Could I win a game jam days after installing GameMaker?

[Music] hey Pals welcome back to a new video now I love doing game jams and last year in October I actually entered into ludum dare with an engine that I never really tried before and recently I was approached by game maker to see if I'd like to do the same in their engine now actually game maker was the first engine I ever used in 2006 in the early years of high school and a person born then would now be old enough to drink so uh it's been a while and I'm sure some changes have been made I know that game maker has actually updated their Licensing in the last little while and so you can now download it for free there's an affiliate link below if you're interested in checking out game maker after watching this video meaning this is a sponsored video and of course being a sponsored video you should filter through any of the opinions that I give with that knowledge though I did ask the game maker team if I could be honest with my opinions through this experience and they said yes so I've done my best to be as honest as possible and we'll just see what I say about the engine so in this video because I stream and record everything we're going to be watching the first two days of me learning game maker and then covering the 48 Hours of me entering the jam and submitting my game then a reflection on the game and my thoughts on the engine itself okay let's get straight into it so here we are in VLC we're watching a VOD now of my stream and uh one of the first things I did was of course download Game Maker uh I had kind of like a package of you you know tutorial assets that I was going to be kind of looking through and of course game maker has a bunch of template kind of games that comes with so my goal here was basically just to consume as much content as I could about the engine from as many different places as possible so here we're actually watching a video by a YouTuber Sarah JS and they have this really awesome Channel where at least in this video they're explaining how to use Game maker at like this blistering Pace Building pong basically in like 10 minutes 15 minutes so I just like turned that video on put it at like 1.5x and just like soaked up all of the knowledge uh which was actually really really valuable as a way of learning for me when you have a project framework then you understand the motivations for why those things exist whereas if you just read a manual like end to end yeah the the context isn't really there so it's hard to remember everything whereas here it's like oh that's where you make a Sprite oh that's how Sprites relate to objects like it makes perfect sense my first impression was uh basically how much of a unique ecosystem it is it has this really interesting kind of workspace system where overlaid onto your interface when you're in like your scene editor or anything like that you basically have these windows that pop up like inside of the application and the windows have this kind of flow diagram layout where wherever you click on a property that property then opens up you know next to to the window so you've kind of got this cascading set of Windows that contain the properties at the top level everything in the game that you put into like a room is kind of like an object an object has a Sprite it has a collider it has variables that you can add to it uh that are accessible from the script and it also has events so having those things like right off the bat is kind of interesting and being able to access them from the editor here without having to add them in uh will definitely make it easier for kind of like beginners to get into things and this kind of like workspace system goes as far as including like a Sprite editor and like a code editor rather than having your like editor application and then your code application your IDE instead in game maker everything is just in the one place it's all kind of like visually sped out and I definitely found this a little bit intimidating at first but then eventually I kind of understood the like flow diagram of what I was being shown left to right and I started to digest things a little bit better as far as code goes game maker is very event driven so so you have your objects they have events those events are templated out by the engine so things like on create step which is your like update Loop and then you have like collision with specific objects all of that stuff is kind of made for you out the gate when you create an object and then when you click on the event it opens up an editor and you just write the code basically the body of the function you just write that inside the editor for that event so if you're making like really lightweight game objects so you know simple players simple enemies that kind of stuff you don't even need to really Define any functions it's just sort of it's all in the events I then went through and made sure that I understood kind of a fair bit of the documentation uh game maker documentation is a little bit trickier than some of the other engines that I've used mostly because uh a lot of the libraries of of code are not really bound to objects or data containers or things like that so if you want to modify an array you don't say like array dot some function there's like a function somewhere in the library of of game maker that says you know array ad and required me to learn a lot of these function names off by heart I was actually you know going in and playing some of these like boiler plate games that they've built I kind