laughing.

Written by Evilspud

give up a little freedom for a little security, deserves neither and will lose both." or perhaps, "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

Of course, we're all also familiar with the infamous delays at release date, well-excusable for a new experiment that I think made it all worth while. I am talking about, of course, Instant Play, a revolution in game development and marketing, the ability to play games from your browser. This amazing development has redefined browser games; no longer the low quality flash games you play on AddictingGames now we have real quality, and the price is right.

Written by ISMAvatar

TwilightPhantasm, branded by Ben Smith (its creator) "The Darker Game Maker Community", is pretty much as its slogan suggests - a Game Maker community with a dark theme. However, the darkness is only referring to the website colour scheme; members are generally very friendly. So, how does this community differentiate from all the others in a large pile of substandard websites? All but the chatroom and forum is coded from scratch. Might not seem like there's much left after those two are out of the picture.

You'd be surprised though. These are some of the features of the website at the moment:

If you want to do anything on the website, really you need to register. Handily, the creator has made the website connect with the forum (SMF), so you only need to register once. Extremely convenient (some other websites ought to master this).

The website allows you to submit your game(s), provided you have the exe in a zip file, a thumbnail, and a screenshot ready on your PC. You enter the details in, and when uploaded a moderator or administrator will approve or deny it. This is generally quality control, although few games are considered "too bad to accept". The whole archive system is nothing new and generally essential, but at least they've coded it all themselves, and it generally works well. Once it's in the archive, other people can comment on the game and rate it (both well-made

features).

Again, nothing new to Game Maker communities, but it's coded from scratch, and works fine. Input your title, your current mood and write a blog as you please. Includes BBCode for text styling, links, images and the like. If you know CSS, you can customise its looks, which is a nice feature. People can also comment on your blog entries (optional, there's a tickbox allowing you to prevent it).

Each member has their own virtual "trophy cabinet" which they can fill with awards won in games. On top of many games having the ability to win trophies for specific achievements, three (currently) allow you to log into the website directly through the game EXE and win the award - the three games are MooMoo by Ben Smith (the creator of the website), Fireblast by Ulrik04, and Zyousbox by myself. The inbuilt script was created by Ben and is available if your game is considered good enough.

These are one of the newest features of the website.

When you upload your game (and it's accepted), you get a little image showing a cropped area of the thumbnail, the game name and your username, download count, and its current rating. If you're advertising your game all over the place, this can

save you a bit of time writing out the details, especially since the image is given to you in either BBCode or HTML (copy the code, paste it, and you're done). A brilliant little piece of work.

Currently a fairly new system with little use, although they will soon become a fairly important part of TwilightPhantasm. At the moment, you can earn credits by uploading games and blogs. In the future you will also be able to win them in specific games.

Spending them will be possible in designated games on things like extras, minigames, cheats etc.

you want - Introductions, Game Maker help, Software advertisement (although frowned upon if you've not made yourself known), WIP posting with in general a lot of feedback given by the members, the ubiquitous General Chat, and anything else. There's also a suggestions section where you can post things you'd like to see. It's great to find the website's creator has replied to almost every topic made in the Suggestions board, and acted upon many of them. The forum has all the things you'd expect to see - PM inboxes (100 PM space limit), a page of statistics, Who's Online list etc etc.

Usually pretty active as there's a period of time every day when few people are on. When there are people on the chatroom, it's a great place to hang out and chat to fellow game makers. They are generally happy to help you out with anything you might be stuck on, or will hold competent conversation if you're doing fine.

In my opinion (and not just because I'm a moderator and active member there) it's a great website, which most people can find a home in. You will always get feedback, help or discussions when you want or need them, and will be thanked when you help or give feedback to others. I suggest that you try the wesite out today at http://www.twilightphantasm.com/ membership and everything is completely free and fast, and you'll get a warm welcome when you introduce yourself.

The community of TwilightPhantasm is essentially its heart. Well over 100 members, over 27,000 posts in over 1200 topics, and a range of boards for anything

Written by NAL

TwilightPhantasm is the best alternative to YYG and the GMC! I really love TwilightPhantasm. Is the most friendly GM site in the world. You can relax by playing games, posting in interesting topics at the forums, write blogs about anything you want, uploading your games and also chatting in the coolest chatroom! The best site for having fun with the whole Game Maker thing!

Also new features coming up every day, like the awesome "DCards"!

Anybody who is involved with this site feels lucky now and some members wonder how they didn't notice this site before!

TwilightPhantasm as quite a large variety of people in comparison to other forums I've been on. It doesn't have 20 boards, yet has a place for everything. It's pretty much an all-around good site with the cool aspect of encouraging Game Making.

TwilightPhantasm is basically the best forum related to the Game Maker program. Each individual member

has something productive and encouraging to offer, which makes it such a great community. Having the freedom to suggest what to change on Twilight to make it a better place and have it heard and taken action is incredible.

I joined the TwilightPhantasm community shortly after it was created, and I've seen it grow from a small place where a handful of people talked about making games, to a large site where new members arrive every day, uploading their games, getting feedback, chatting, and enjoying themselves while being part of one of the largest unofficial GM communities.

TwilightPhantasm is a place where people from all over the world come to talk about Game Making.

Needless to say, the community is very cordial in all respects.

TP is the friendliest gaming website. You can get help with your games yet have tons of fun chatting and getting to know some of us.

BEN: TwilightPhantasm was derived from one of my favourite words back when I first thought of it, "Twilight". Then I thought that it would be a bit bland on its own. It needed something to make it stand out, something to make it more unique, thus I came up with Phantasm. Just recently I was told it sounded rather rude, I assure you it isn't though.

BEN: My initial motivation was to make and produce a personal site for me and my games. When I first made TP I had no experience in HTML and I never had any intention for it to grow into what it is. I have considered a name change since the name TwilightPhantasm hardly fitted a community but I couldn't change it, the name just kinda stuck.

TwilightPhantasm was a personal website up until the Yoyogames forums in my opinion and a few others had fallen into such a bad state that we created our own forum on TwilightPhantasm. From there the site just kept on growing into what it is today.

