Game Maker tool is getting serious nowadays

wow, I haven't been there for ages. Looks very advanced from what I saw a couple of years ago. How is their tutorial base now?

 

I would not waste time on that or other click based products... unless you cannot code, you work alone, and you don't care about making commercial products.

We use Monkey now. Many other devs on this forum now do too. There are other similar free alternatives too.

http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/

http://code.google.com/p/playn/

http://www.haxenme.org/

 

I dumped Game Maker when I paid for it twice and YoYo still refused to support me. (and later went to things like deleting support tickets, insulting me on the support system, and whatnot)

 

Wow that was that bad?
What do you use now instead ?

 

I know YoYo Games is trying to make GameMaker into a more serious platform. In fact, they were at GDC last week touting what the new GameMaker Studio (which is in beta) can do. They want it to be more than just a hobbyist engine. It's becoming that all-in-one tool that I want to use, however it's still not quite there yet. I tried the beta out and it does have some stability issues right now. I can get some things running, but not others. I'm hoping they get these resolved in short order. If they can make this stable enough, then it's something I'll be using (otherwise I'll be looking elsewhere too).

Monkey doesn't have a built-in level editor, sprite editor, or particle editor, however I'm told there are some off-the-shelf editors that can be used in conjunction with Monkey. Yet this means you still have to write some code to integrate this into your game.

 

I'm playing with the beta in my rare moments of free time, and I'm finding that it suits my artist-engineer brain better than straight coding ever did. I wish there'd been a program like this when I was still a teenager and had lots of time on my hands...

 

For desktop games I am using Novashell...

I heavily modified my version in some aspects, but stock Novashell is already great, but the thing still would feel "incomplete" near Game Maker, because well... It never reached 1.0 anyway.


For web games I am learning now Flixel, that does not have integrated editor (it does have third-party editors made for it though).

 

The new game maker is pretty nice with a lot of new features. We actually used it to prototype a game for the local community college admissions dept. They liked it and are formulating an offer to purchase.

We used it mainly for the quick turnaround on the prototype and actually used all code for the game. The thing that was nice is the use of rooms with quick background/music setup. All the object events can be codded using GML which is quick to learn if you have any other programming knowledge.

We where actually going to use a different language but the school requested GM specifically the HTML5 for their website. I think they also plan on using it in Angel.

 

Did they fix the horrible screen tearing problem when using horizontal scrolling? Game maker is a very good tool , but this particular problem was a show stopper for me

 

Self answer: they didn't , it's right there in the demos, in the PC version at least.
It's interesting for android IOS dev, but the $300 per platform price is a bit high

 

Just to clarify, GM Studio is $99 base price which includes Win and Mac. Then other platforms are $99 for HTML and $199 each (not $300) for Android and iOS. (see http://yoyogames.com/game_showcases/294/purchase/express) Still might be steep for some, but it's a one time purchase instead of a subscription like some engines like Corona ($200 or $350 a year).