#Hands on insight about Gamemaker

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

merry sinew
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Hey guys, I'm a newb game dev (web developer as current job), I gave Unity a 1 year try and loved the 3D aspect, I'm currently doing courses at GDQuest and I'm really loving Godot 2D as well. Having said that, I'm really interested on what are your thoughts on trying Gamemaker like for several months really invest in it? I'm kind of worried that if in the future I want to launch a game, it might be pricey or hard to port to consoles, in the other hand, I see so much more good games being released with GM than Godot right now.

Can someone with experience in Godot/Unity share your experience using GM as full time engine?

Thank you!

slate mesa
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gm will be much much much easier for you to port to consoles than godot, and the cost of porting to consoles can be high no matter what engine you use, there are needed dev kits and cert costs and all kinds of stuff. all that being said, this being said this question is probably not going to get answered in the help channels, since these channels are for helping you fix broken code in your gm game.

you can ask in the #gamedev channel and you will get some answers

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just a heads up, this is a gm server, and you will get answers that skew way towards gamemaker being the best choice

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thats also cause the people who make all those finished, released GM games you see all over the place arent really hanging out here haha

merry sinew
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thanks @slate mesa yeah actually I kinda like GM a lot and see it has better commercial success than other engines in terms of good games released.

slate mesa
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its a great engine

merry sinew
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actually the guy who created Hero's Hour talked to me a while a go, and made me think about GM as a primary choice, I think the good part is that I can easily transfer my programing knowledge here I guess.

slate mesa
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if youre coming from a programming background, i suggest you still take some time to watch some intro/beginner tutorials for gm because its Not Like The Other Girls or so to speak, like there are places where it breaks convention and we see it frustrate seasoned programmers pretty often

merry sinew
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okay got it, I'm used to switching to higher level programming at work so I guess I'll take a positive attitude towards it, I'm not that closed to new things as most devs.

proven osprey
# merry sinew Hey guys, I'm a newb game dev (web developer as current job), I gave Unity a 1 y...

for porting to consoles, there are publishers out there that can handle that (for a cut of the profits)

Game Maker games from what I hear are very easy to get onto a console (there was an exploit with Undertale to get any GM game to run on a Switch at one point, and it worked with a past game of mine.)

but there is a whole process of getting a dev kit, needing to get your game rated my the ESRB/PEGI, following specific guidelines by the console publishers (from what I've seen, they have rules about how inputs should be shown, or the phrasing of things, or might have their own content rules on what you can and can't depict on top of the ESRB)

slate mesa
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yeah gm is a middleware partner with sony, nintendo, and microsoft so porting is much much easier with gm, but u still gotta deal with dev and cert

proven osprey
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def be careful with publishers, as if you are an unproven developer a lot of the ones that can be eager to sign you on can be kinda scummy

I'm happy with the one I landed, who reached out to me first

but I had another one reach out with some very misleading claims, but lucky they were second so I could not sign anyway lol
(they were trying to sell me on porting to consoles, but it turns out they did not even have a dev kit when first talking to me, months later they DMed me like "hey we now just got a Switch dev kit!" and still have yet to publish anything on the system from last I checked)

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it's prob best to publish to PC first, and just keep it in your pocket that getting your game running on a console would be fairly straightfoward

merry sinew
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Wow thanks great insight, I'll be looking for publishers in 12 months after a demo Im creating is finished. Thanks for the advice

proven osprey
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don't be like me and rework the core of your multi-year game like twice because you made it, and in the process learned how to do it better lol

merry sinew
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great advice, I have just a couple of crappy games, on my way to do more, I'm following a 12 month strategy I learned from a published dev I follow, but yeah def will have several demos before my first commercial attempt.

proven osprey
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yeah, def also get people playing it to make sure it works
playtest often, it helps a lot

and also it's good to show off progress to get some people paying attention if you got anything good lol

merry sinew
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that's the thing I still have only crappy games, I intended to do like that for the sake of experience

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but I get your point, once Im going all in, I need to proof and test often and fast at start

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so I dont waste time on going nowhere projects

proven osprey
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like, from playtesting my game, it helped showing when a method of interacting with something needed to be more obvious

or even like, one person has a condition where holding a button too long causes fatigue and my B-Button run was causing issues for em, so I added a toggle for run as an option

also it's just nice to see what people find really fun. I added a small move you could do that was kinda useless, but people loved doing it lmao.

merry sinew
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lol

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nice to know that about small moves

proven osprey
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having small fuck around interactables can be nice, lets players have a bit of flair to playing
even down to like 'press up to look up' I enjoy in games like Mario World

merry sinew
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Im dreaming with porting to xbox, pc and switch some day in the long run, so sticking to an engine now is important to me, I have a 10 year road map planned to be honest. This is just me starting after 2 years of other engines I really need to try GM

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but I clearly know Im not having a 1 game hit that would change my mind, Im aiming more towards small games, constant small incomes etc

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my life*

proven osprey
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be careful with going too long in the future, because who knows what kind of tech is available then, the switch is only 6 years old lmao. (unless you mean plans for multiple games over 10 years)

though 10 year old GM projects can at the least be ported to newer versions of GM

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there is stuff in my current game ripped out of a project I started in 2017 so GM has at least now a good longevity trackrecord

merry sinew
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yeah sorry my english is shit, I mean 10 years to what ever tech is available and multiple games/apps

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in other words 10 years to become full time indie game dev, instead of my current profession. Who knows maybe I can achieve it sooner with hard work.

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been reading lots of game design books, alonside studying game engines and developing prototypes, I almost quit once I lost my pc with all my data but here I am xD

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also I tend to follow and watch people who actually released games instead of the viral youtuber xD

proven osprey
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a good tip for longevity too I find is name things in your project in less specific ways, as it's good to reuse things you already made when you can

like, my character object is called 'obj_player' and is based on a object in a past game, which is based on an object in a past game

making things like scale numbers be macros or enums helps too, as my games went from a 32x32 scale, to 16x16, to now 24x24

best to change 1 number instead of scrub an entire project.

my plan rn is spend a long time making core engine elements, but I got games I wanna make in the future based on the same parts.

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I made a single camera system back in like 2018 and all my projects start with it lmao (with some tweaks to modernize it)

merry sinew
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holy smokes that enums tip is great

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so you are creating your own modular framework I like to work like that too

proven osprey
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yeah like I got things I've made like:
collision code
a 2D platformer character controller
a camera system that follows objects
an auto-tiler that fills in the edges and patters
an object permanence system that saves values of objects in the room
a visual novel system for displaying text and artwork

nice to just pluck it out and toss it into something else if needed

merry sinew
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yeah and the advantage here is that you know how you built it, unlike having stuff imported from someone else, name plugins or assets etc

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I really like to approach stuff myself too, and avoid using someone else's fix for stuff

proven osprey
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yeah, though even then too don't be afraid to look up assets for some things
like, I bought 2 shader packs a while ago and that $25 or so prob saved me hours of learning how to make shaders

I know the basics of what they do, but that stuff is there for you to use

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though it is good to strive to at least understand every line of code you got lol

merry sinew
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oh yeah graphic wise Im hiring everything or getting it as assets, where do you buy your assets?

proven osprey
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in terms of art/music I make everything myself Bito_Down