BEN: Well, it was just my style. I liked it, the website has gone through so many graphical renovations though as I am never satisfied with how it looks. At first many people are very skeptical about TP from its design but most of the members on TwilightPhantasm either like it or have grown to like it. The design and

style does not represent the people though. We aren't a load of crying complaining stereotypical "emo kids".

Most of us are nice, pleasant and generally normal people. I personally think the style of TP is a bit like marmite, you either love it or hate it.

BEN: My personal latest favourite features would be the Download Cards. I am very happy with the way they turned out. Overall, I can't really pick a favourite feature, I am proud at what I have accomplished with TP.

BEN: I have so many to add, but I guess I'll just talk about a few. My next big aims are to get this credit system fully operational, add game sorting and searching (since we are getting a much bigger, than I'd thought originally, game archive), rewrite the login script, more graphical enhancements and new themes for people not too keen on the style of the website. Then it's just a case of listening to what the members want and seeing what can be done.

BEN: I am very pleased. Considering that I never thought it would become such a large website. Okay it can't compare to 64Digits, Snowmoons, GMArcade and the countless other ones out there, but I am so proud of what I have accomplished. I have made something that people like and use and I hope it won't stop growing anytime soon.

So, I was playing Puyo Puyo the other day (or, to be more precise, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine) and I was struck by how well it illustrates an important principle of game design-- the necessity of creating a dynamic tension and interplay between two seemingly mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed desires.

Keeping the height down helps stop your screen from filling up, but it also hinders your ability to set up the chain-reaction combos that'll bombard your opponent with garbage blocks; building high towers of blocks increases your chance of pulling off one of those devastating combos, but it also greatly increases the danger of losing the game. And, of course, your opponent, whether computer-controlled or another human player, is trying to do the same to you.

Though a similar dynamic exists in Tetris and other falling-block puzzle games, ultimately the competitive nature of Puyo Puyo and those garbage blocks change everything. In Tetris, a player can choose to play it safe or to go after high-scoring multiple-line clearances; in Puyo Puyo, however, choosing one strategy or the other is a recipe for disaster. The player must act and think competitively, striking and maintaining a balance between the two impulses of attack and defense.

In some ways this sort of dynamic game play is part and parcel of any competitive video game-- that is, any game, regardless of the number of players, that pits one intelligence against another-- it comes with the territory. In a strategy game, such as Battle of Wesnoth, you can only deal damage by putting yourself in the line of fire and you only remove yourself from danger by removing your ability to attack. Limit break attacks in fighting games and RPGs can only be accessed by sustaining massive damage; sustain too much damage, of course, and that's the end of the game. Tower defense games create a tension between the desire to hold onto your money, thus allowing you to buy better units later in the game, and the need to buy enough units to allow you to survive that long.

Such tension might be natural, but a good game designer will always be acutely aware of that tension and find ways to emphasize, encourage, and strengthen it through deliberate and intelligent design decisions.

The classic shmup Galaga, like its predecessor Galaxian and many other shmups before and after it, tasks the player with attacking enemies and evading them. But the tension is dramatically increased, and the ultimate quality of the game along

with it, with the inclusion of the two-ship mechanic that doubles the player's fire power along with the size of the target the baddies are shooting and swooping at.

Another example would be the classic arcade game Robotron: 2084. In an interview with John Sellers, the game's creator Eugene Jarvis described the concept at the heart of the game: "The game mechanic was based on the psychology of having conflicting goals. You want to a) stay alive with all this shit coming at you, b) kill the robots, and c) rescue the humans. So there's this big conflict.

You know, here's 20,000 points but there's forty bullets coming at me. Do I go for it?" (Arcade Fever: The Fan's Guide to the Golden Age of Video Games, Running Press Book Publishers, p. 53.)

It's that same principle of dynamic tension, so much so that we might call it the Jarvis Principle. Good game design will not only bolster the presence and importance of the Jarvis Principle, but will make it central to the game play. Again a kind of tension exists, for example in Tetris-- the desire to clear more lines versus the desire to play it safe-- or in most platformers-- gaining a valuable power-up versus going about your way. But, again, this tension is mostly optional; you might desire that 'one-up' on the other side of that large bed of death-spikes, but choosing to go after it or ignore it is largely a matter of player choice.

And there's nothing wrong with that-- believe me, one thing we need more of, especially at the amateur level, is player choice and autonomy!-- but there's no real tension if it can be resolved by choosing one option or the other. Perhaps that's why such dynamic tension is more at home in games that, whether their player interface is action-focused or more deliberate, turn around strategy to one degree or another.

So how do we, as game designers, ensure a central and compelling dynamic tension in our games, especially those that exist in more action-oriented genres? As always with art there's no easy or pat answer for that-- no formula for inspiration, no paintby-numbers for an act of genius. But by keeping this in mind when setting about designing a game and by studying great games that do it well, there's a better chance that we'll pull it off-- and thus, a better chance that we'll make a better game.

Written by Tom Russell

Sandy Duncan: YYG goes back to the time when I first left Microsoft in 2003. James North-Hearn (who had just quit as VP Publishing at Infogrames) and I were discussing how we could create a publishing business that was more “streamlined” than the existing games publishers. We came up with something called “Thin Publishing”, which is essentially a business that outsources as much as it can. We looked at buying one of the UK based publishers, but I got offered a lucrative job outside of video games in the middle of these negotiations and couldn’t resist taking the big salary on offer. We didn’t give up on the idea completely, and over the next 2 years we met up with Spencer Hyman (who we already knew) and he persuaded us to adapt the business model to fit a web based business. So that’s how we ended up pretty much with the idea for YoYo Games that you know and love today. Our “end game” is to create a publishing business helping the best developers to sell their games and share in that success. To do all of that we probably need to get YoYo Games to be about 10 * as big as it is today, so that means we need to continue to develop Game Maker as well as the website.

SD: We felt terrible.