of find this process a little bit harder than watching someone build something from scratch when you're looking at a big project like this it's kind of hard to know where exactly the logic lives seeing the like editor time view of the scene and then that looking kind of like nothing like the runtime view is another one of those confounding factors where it's like I know that when when I press play it looks like a game but back here it just looks like a bunch of uh black boxes which I don't know what they do so I kind of didn't stay on this track very long because I didn't feel like I was learning that much that quickly uh I mostly just suck to YouTube tutorials and then kind of jumping into the engine and just playing around with stuff so before long I was like hey let's just do it let's just jump in create a new project and make some objects and see what happens so here you can see the workflow it's pretty straightforward like you just make an object the object has a Sprite if you haven't assigned one you can create one and then here you are in the Sprite editor and you already making the Sprite for the object and it's already in the engine so you know you could just jump in in this case uh I made a beautiful uh smiley face this is my my game character and I'm doing a little bit of assessment here of the Sprite editor you know I'm Sprite editor guy uh being a big fan of aprite the functionality here is kind of it's not a Sprite level it's it's kind of serviceable this workflow of like create an object throw a Sprite on it give it a little custom icon and then just like move on was actually kind of cool and what I wanted to explore here was just some of these foundational things that I use every day when I'm making games so you know can I do some control input can I make the character move in 2D space can I give them a dash how do I like just build out some stuff that I'm familiar with so that's what I did and before long I had a little dude moving around which was fine so even things like uh input sanitizing so if you press you know up and right do you go faster than if you just go up um trying to like figure out the best way to do normalization of vectors understanding Vector math in general how it's done in game maker and then you know things like simultaneous opposite direction stuff so if I press right and left at the same time do I go to the most recent direction or do I go nowhere doing those kind of routine things helped me get a sense of like okay how is this done in game maker how are you expected to do things I also wanted to try out like the engine's agility when it came to like switching between platforms so how easy is it to Port a game from Windows to HTML how long does it take to render out like to export and build an HTML game uh how good is the debugging experience when you're making an HTML game versus a Windows game it was something that was a little bit tricky and I opted to kind of like build the game in Windows and then every so often kind of like switch over to HTML and see if anything broke and in the jam that was something that came up a little bit but wasn't too much of an issue I also did a brief little test with their timeline editor timelines in uh in editors are like one of those you know pet little things of mine where I get really really picky about them in a video that I made about gdau I criticized its timeline uh quite confidently uh and I was actually really really pleased to see that uh game maker has a very capable timeline editor with a really really clear key Framing and animation curve system actually being able to have that be played within an editor and then use that in the game that's something that I think is uh really important and then like the long-term implications of like could I make a cut scene out of this system uh I was really impressed I thought it was really nice um just as a ux designer I'm picky about it I've built my own timeline in a different engine for my own purposes so like I was very happy with this so by the end of the second prep day I had this you know kind of 2D sides scrolling platformer set up uh I wasn't confident that I would build a platform for the jam but I was confident that I'd learned enough about the engine and how to make stuff in it that I was happy with my knowledge beyond that I didn't do any other prep I just set up my prep document and then went straight into it so let's cover Jam day one so here is my working document for ludum dare 55 this is the final version of the document because obviously I finished the jam I put some like Focus points in so things that I want to remember that I want to focus on as targets for myself basically then I have like the days laid out this gem started at 11:00 a.m. in Sydney time so started on Saturday finished on Monday 11:00 a.m. it's 48 Hours uh which meant actually it was really good for me I could like get a good night's sleep before spend all day Saturday all day Sunday and then if it came to it not sleep Sunday night and then submit on Monday morning um which is what I did uh so I'll show you the VOD we'll jump straight into it so here we are it's the start of the jam it's 11:00 a.m. and I'm looking at Twitter where the Jam theme was announced and the Jam theme was summoning so I went back to my document filled in the the theme title and got to work basically this started with just word association you know just like okay what are the different things that you can summon or have anything to do with summoning there was a really cool idea of like uh