![]() Is that it? Is that enough? No? Let me continue. We’re talking a library of games.Ĭrash Lands, Minit, Undertale, Stone Shard, Nuclear Throne, Cook Serve Delicious, Downwell (which I admittedly spent way too much time on), Turmoil, Nidhogg, The sheer number of titles made under GM (to say nothing of the amount made under the likes of flash), speaks volumes about the rapid-prototyping approach to development for software in general. If you wanted anything crossplatform, if you wanted more, you would have to also do *all* your own data loading/saving, handle navigating the file system, setting up and importing/exporting data from a tile editor (or making your own), all of which takes time and focus away from the core cycle of ideate, prototype, and testing. For an amateur it was well enough to blit something to screen, and set collisions, while getting input. Sure there were others that made it possible, SDL, LWJGL, but these were libraries, not fully integrated development environments. GM made desktop development for amateurs, what it is today. Actually thats not entirely true, there *was* flash, and the easy hosting options available to it lead to sites like New Grounds becoming wildly popular, but thats a story for another time. It of course could be argued that Game Maker, and Game Maker Studio (despite the amateur name), was simply the first on the scene or market, that lowered the bar sufficiently to introduce development to the non-professional market. ![]() Despite the memory leaks, frozen interfaces, antipiracy measures, one of which lives in infamy for deleting a legitimate developers entire spite all of this, for years GM has been all but the gold standard for amateurs not looking to make the next MMOFPSRPGOMGBBQ.Īnd GMs success is largely due in part to its focus on rapid iteration, making changes, builds, and testing, if not seamless, close to it. There is GM, the market leader, with many successful free, and commercial projects that have gone on to be widely loved and distributed. And while I’ve only used Unity on occasion, I can safely say, a glance at Unreals workflow definitely makes the grass look greener on the other side.įor 2D games, there are a host of options. Then theres Unreal with many successes behind it. And while I’m not here to write about 3d engines, I’ll include the standard line up.įor 3d games, there is Unity, which for years had interface issues, memory leaks, and suffered from neglect in key areas like unreliable netcode, and text rendering so bad they just bought and integrated a third party solution. Regardless, it is true that the feature set of your tools can make your job heaven, or turn anything you want to do into a grind from hell.Ī cursory glance at this list boils down to a handful of options. It is a common refrain for amateurs to blame their tools, something even professions sometimes do. A little research will quickly narrow down the scope of what will do the job. (I can hear the “citation needed” comments already).Ī simple search for ‘game development tools’ brings up a plethora of options. Despite this, the tools available to your modern dev are crude in comparison to the tools available to movie and tv editors, to digital artists, and even musicians. While for many years games, especially independent development, were not taken seriously as an industry or art form, today it is an industry that surpasses all tv and movie sales, and permeates much of modern life. If you’re a veteran or even an amateur like me, there are a wide variety of tools available to suit your needs, but that wasn’t always the case. On the market there are tools from Unity, to GM which primarily does 2d (though advocates claim it does 3d, the tooling definitely doesn’t help). ![]() In short, we’re here to say I wish x was different. We’re here to talk about in what ways our tools could be better. Instead, for those who stuck with it, we’re here to talk about the tools we have and the tools we wish were better. Today we are not here to talk about money. Yes theres money to be made, but no its not simple, or easy, or quick (unless you’re the developer of flappy bird, or adventure capitalist, but I digress). The truth is, for the most part, most people in group one will quickly burn out. They saw someone talk about “how much money games can make!” or saw a news report about a game that sold ridiculous numbers of copies. They’ve played too many games and had too many moments where they thought I wish x was different. If you’ve been around a little while like I have, then you know there are three reasons people get into game development:īecause they have what they think is an awesome idea.
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