The old Glog www.playsnack.com is still around somewhere, I keep it on our servers as a reminder of how difficult we made it for ourselves at times. If you look at the growth in the site and the community, then we must have gotten more right than wrong. It was a great feeling to see the feedback when we upgraded the GMC server and forum software, I think this certainly helped us win over a few of the doubters. We can’t make everyone happy, but with what we’ve done so far I think the “unhappy” folks are a small, but less than silent minority.

SD: Absolutely. We still have our critics and I hope they never go away because it helps to keep us alert.

Building YoYo Games is a slow process, but almost

everyone in the Game Maker community has been able to get some benefit from our efforts. The GMC is more reliable than it used to be for example !!!! 18 months ago there weren’t many places you could put a game on a server and have it downloaded or played an unlimited number of times all for free. This seems to have made some people pretty happy. We’ll keep these competitions running pretty much quarterly, but look out for many more ways to earn some money from the YoYo Games site in the next year.

SD: Hard to put a number on it, but my focus is on taking the best games and turning them into “products” that we can sell. We’ve already quietly started work on putting the infrastructure together for this. We will share the revenues equally with the game developers. I can’t say much more, but will make sure you' re among the first to know when we’re ready to make a proper announcement !

SD: I think we’ve given the GMC a brilliant destination to show the world what you can achieve with Game Maker. The “GMC” in the shape of the YoYo Games website has more than 10 times the traffic that gamemaker.nl had less than 18 months ago so something good must have happened. We serve more than 10TB of data every month and it’s growing every week. We’re far from sitting still congratulating ourselves…we’re only one third of the way into a five year plan.

SD: No plans. Less than 2% of our visitors are using any browser other than IE/FF we just don’t have time to test and support another add on.

SD: There are over 500,000 unique visitors to the site every month…so if I said we listened to EVERY piece of feedback, then I wouldn’t be telling the truth. BUT we do keep a record of the main issues and try to address them if we can. So don’t stop telling us where there are issues or new features you would like to see.

SD: Yes. Most of the work is in the website NOT in Game Maker. If we decide to release this, then it will be in the second of the two releases of the website we plan for this year.

SD: Our ultimate goal is to publish the best of the games that get uploaded to the site. We will of course only do that with the permission of the developer of the game. If we achieve our goals, then the most successful developers could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars…maybe even more. We’re working hard behind the scenes on making this a reality, but it takes time and money to make this happen and we don’t (sadly) have unlimited resources. The first people to earn money (we’ll share our revenues with the developers of course) will be doing so before the end of 2009, maybe sooner.

Raising funding (this has become a LONG and difficult process. I also spend a LOT of time seeking out and developing business partnerships that you haven’t seen anything of yet.

SD: Yes, we will move to a new helpdesk system in January and I have hired some new customer support resource that will start at the same time. I expect big improvements in the New Year

SD: Yes, pretty much. The first priority has been to get the runner into C++. The dev work for this is feature complete and we are in early testing.

Separately we will start work on the Maker part later this year, though we haven’t as yet decided if this will be done in C++ or some other platform. (We could for example keep it in Delphi or maybe use C#).

SD: It takes a LOT of effort to do any of these things properly and I haven’t seen one that is adequately staffed or funded to really pull this off. We don’t rule out making Game Maker an open source product some day, but for now our focus is more on the games and making Game Maker better as a development environment, based mainly on Windows as the key development platform. Worth noting that every console game is developed on PCs, mainly Windows machines.

SD: For now, yes. The good thing about Softwrap is it’s cheap…unfortunately we get what we pay for.

Using another DRM is just a difficult thing to do right now and we need the money from Game Maker sales to help pay some of the bills, so changing to another, more expensive DRM would mean we would seriously have to consider charging more for Game Maker. I think I can say that we almost certainly won’t use Softwrap for GM8 unless they make a lot of changes to their product. In fact I believe we may not use a DRM at all, but that decision is a long way off.

SD:Not really, though the work we’ve done for Apple Mac version is obviously pretty portable as OS/X is based on BSD. The pity is we’ve run into real problems with the tools we’re using on the Mac and this might all get delayed until the C++ Runner is debugged…that will at least let some of the games run on a Mac…so Linux would be easy in a similar sense, but we have no plans for this.

SD: Mark Overmars has done a few of course….and Michel (Cassius) son Leo (he’s 11) is a big fan.

Otherwise sadly not.

SD: We al spend a lot of time reading all of the stuff that gets posted on the site…whether that’s to the YYG bits or the GMC…so anything that gets published gets read by some or all of us, including the magazines.

SD: I like 64 digits. I realise it’s more than a blog, but it’s a way of seeing some things that are of interest to the community that don’t always show up at the GMC/YoYo.

SD: This is really the core of what YoYo Games is all about. I don’t expect to see development on much more than Windows and Mac (note the Mac version is ready for a private Beta in the next few days. It’s technically possible to have a Linux version (based on the Mac version with Open GL), but I’m not committing to it yet. The exciting area is having a runner (and maker) that allows the developer to “target” different platforms. If I could do this today, then iPhone would be top of my list.

SD: Yes. There’s a possibility that we’ll do more competitions in 09 than 08. We’re currently looking for sponsors for some additional competitions, but the quarterly $1,000 prize is pretty much a fixture.

SD: Not at all. We LOVE the accessibility that we get for new GM enthusiasts as well as the fact that GM also facilitates serious development. I would love to have a debugger for the more serious developers as well as the best extensions built in as standard

SD: Yes, there are lots of things I would like to see done differently. In some ways I wish we had never used a DRM….the main reason it’s still there is it makes it really easy for us to get paid since we don’t have any payment infrastructure built into the site. …but that’s only one thing on a long list of “wishes”. I start to get excited about GM 8, even though work won’t start on it until early next year.

SD: Have patience, Rome wasn’t built in a day…we have some very clear plans for what we’re doing.

Keep giving us your feedback…we really do try to listen and take action. We’ve spent more than a Million $$ so far and we will spend much more in the next 2 years, so these are exciting days for the Game Maker Community. You can help US by promoting the site and especially getting people you meet/know to play your games on YoYo.

Russell Carroll:I am involved in quite a few different things at Reflexive.