summoning things to court a court summons as opposed to summoning the dead or Monsters now we allotted chat and I a lotted a fair bit of time to just thinking about mechanical ideas we even thought about like a golf game like summon the ball towards you like inverse Golf and then maybe there was an idea about like like sort of a play on Lemmings so like summoning people to you to save them from Monsters or dispelling monsters and um this kind of led to this idea so there's a game that came out many years ago called agar IO or Slither IO paper.io there a bunch of games iio games that are almost like little battle Royals that play in the browser and you just jump in into a room and everyone is an object and they're all trying to consume the other objects basically and I thought well maybe we could do something that's like egg iio but like you you are a wizard and all of the AAR things are demons uh and you would basically Dash around collecting resources almost like vampire survivors esque you're picking up all the resources before the demons do and then summoning bigger demons into existence to eat the smaller ones and I liked this idea at first I thought this was kind of workable um especially from this like top down thing that i' started with and then just building out you know a basic prototype this is my strategy right you just build stuff don't polish anything until you know that it's going to stay in the game you only have 48 hours right so you have to just build something get it going and then as you work try to prioritize the things that are most valuable so first I'm like spawning in the souls I created like a little spawner script and then having Collision so having them just delete on collision it's pretty straightforward and then inre in an integer that said how many Souls you have every time you step on one um and then one thing that I'm really picky about with these kind of things is having like there be magnetism so if you get near a soul actually having it like Zuck towards the player especially in like a high intensity action game which I thought this was going to become I thought that was really important so I added that and you can see here that works you know as you get closer to them they kind of like Hoover up near the player a lot easier to collect a lot more of them without having to increase the size of the player then uh being able to shoot them out and then trying to make the monsters grow um although not always right the first time but eventually I got it going pretty quickly it wasn't too hard here's me just making sure that it the object is pivoted to the center so that it scales from the middle and then just making it kill the player on collision and then making it run towards the player so pretty straightforward enemy AI but I was going to make these monsters obviously run away from each other depending on their size and you know eat each other and and sometimes eat up the souls and sometimes eat up the player so I needed to create a little bit of behavior though I didn't want to go so far as to create a state machine for this game so a lot of this stuff is kind of like just in if statements uh which is not long-term a great solution for this kind of thing but for a jam you only have 48 hours it's kind of easy to just hack stuff in and make it work little bit of like debug ux here actually just coloring the monsters based on their intentions so when they're chasing the player they go red if they're chasing Souls they go green you can see at this point one two three and a half hours spent on enemy AI with a game like this especially when you have only one other kind of entity in the game they are more than half the game so getting that right seemed like it was important you know maybe there were other versions of the game where I could have made different kinds of enemies that were each less capable but more unique right uh maybe that would have given me a bit more opportunity to make it more visually diverse but um ah you never know these things until you finish so towards the end of the first day was um putting some more of that ux in and finishing that game Loop and I started working on killing enemies and how that works into the gameplay Loop so the idea that I had was that when a demon monster dies its kind of like skull drops to the ground and then you could pick that up so basically like the enemy becomes an item for the player to collect a bunch of souls all at once I also started to experiment with the summoning mechanic so basically you could uh hold right click and then a summoning kind of sign would appear and then when you let go of right click a demon appears of the size of the summoning sign so you can create a little a little demon by holding it a little bit or you can make a really big one by holding it a long time but it would all depend on how many Souls you had in the bank uh then just having the camera follow the player I really wanted there to be almost a little bit of a like a horror element to this where like you couldn't see all of the enemies at once and you know zooming the camera in was a really effective way to do that very quickly there was this moment at kind of like the end of the first day where I was feeling like as I was play testing the game there was something missing like you could make enemies that were bigger than the biggest enemy on the screen and then eventually they would turn on you but then how do you like clear the room it's like that that story about what is it the old woman that swallowed the fly or