Gamemaker

What is gamemaker?

Gamemaker, originally named Animo, is a trademarked game creation system created by Mark Overmars and published by YoYo Games, a software and game publishing company based in Scotland. It is written in the Delphi programming language and functions as both a game engine and an IDE, otherwise known as an Interactive Development Environment. This engine was designed for those with little to no programming experience or skill to be able to effectively create games without be limited due to their lack in programming abilities. This is due to the fact that Game Maker centers itself on a drag-and-drop system that allows developers to literally drag and drop what they need in order to complete their games. The interesting about gamemaker is that it also includes a sandbox scripting language known as game maker language that can be utilized to make more advanced games that could not be created using just the drag and drop features.

Development history

While gamemarker is a popular engine when it was originally released in 1999 it was a program for creating 2D animations. It was later renamed gamemaker and originally did not have DirectX support, a separate runner to run games independently from the IDE, syntax highlighting, nor the ability to compile games into executable files

What can it do?

As it Gamemaker has greatly evolved from its original 2d animation purpose it slowly added more and more attractive features that have drawn in developers. First of all, like unity, Gamemaker includes a feature compiler that can compile a developed game into any number of executable files for numerous playforms including windows, Mac, Ubuntu, Android, IOs and HTML 5. It also as the capability to render in both 2D and 3d and uses either Direct3D for windows and OpenGL for Mac. Furthermore, it also features interface plugins or ‘extensions’ which can give Gamemaker more functionality. 

The Development experience

Gamemaker makes it easy to bring a game from a concept from a concept to a deliverable with its interactive IDE with all the resources conveniently located in one place. The engine also feature a shader support network, uses box2D physics, openAl for audio, and features networking support. Finally it features one of the most important tools for developers who are constantly going through iteration after iteration of their game, version control.

Controversy

Gamemaker has undergone a few controversies over the years that have affected its reputation in the industry:

Reverse Engineering

 

• ·         Multiple decompiles for various versions of the software have been written 
•  Used to obtain editable files to produce executables 
•  One allowed users to publish apps to IOS without the company’s consent 
•  Resulted in a law suit

Logo Controversy

 

• ·         YoYo Games hosted a competition for a new logo in 2009, the winner was Albert Zak 
•  The decision was highly criticized for the product’s userbase 
•  Became an internet meme

Digital Rights Management

• ·         In a version released in early 2013 some developers would import their games and found all of the legitimate image type resources to be destroyed 
•  There would be a symbol of a pirate on top of the image 
•  This was a result of a fault in their digital management software implementation which was used as their method for combating pirated copies of Gamemaker 
•  It took a few weeks to address and fix this issue

2013 April Fools’ Day Joke

• ·         On March 30^th in 2013, Mike Daily, someone, announced that YoYo Games was being purchased by Valve 
•  The joke drew so much criticism from the community and led to widespread arguments within the community 
•  It resulted in a huge loss in the user base of Gamemaker

Hacking Scandals

• ·         On March 18^th in 2013, the Gamemaker community forum was hacked unknowingly for an unknown period of time 
•  The hacker stole countless member’s accounts and password information 
•  The same hacker hacked GMC again in an attack involving their twitter feed and IRC chat link at a later date

Gamemaker Vs Unity

While gamemaker was released long before unity they pretty do the same thing; each have their own interactive IDE, their own scripting languages, and support for multiple platforms and graphics APIs. Unity however implemented many features before gamemaker and fully supports 3D which is much more attractive to developers. Currently both programs have all the same features and while game maker is cheaper to license at $800 as opposed to Unity Pro at $1500, it is only available on windows unlike unity that is available for both windows and mac.