I work as a Game Producer/designer creating games and working with them through to completion. Typically I work with developers outside of Reflexive to complete these games and I usually have several projects in the fire at the same time. I'm also part of our Publishing group, so I play a lot of games to determine if we might publish them and talk to the developers about that. If we do publish a game, I might step in and be the producer on our side of that project. As well I'm the producer on the Mac Arcade. So I look at Mac games, test them, wrap them with our DRM and keep our Mac Arcade running. Lastly (long list!) I do press and marketing for the games we release. I enjoy that as I love to write and dealing with the press often creates additional opportunities to write, and I've enjoyed those as well. I wrote several articles for Gamasutra this year and really enjoy the chance to talk about our little niche of the games industry. Of course that is just me. Reflexive is split between doing game distribution and game development. The distribution side recently became more fixed in people's eyes as Reflexive was acquired by Amazon, but traditionally I think more people think of us as game creators.

Russell Carroll: There are certainly many ways to judge success. Our Big Kahuna and Ricochet series have certainly been very well-received by the public and have sold really well. However, another way to look at success is just achieving a dream. In that respect, Swarm, our first game was a great success, as have been all the titles that we've released. Wik: Fable of Souls was another game that quickly comes

to mind as a key success as it was a game of the year on both the PC and for XBLA.

Russell Carroll: Making games is difficult. If you've been watching the financials you've seen just about every major game company announcing layoffs and division closures. In that world it is hard to be successful regardless of your size. However, despite the difficulty, there is a lot of joy that comes out of working for a smaller development company. We are somewhat forced to work on smaller projects, but that really isn't a bad thing. Smaller projects mean that each person is closer to the heart of the game. You don't end up with an employee whose entire job is to make the water look realistic. Each team member has a lot of involvement in the game and can feel like it is really their game. We are restrained in budget as well, but that really helps to reign in the scope of games and to focus on games that are smaller. In so doing, you've got a great opportunity to focus on game play and to make the game as perfect as possible. So sure, there are challenges, but a lot of those challenges turn out to be blessings in disguise so to speak.

Russell Carroll: Making games for fun and for profit are often very different things. To sell your game you have to be aware of the market. What is selling?

How much of it is selling? Who is buying? Why are they buying? As a company that also sells games we get a lot of good information about what sells and what doesn't, but just about anyone can get a good feel for the downloadable games market by checking out casualcharts.com (which happens to be run by a Reflexive employee, the creator of both Big Kahuna and Ricochet - James C Smith). The key thing to remember is that if you want to sell your game, you

have to make a game that people will buy.

Sometimes, and I stress it's only sometimes, that means you can't make the game(s) that you want. If you just want to do your own thing, you can try to sell that too, but in my experience, I'd say you are much less likely to earn a livable income if you make your game without considering what people are currently buying.

Russell Carroll: Mostly we stick to casual game rules.

We use the mouse for player input and though we may use the right mouse button, the game should be playable with only the left mouse button. We spend a lot of time working on difficulty ramps, trying to ensure that the game is easy in the beginning and ramps up slowly. It's also very important that everything be as intuitive as possible and that there is a lot of visual feedback for players, so that they get an immediate response when they do something.

Russell Carroll: For me the answer is yes, but I've only been making games with Reflexive for a short time. In fact I only have one game that I've completed with Reflexive, Airport Mania, though I'm currently working on several more projects and previous to working on games at Reflexive I did some game development in my spare time with my brother (BC Soft Games). So perhaps I'm still looking at game development with child-like eyes, but I have to say that I very much enjoy it. There are absolutely moments when I look at a game and think that it just isn't possible or when I get stuck in a design and can't seem to see any solution, but after time, sometimes a fair amount of time, ideas come and that, for me, is the greatest part of game development. Ideas that break down the walls that stopped your progress. I really enjoy the creative side of making games, but I also very much enjoy the producing side and ensuring that the game is approachable by players and has the

extra touches that will make it a fun and unique experience.

Russell Carroll: If I had to pick one part of making games I didn't like, it would have to be level balancing. It requires a lot of testers playing and a ton of spreadsheets to determine where there are problems in the levels, and there is a lot of secondguessing difficulty curves as you try to make a best fit for the majority of players while realizing that regardless of what you do some people will think your game is too easy and other will think it is too hard.

Russell Carroll: Just one last thought on making games to sell. The way I've always thought of it is that I have a long list of ideas for games. However, on that list there are frankly a lot of ideas that I can't do currently. They may be decent ideas for short flash games, or great ideas for huge retail games, but they aren't the right games for me right now. After you take those ideas off your list, you're left with a list of ideas you could do, but obviously, you're not going to do all of them at the same time. You have to narrow it down to one idea. For me, a part of that process is thinking about how well the game might sell. The public has different likes at different times, so different ideas might be more commercially viable at one time or another. In the end, I try to pick the game that feels like it is right for the moment. That does mean I probably don't pick an idea that sounds cool, but doesn't seem like it will sell. However, that doesn't mean I'm making a game that I don't want to make. If you ever cross that line and do a project you aren't interested in b/c you think it will sell, you'll find yourself making a bad game. I think it's an important distinction. It all starts with a long list, and if your list is only one idea long, I'd recommend you spend some more time thinking about game making. You'll find that there are lots of ideas and interesting things you can do if you take the time to consider, and when you do, I'm certain you'll find that one of the ideas is both interesting to you and seems like it would sell well.

MooMoo is a minigame inspired by the Legend of Zelda: Magora's Mask. In it, you play a farmer defending his cows from attacking aliens. Unlike the traditional farmer who usually would carry a shotgun at all times, this little guy has a bow and a set of arrows.

For every enemy you beat you get a little bit of money.

After the first (and each subsequent) wave of enemies has been successfully beaten, you get to visit a shop where other types of arrow exist, including bomb arrows, arrows that shoot three at a time, and arrows that burrow into the ground and dive up if they miss.

The mechanic works very well and is made better by little features, such as a motion-planning mechanism that destroys fired arrows on contact with the floor if they won't hit an enemy. Particle effects are also put to good use for bomb arrow explosions, etc.