something where like you know they're getting bigger and bigger things in to chase the smaller things and it just scales to Infinity so I was like how do you how would I make this something where you could actually like destroy the demons without increasing the the economy of the room and then an idea came to me of making like a ward or like a like an exorcism ring uh which I thought was really cool but it seemed like an additional mechanic um so the idea would be that you place candles down in a ring and then if you place the final candle closing the ring off with a demon inside of it you could like kill them in one go you just like destroy them I thought this was like a really cool idea I wasn't sure if I could do the math for the shape detection to see if they were inside or outside the shape and I wasn't sure if it was going to be fun but it did feel kind of neat conceptually it felt good as an idea so I was going to call this the ward mechanic and uh that was the end of the first day I did a little bit more plotting in just to make sure that you know now that I knew kind of what the game was I was like okay now let's make sure we have a couple of hours for UI couple hours for music so that was the end of day one let's go check out what happened on day two okay so it's a start of A2 and I did a quick recap of like the game that we're making basically this is the beginning of me having a little bit of chafing with the game maker sort of system I really liked doing code in uh vs code because I'm so comfortable writing there and I really wanted to make use of some of the editor features that I like from there but it really doesn't like you doing that uh basically game maker creates a script for every function every event handle um for every object so every object was a folder and every function was a script which is kind of a bit uh off-kilter to how I'm used to doing stuff it also meant that having to search through the files quite often to find what I was looking for like which function I needed to place something in was a little tricky and then just writing some code to create the ward at this point it occurred to me that there was actually a solution for the shape thing that I had remembered hearing about many many years ago um uh there is a test you can do to determine if a point is inside a shape you have an object from that object you cast a ray in any direction uh could be you know north south east west anywhere as long as the length of the ray is larger than the total size of the shape that you'll need so as big as the room for example um and if the ray crosses over one of the edges of the shape an odd number of times you are inside the shape if it crosses over an even number of times or no times at all you are outside of the shape um there's no like area calculation anything like that you literally just count how many times it crosses over for every Edge does the ray pass through it checking to see if two line segments overlap is not complicated um so this is me sort of demonstrating what that is this is me figuring it out on stream so um you can tell you know from this point here like okay we cross once cross twice cross three times that means we're inside the shape it was not complicated at all and uh yeah it totally worked it was it was actually like really cool and really fun almost immediately so the way that I ended up trying to balance this was I would say Okay depending on how far you are from the previous candle when you go to place another one that increases the cost of sols required to place that next candle so you couldn't just make a giant rectangle the size of the whole level you had to ration how big the thing was going to be and also you had to fend off the monsters while trying to create the circle which was cool and at this point I hadn't thought of it yet but eventually I would make it so that the whole game was like operating on single resource so like the souls were the player's Health they were the way that you slow down enemies they were the the resource for how to create the wards and um I would represent that by like a bar along the top which would shrink uh as you spend them then I wanted to dedicate time to creating like a mockup for the game just to create the graphics so I thought it would be interesting to start a new palette for this game just because I knew that thematically it was so different from what I normally make so starting with blue and then sort of like building out towards a green uh or a yellow or red and uh before long I had like a pretty nice palette that I was really happy with put it into a Sprite and then like use the ink dropper to just grab all those colors and then I just started like drawing like a mockup so this is just like how I want the game to feel when you're playing it I had this idea of like purple smoke and this kind of like off gray you know Cobblestone graveyard feel and then I would use like white for all the interactable elements just to keep it really simple and and straightforward and then I would use color for different things so like green for the souls and then like red for Monsters um and I ended up with something like this so I was really hoping that I could Wrangle game Maker's particle system to play nice with this kind of presentation but I was pretty happy with how this looked like I thought oh yeah if the game looks like this that's great this actually was one of the kind of hitches whenever you're working on a new engine or you know solution if you don't know what you don't know then there