There's also a varied set of enemies, that respond differently to different arrows. Plain old black ghosts are the basic enemy - one-shot kills, slow, and frequently in large groups. There's also UFOs that stay put in the air and try to beam your cows up, enemies that can only be exploded, and several others. As you progress, of course you'll need to buy more expensive arrows as eventually the standard ones just won't do.

One of the game's highest points is its integration with the creator's community website, TwilightPhantasm.

Before you start playing, you are given the option to enter your TP login details (or register there to get some). Once you have, you can upload your scores to the online highscore list there, and also win up to three awards for achievements within the game.

Awards are collectible for members of TwilightPhantasm, marking their achievements in compatible games and for other achievements (eg. winning a competition on the website).

+ Well-executed idea The problem with the mechanism is that it's pretty much all the same thing. If you're going for a highscore expect to fire several hundred arrows.

Enemies are generally slow, very frequent, and easy to miss with arrows (gravity takes its toll, making shooting more than just point and click).

+ Addictive + Inbuilt compatibility with TwilightPhantasm

- Prominent use of default fonts Graphically, the game has some high points, and some low ones. Most of the graphics in the game are made well - that's a high point. The low point is the constant use of Arial as a font. Things like the TwilightPhantasm login page and the HUD look really bland as a result. As an add-on, the cows unfortunately do not look much like cows.

Sound is adequate. Music is in MIDI format but fits the game, which is rare for MIDIs. I couldn't hear many sound effects at all, which was a let-down - it could've done with some dying enemy sounds and the ping as the bow fires an arrow.

- Some design flaws - Can get a little repetitive Overall, despite a few flaws which drag it down a little, MooMoo is still a fun arcade game. It sucks you in fairly successfully and will have you playing a few times to try and unlock the extra modes and the awards. It's free - give it a go.

Written by NAL

Grappler (inventive name) is a game where you control a ball on elastic by sticking the end of the elastic wherever you like. Levels are simply an HUD, the ball and elastic, and a load of differently coloured blocks. It’s part puzzle, part platformer, part confusing.

Here’s why.

Firstly, it seems that there are about ten different blocks that all do the same thing. I’m sure I got hurt by at least five, and killed by at least two. Admittedly, some were stationary and some were moving, but trying to remember which blocks do what when you have a ball swinging around isn’t too easy, especially as there’s little indication by the block’s decoration (bar one of the death blocks, that has a skull printed on its side). Also, there are blocks that you can pass through. the problem is that they look EXACTLY like the blocks you CAN’T pass through. They’re usually placed so it’s fairly obvious that they’re the way forward, but occasionally you get to a dead end with no idea where to go.

Another confusing aspect is starting the game. You’ve read that you use the mouse to place the end of the elastic wherever you like, so you get ready, you click the Easy difficulty level and… oh no! You have to do the tutorial first. You return to the main menu to find there is no tutorial button (you find the tutorial by going into Help then passing each help page). The tutorial itself is well-made, with indicator blocks telling you where to place your elastic and when to let go of it.

Still, once you’ve got over the confusion aspect of Grappler, you’re ready to play. It’s hard. Very hard.

You’ll undoubtedly “over-swing” and crash into a line of death blocks many times. To avoid doing this, you’ll use the elastic more often… only there’s a limit as to the number of times you can do this. If you reach the limit, you’re dead. You’re greeted with a random word meaning “LOSER” and you’re at the start of the level again.

Once you’re used to the painful difficulty and you know what all the blocks do, the game is actually pretty fun. It requires a lot of quick thinking, and a little bit of remembering the level so you know when to use the elastic effectively.

Graphically, the game is alright, nothing special.

Menus look alright, but the buttons don’t animate or anything when they have a cursor sitting on them.

They do click, though. Many of the backgrounds are taken from the Game Maker resource packs, which is a bit of downer, but some are not.

Music and sounds are resource too, hence the low rating I’ve given in this area. I hate the resource sounds, as do many players, so be prepared to turn your speakers off if you’re of the same opinion as me.

+ Well-executed idea + Addictive + Inbuilt compatibility with TwilightPhantasm

- Prominent use of default fonts - Some design flaws - Can get a little repetitive So, what’ve we learnt today? Grappler is undoubtedly fun, but only if you’re willing to devote a little time to get to know it better. It could do with some touching up in every area, and if it got that, it could be a great game. Until then, the potential’s there, but it lets itself down.

Written by NAL

The title can be pronounced either as "score" or as "es-core", the latter a pun on the word "escort", which also serves as the game's central mechanic: you are charged with shepherding an otherwise defenseless President through pirate- and rebel-infested outer space to a colony that's in some kind of turmoil. What this means, game-play wise, is that you control two ships, one of which is charged with protecting the other.

I decided to make this game a scrolling shooter for four primary reasons. First, it gave the player greater mobility, making it easier to dodge enemies, bullets, and asteroids while attempting to nab powerups. Secondly, it made it harder to defend the second ship, which is constrained to following the first ship's movements along a vertical axis. If the first ship had been likewise constrained, ala Galaga or Galaxian, he would always be between the enemy and the second ship; the second ship would never have been in any danger that wasn't already posed to the first. Thirdly, the power-ups-- and especially the Tower power-up-- were created to make greater use of the entire playing field. The fourth and final reason is largely an aesthetic one, as I became enamoured early on with the idea of a "widescreen" game, in which there is a pronounced difference between the long horizontal playing field and the short vertical one.

The primary offensive capability possessed by the Molly II is a horizontally-scrolling bullet-- the standard, of course, for the genre. The bullet initially causes one point of damage, sufficient for destroying most low-level enemies. At the end of each stage, the bullet's strength is increased by one or two points depending on how many enemies you've destroyed.

But a shooter can quickly grow stale without powerups. (cf. my article on power-ups in the first issue of Russell's Quarterly.) In this game, I provided four additional offensive abilities: The double shot fires two lasers. It also yields one-

and-a-half times as many points as the regular shot.

While the normal bullet sprite is four pixels high by four pixels wide, each laser is four pixels high by ten wide, with a space of eighteen pixels between them.

The smallest enemy is sixteen pixels high, meaning that there is a higher probability of a hit with the

double shot.

The tower weapon is the most unusual. This allows the player to create up to five automatically-firing towers. Once created, they begin to slowly ebb their way to the left and off the screen. Planting them further to the right maximizes their potential, but also the vulnerability of the president's ship. This pushand-pull between offensive and defensive needs, as well as the transitory nature of the towers themselves, is emblematic of the game's central strategic elements.

A bit of nerfing was required when I introduced the homing missile. They immediately seemed to work far too well, immediately destroying just about everything in sight. I briefly tried making them slower or less numerous, but I found that in doing so I greatly decreased the fun factor. Instead, I reduced their damage capabilities to 1/4 of a hit point, meaning that four homing shots would be required to do the work of one normal bullet. And though both the tower and double shot bullets are upgraded along with the normal bullet, the homing missile remains at 1/4 of a point through out the game.

Insight Into: S*Corps

The fourth and final power-up, the bomb, creates a large circular explosion-- roughly 240 pixels in diameter-- causing 1/10 of a point of damage per frame of collision for up to eleven frames. This also prevents it from being abused, but being that it can be deployed up to about six times in a single second, it should take care of most enemies. Just in case I nerfed too much in this case, I gave it the added capacity of destroying asteroids-- the only one of your weapons able to do so.

The first thing I noticed after deploying my towers is that it drove my accuracy rate to pot, thus preventing me from achieving an end-of-the-stage accuracy bonus. I should have seen that coming; with eight bullets fired in eight directions, there's a strong chance only a few will connect. And so, of course, I changed the creation event for my tower bullets so that they would not increase my global variable "global.bulletcount" and thus not negatively impact the player's accuracy rating, which was determined by dividing the number of hits by that variable.

I found a similar problem with my homing missile.

The step event directs the missile to step towards the x and y coordinates of my enemy parent object, pirate 1. Unfortunately, the missiles went towards that particular enemy at the expense of all others, and

seemed to work; the bullets now went after all nearby enemies, moving from one to the other when their work was done. Unfortunately, when the missiles did their job and cleared the screen of enemies, there were no more objects for them to move towards: another error message. I tried the quick fix of "If object enemy parent exists," step towards it, "else, destroy self", but for some reason it still prompted an error message.

The answer was obvious; I put an instance of the enemy parent object in the first level of the game and made that object invisible and persistent. Because "enemy parent" had no events (remember, the various collision events were still in the object "pirate 1", which was still parent to the other objects, making "enemy parent" their grandparent, so to speak), it could not be destroyed by the homing missiles that, having cleared the screen of other enemies, shot themselves off screen towards it.

But all that gave rise to the problem I hinted at earlier.

Having cleared the screen of enemies, I found myself shooting dozens of homing missiles off-screen in between waves, which-- like the tower bullets, only more-so-- destroyed my accuracy rate. And so I took that same solution-- not counting tower bullets towards the bullet count-- and applied it here. Having done so, and feeling that the double shot was out of place as the only special weapon to count towards the bullet count, I decided to be consistent: all special weapons would have only a positive effect on the accuracy rating, thus making them more desirable.

I did not realize at the time just how desirable I had made them, and the double shot in particular...

when that single enemy type was destroyed, it did not go after the child objects, instead relaying an error message.

And so, I created a new object-- called "enemy parent", which I set as the parent for pirate 1, which was still the parent of the other enemy objects. That

The game has a moderately high difficulty level in its normal mode, and so to ease it up a little I upped the starting number of lives from three to six.

Of course, these lives are really irrelevant if anything happens to the second ship-- one hit and it's game over.

To give these lives some value in view of the game's central mechanic-- defending the other ship-- I enabled the player to commit a strategic selfsacrafice. When the player collides with an enemy, all other enemies currently on the field and cleared from it. So, when an enemy is getting too close to the President's ship, a player with an extra life can choose to ram himself into something, thus making the save.

I felt such a useful possibility would strengthen a player's desire to garner extra lives in case he needed to use them later. Initially, I decided that the first new life would be earned at 10,000 points, the second at 20,000, the third at 40,000, and so on, doubling like an experience table in an old RPG. But the flaws in this plan were two-fold; first of all, once I had settled on an extremely finite number of stages, it became apparent that the possibilities for extra lives were very limited. Secondly, it would make for very long dry stretches of time between 40 and 80 and 160,000.

Taking the advice of my wife on the subject, I gave the player an extra life at every 10,000 points. This made the difficulty curve significantly less steep without changing the other aspects of the game play.

This decision, coupled with the others, resulted in a very happy accident. Recall that there is an accuracy bonus (10,000 for 100%), that special weapons do not affect the bullet count, and that the double shot scores 1.5 more points. Can you see where this is going?

Let's say, for example, that you kill ten enemies with ten normal bullets-- that's 10 (hits) divided by 10 (bullets) for an accuracy rate of 1-- that's 10,000 points.

Now let's say that you killed ten more enemies with your double shot. That's 20 (hits) divided by 10 (bullets)-- that's an accuracy rate of 2.

That's 20,000 bonus points and two extra lives. Now, let's say you fire one normal bullet at one enemy, grab a double shot, and hit twenty-nine other enemies solely with that. That's an accuracy rate of 3000%.

That's thirty extra lives.

Wow, I thought. That's really cool. That could potentially break the game. But my first impulse was, let's keep it in. For one thing, I figured if I had that reaction to it, other players might have the same. It makes the double shot more valuable than it would be otherwise, preventing it from looking like a "nothing" power-up in comparison to the tower, bomb, or especially the homing missile.

And, secondly, there was the nature of the game itself to take into account. You could have a hundred extra lives, and if one enemy hit the other ship just once, it would still be game over. This "game breaking" feature could certainly be an advantage to the player, giving him more ships to sacrafice if need be, but he'd still have to play the game.

And, coming back to that screen-clearing sacrafice feature, its implementation resulted in another unexpected surprise, one that nerfed the homing missile further away from the realm of near-infallibility.

Playing through the first boss fight, I found that once I came into contact with the boss's shots or missiles, he-- like all the other enemies before him-disappeared. Since this was more-or-less against the entire idea of a boss fight, I disassociated the boss objects from the other enemy object types-- not linking them to "pirate 1" or "enemy parent".