is always the chance that something's going to trip you up particle systems were that for me I found game maker particle system to be a little underdeveloped for what I would like um in other engines for particles you can do things like Define a behavior of a specific parameter over the particle's lifetime in game maker you only have one property that can modify the size of something over a lifetime and it's not over its lifetime it's just per frame so it's like an increment value so it could be like size increase by 001 every frame or decrease by 0.001 but you can't make it like specifically be this size in the middle of its lifetime or you know change directions halfway through but for me specifically I really I really wanted it to start small get bigger and get small again and I spent quite a long time trying to do that mostly because if you if you start small and end small then the birth and death of particles is less obvious it doesn't pop you can do that with Alpha and size and it will feel very ethereal right it won't feel as um bursty you can see here like it almost feels like the they bubbles that are popping I really didn't want that I wasn't able to solve this within the parameters of the G Jam so I sort of had to had to just deal with it we spent like way too long on particles it was like 2 and 1/ half hours I got distracted I overcommitted I should have moved on but it was such an important part of not only the enemies but the walls I wanted the surrounds to be like smoke and fog the edges of the level and I was even thinking of having there be like interactable fog so like having the level be full of fog that clears away as you pass through it I thought that would be cool but the fact that it took me two and a half hours to just get something in there was like so I had to kind of move on to put the mockup art into the game one thing that's kind of um a little tricky with game maker is it doesn't have a hierarchy so you can't have like a particle system that's pinned you know as a child object to an an object instead you have to set the position of an emitter every frame to equal the position of the thing that it is supposed to be attached to here I'm just making like level modules I just place in the scene to just vary up the background and then I just stamped them into the level just to create some variation at this point the only way to destroy a demon inside of uh the ward was to lead the demon out and then run to the other side of the ward and then seal it off as they run towards you just because they're following the player and the way that you terminate the ward is to be standing back at the start candle so here you can see me like leading it back and then quickly running over and then closing it off so that was like a little bit limiting the Strat was like consistent and not that creative like you always had to do the same thing every time and somebody said hey like why don't you make the ceiling of the ward attached to a separate button so that you don't have to stand back at the original and I was kind of resistive to that at first but eventually I was like ah you know what that's probably the right idea but it was difficult to kind of determine how we would now take all of the things you could do in the game and bind them to a really like straightforward key mapping so at this point in the game we have running around W ASD space bar Dash we have left click to fire Souls right click to summon demons and then shift to place candles in order to make it be remote you know detonable I would need to have like a separate key bind for closing the ward verus placing the candle which meant in order to keep it mouse and keyboard and pretty straightforward I ended up having shift be like a mode switch so with this new model I had shift be like the mode switch and then the mouse buttons are Place candle with left click close Ward with right click that was the way that I end up doing it this felt tough that was kind of like a little asterisk that I probably should have been more aware of but at this point we're sort of like getting quite late in the jam so I didn't have a lot of time to rethink the game's core structure but I really liked this mechanic and I really wanted to persist with having there be Wards I didn't want to take it out and having them be fun and creative at this point we're at like 8 900 p.m. on Sunday which means if I'm going to do any more I have to pull all so I just took a break ended the stream and prepared for the final push so I started this stream by having there be just like a little bit more interactive procedural stuff around the player character I wanted the staff to move relative to the mouse position on screen so if the mouse goes to the left I wanted it to move to the left if the mouse goes to the right I wanted it to move to the right just to make it feel more animated cuz right now it was just like a static Sprite and um that was not too hard same Principle as how I did the hands for the monsters and then I just thought I would get out of the way the idea of like giving the game a name and giving it some sort of a brand so that started with a title screen I had this idea for the name raver like Soul Reaver almost like Reaper it's felt it felt good and we very quickly had this idea of like what if the staff was a scythe you know what if it's a little bit more like that and that was cool but eventually we had this really cool idea of having it be the the skull the goat skull uh and I thought that was really cool so I kind of ran with