Now, if you've been paying close attention, you know that the homing missiles are set to move towards the enemy parent object and its children, which means, of course, that the homing missiles do not move directly towards the boss. Instead, they move towards the hidden enemy parent object situated in the HUD. With the larger boss objects, the homing missiles will of course make contact as the boss object would be between them and their goal, but with the smaller bosses-- those in levels two, four, and five-- the homing missile isn't quite as perfect.

Written by Tom Russell

Senseless War is my latest game, a game I started on March 8, 2007. It all started as I was playing the game that inspired me to make Senseless War; a tower defense game called Middle Earth by mikeb33. As soon as I finished playing Middle Earth, I was full of excitement and inspiration. I wanted to make a tower defense game myself and the ideas were just flowing through my head. So I opened Game Maker, created a new sprite, and started the game Senseless War. Then came the first problem, I had no idea how to make a tower defense game. So I quickly went straight to the GMC and started looking for examples of TD games. I downloaded many examples and each time I still had no idea what to do. Many of the examples made no sense to me at the time and I nearly lost interest. Then, after a while of searching, I found one example that did help me understand better, and after playing around with the example and learning what does what, I then quickly started SW. The first month of SW was full of development. I had released a beta already and had already gotten some inspiring compliments. The start of SW was so intense that I had a new beta nearly every week for around two months, constantly adding new things. Once I had the engine completed, adding new units to the game was nothing. I had found graphics that I liked, which at the time were stickfigures, and I was proud already.

At this point, SW itself was a simple tower defense game, with only a small fraction of things to buy compared to now. I soon added more units, defenses and even started to make what I called God Powers.

It was a grand start of a game. Soon after the 7th beta, a player of my game PMed me, his name was Mentos and he suggested at the time to add a highscore table. He added it himself and we became partners. After that, we had a highscore table and I knew I was really going to make something special as well.

The months passed by and I constantly added to SW. Releasing a beta every 2-4 weeks, I was surprised by the amount of responses I was getting. My original thread had at the time over 40 pages of replies. By beta 17, I was proud of what I had. Soon after that, my game got placed on Game Hippo (R.I.P) and beta 17 was downloaded over 7000 times. Reviews and articles about SW were written, and all was going well.

After that, I slowed down and started working on other projects of mine. After accidentally releasing the source of SW and after about a year of consistent, but dithering work, I decided to postpone SW and it stayed in the dark for a bit of time. Time went on, my other works were finished or abandoned, and I was again looking for some inspiration and ideas. As I went through my abandoned games, looking for perhaps the urge to finish them, I passed by Senseless War, and decided to open it.

Soon after that, I was quickly changing things, adding units, and taking some away. Changing the graphics and making new ones. I was full of inspiration again.

The idea of online play had come and gone, never to be made. Highscore tables had been made, hacked, and replaced. Everything was being worked on and polished, and I felt good about SW, I knew it was my best game yet.

Towards the end, I found myself trying to find something to do. It was either changing the graphics or adding new options to the game. Finally, after fixing every bug I could find, polishing every thing I could, I realized it; I had finished Senseless War and I couldn't have been any prouder.

Written by Michael Febus

If you’re planning on building more than one website anytime soon, or you’re thinking about starting up a web design business, you’ll realise that it’s relatively difficult to get great resources to assist you for nothing. That is unless you want to be dodgy and download it all off BitTorrent.

However, over my years I’ve discovered plenty of resources that are free and are a great addition to your web designing. It’s especially useful for businesses that need minimal costs and maximum profits. So let’s go through the 10 essential free resources for web design!

This is a wonderful application that will help you format and organize all your website documents properly. It is, as you may have a guessed, a basic text editor like Notepad, but with many features that centralise the organisation and layout of your markup code. This includes colour-coding in plenty of languages including HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, and many others. There is also tabbed support, so you can open multiple files in one window, and switch them via tabs. You can hide/show sections of code in a tree-like structure (such as hiding all the content inside the BODY container), neatly tab your code, and do countless other things to convert and optimise all your documents.

Unfortunately for us Internet Explorer sucks. Yet, ethically we should still be designing websites that work for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (at least), as well as all our friends like Firefox and Opera. However it’s irritating for most web designers when you have to test your website on multiple browsers, and you can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed on your computer at once. Well, this program contains 5 old versions of Internet Explorer, custom-designed to not interfere with your main installation. Considering these 5 versions don’t include Internet Explorer 7, the general idea is that you install Internet Explorer 7 and then MultipleIE. It’s very simple to install and it doesn’t add crap all over your computer.

MultipleIE: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

A very valuable resource, and used globally. This is a site that generates made up words that appear like actual text in a website.

This is for dummy/placeholder text in your website before it is developed, when you are yet to process the content but would like to see what it’s like with a certain amount of text in it.

Lipsum.com: http://www.lipsum.com/

Notepad ++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ SwishMAX has always been my preferred editor for flash animations and websites. They’ve been very kind to offer discontinued products for free on their website. SwishMAX 1 is still a very application. It allows the use of actionscript, key framing, and so on.

It’s absolutely free and much easier to use than Adobe’s range of products.

SwishMAX: http://www.swishzone.com/

Joomla! Is a free content management system that you can integrate into any website. You just need a server that supports MySQL, PHP, and Apache. It’s a little complicated to install and use, but only someone who is able to cope with relatively complicated installations will want a powerful beast like Joomla!

Joomla!: http://www.joomla.org/

This is one of the most popular FTP clients around – it is free, though it does have a nag window at the start. Regardless, it has all the features you could want and is very fast and smooth. The GUI is nice too. If you’re looking for something a bit more simple I’d suggest CoreFTP or just your basic Windows Explorer FTP Client.

SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/download/

This is a blog website designed to be easily implemented into any website. This is great if your client wants to add news or blog entries. To be honest, I am yet to use it but will need to in future and am told that it is a very useful and easy resource.

Inblogit: http://www.inblogit.com

This website takes screenshots of a web-page under various conditions, of which you can select yourself on an easy, tick-box based menu. This is useful for testing to see whether your website looks correct on different browsers, resolutions, and java, flash, and javascript settings (different installed versions, or disabled entirely).

Colour Lovers is a cute little community website, where you can browse through colours, palettes, and patterns that people have come up with. It’s rather strange that people are submitting solid colours and giving them names… but hey, whatever floats their boat. It’s still cool to use this website if you need to find a nice colour theme for your own design.

Colour Lovers: http://www.colourlovers.com/

Browsershots.org: http://browsershots.org/ If you feel unethical downloading Adobe’s Master Collection CS3 knowing you’re only using about 5% of its features, SplashUp is a great free web-app that takes the form of a simplified Adobe Photoshop.

Instead of downloading the program, you use a tool embedded into the website to make your designs – it includes blend modes, layers, and so on.

Splash Up: http://www.splashup.com/

Written by RhysAndrews

still though, phew, this looks awesome. I think the 4/5 it has on the site is deserved for this effect.

So many 3D effects have been made with Game Maker, but there is no place where there's a list of all those effects. That's what I thought when I created the 3D effects topic on the Game Maker Community. The list of effects kept growing and growing and currently it contains 69 different effects. As the list was so unbrowsable due to the big number of effects in it, I had been thinking about actually creating a place that would host all the effects, but I never got around to getting the good idea about it. Luckily though, Edge PM'ed me about it a month later.

When Edge PMed me about a website for the effects topic, I was delighted. Finally there was somebody who had a really great idea for a website for the effects. The basic idea was simple: create a website where people can post effects, download effects, and also comment and rate effects, as well as creating a nice community for all those effect creators from the Game Maker community. So after discussing some things we should have in it, we started building the website. As we didn’t have a host, we used BlueBind as the base of the database. After different designs, adding new features and changing features, we finally completed the main website as it now is.

We currently have 15 effects on the website, and hope more and more people will upload their effects to get the database to be even more useful to people.

And as the main idea of the website is about effects, I had to write a piece actually about the effects. This is that piece, in the form of some effect reviews.

Josh really did a great job on this effect. In the example, the shadow script is used for a dynamic environment, but I don’t think it’s suited for that. I think it’s suited a lot better for a static environment.

Because when you look at the screenshots or just stand still in the example, you see how the shadows actually seem to warp around the level. But actually, they don't. It just draws a wall from the wall edge in the direction of the light, which will make it look rather unrealistic when you move around. When you stay

What’s nicer than a desctructable environment in 2D? Add another dimension and you know what I mean.

Even though graphically D3DHT doesn’t look very good, it actually creates the great effect of blasting a hole in the terrain, as well as blowing everything around the explosion center away. At first glance, it looks rather unappealing, but when you look further into it, it really is very nice. Just I do think the creator could’ve done a little bit more to make it look better. e.g. Use a more realistic grass texture, alpha map the smoke, center the tree’s origin. But other than those things I think brett14 really did a great job on this effect, and it could be great looking in games in combination with proper graphics.

On the G3D website, you can also register for an account. This gives you a lot of extra features for the website, like commenting on news, effects, and user pages, rating effects, posting in the forums, and more.

The main thing you can do when you are registered is uploading your own effects. We encourage you to upload your own effects so the database will keep growing and growing and get more and more usefull to other users. To upload your effect, first register.

After registering, you will be sent an e-mail containing validation information. After you have validated your account, you go to Submit Effect in the main menu. In that screen, everything speaks for itself. After you're done filling in all (required) fields, you click the “Submit” button. And there you go, you submitted your effect and can now find it on your own page, on the front page, and in the effects database.

Now, this is probably something none of you have heard about yet, but Edge and I are developing an effects demo to promote the website and D3D in Game Maker in general. It will include great new effects, as well as some simple physics and gameplay. Effects inside the demo will include barrel explosions, barrels leaking oil, sparks, and much much more. We aim for it to be a great improvement on 3D graphics in Game Maker so far. It's a little bit too early for screenshots, as we have only created seperate effects, and haven't combined them yet. Be sure to check the website soon though, because we plan to release it in the following 2 weeks.

Written by

IconFX Homepage: icofx.ro Having a custom icon for your game is just one of the things you can do to add an extra layer of polish to your game. For a free dedicated icon maker, you really can't get much better than IcoFX. It's image creating is so good it could easily be a standalone general image editor, with a whopping 10,000x zoom you can easily pick out the details you need. While GM only supports 32x32 standard icons, this program also includes support for many other types, including Vista PNG graphics. It's as easy as microwavable pie with a superb clean and clear interface allowing you to make what you want. You'd be daft to make icons with anything else. This program is extremely highly recommended.

GiveAwayOfTheDay Homepage: giveawayoftheday.com This isn't an application, but a website that gives away a whole piece of software everyday. For just 24 hours the site hosts a fully legal, no strings attached, full and registered program that can be yours for ever. If you miss the 24 hours which it is up for, then you'll never have another chance. It's strictly for one day only! You won't have to visit the site every day though to get the best applications as which ones are going to be up for grabs are listed at the beginning of the week, and you can subscribe to it's RSS feed. It's a great project with many pieces of software that can be beneficial to making games.

GM Obfuscator Homepage: gmc.yoyogames.com/?showtopic=373402 I used to think that throwing a friends pile of research papers collected from all over the world into a mess was an example of decompiling. But not anymore.

Definitely not anymore. Everyone these days is fretting about what might happen when their source code is decompiled and looked at (answer: probably nothing). You can feed your hunger for security by using the GM Obfuscator. Essentially it renames all variables, resources, and adds junk Naples style into your code, this makes it impossible to understand to anyone who decompiles your game. It supports all GM formats, is simple to use, and is growing steadily with many features added as users demand them.

Written by Timoi

GMTech Magazine will be back with Issue 15 is the new year, it will feature a large amount of changes in order to further improve the magazine and make sure that you all continue to enjoy it. Thanks again to all of you who have supported us over the last couple of years and to those who have contributed to the magazine, your amazing help will not forgotten. We will see you in a few months.