that idea and um that was the kind of logo for the game then there was just a bit bit more like prototyping stuff that I wanted to get done so here I've got the skulls disappearing after a certain amount of time just to create more challenge it forces the player to explore the level a bit more if a monster gets killed by another one offc screen you only have like 10 seconds to go and find that skull and pick up all the souls having the game be balanced is like the only thing about the game that there was to design because there weren't any like story aspects or like different levels it just needed to be a really tight Loop so I spent a lot of time on that and then came music music is one of those things that I rarely get to spend a lot of time on in a jam uh so I was like you know what let's spend like 2 hours minimum on music and I was actually looking back on it pretty happy with what I came up with so this is just one of those areas where on stream it's probably not the most fun thing to listen to [Music] but this was the stream for like 2 hours [Music] off [Music] time that's what we ended up with uh I I it wasn't finished but for what it was I I thought it was serviceable you know for a jam entry I'm not a rock composer so whatever so I found this thing called osen audio uh which is kind of like a better audacity and uh this thing was great this was like really really nice application and would allow me to like record a bunch of sound effects select the you know the takes that I wanted without having to recut them and then just export the selection to MP3 so that was like really really easy as a workflow to just go like export and um they were I just did mouth sounds for everything demon sounds it was like you know like whatever there was this there was this sound effect that went w I don't know what it was supposed to be I think I was like for when you like plant a Ward and I think I might have just accidentally made the pitch range like too high and so I don't know chat ran away with this thing where we were just every 5 Seconds it was Wong and I left it in cuz you know for the memes so at this point things were getting like a little bit dicey uh we had like maybe 6 hours left 7 hours left so I was like We'll make like a task list of just like things that are high priority to do before the end of the jam so here I made a particle system for each of the walls to act as the smoke and then little things like getting invulnerable when you get hurt flashing when you take damage and then when you Dash having there be a little bit of an after image of the player uh and then we added a we added a vignette so this is like when you take damage and you're low on health because it was possible to actually decrease your health by placing down a ward because the souls that you have are your health and they're your resource so I wanted a way to indicate to the player that they were bringings close to death without having taken any damage from enemies we made it basically just start transparent and big and then shrink to make it come like come in around the level and be more opaque the less Health you have so that actually like totally worked and then there were a few more quality of life things that I wanted to add because we had the wards closing remotely I had like a a green indicator that showed if you had enough souls to press shift right click to close the ward um because if you didn't have enough souls and there wasn't any indicator it would just be like you'd be like why isn't it closing so I added a little green flash then adding a title screen obviously and a game over screen and then basically just putting in some sort of tutorial to allow the player to understand how to play the game this probably should have been an in-game tutorial that would have been the right way to teach the player how to play this game but I had like a couple hours left at this point and I didn't want to get it wrong so I basically created like a little slideshow when the game starts you just click through it to learn the mechanics and then the game starts it was only really at this point that I realized that the game was kind of complicated to get into like there's actually a lot of stuff that the player needed to understand which is um never a great sign for a jam only now can I say looking back having having like made the whole game that that Ward system could have been the only mechanic we probably didn't need to be able to shoot Souls out or even summon monsters as long as they summoned themselves that would fit the theme and then dispelling them could have been the only mechanic and it probably would have been easier to do and more fun and um hindsight is 2020 it's 2024 now no more time for hindsight that was 4 years ago so at this point we're basically finished with the game just need to export it to HTML 5 and get it out of there so by the end of it uh we actually submitted in the final hour we had like the entire sub Mission hour to just like write up the uh title page and get screenshots and record a little gift of gaml so let's review the final game Loop and then we'll do our Impressions I should mention the jam itself is not over so the Voting is still on people who entered the jam can actually like play the game and still give their thoughts and um I I don't know how the game will do we'll talk about that in the next section but um this is what we've got [Music] wow so given that the gem voting period is not over yet I don't really know if the game's going to do well or not that's up to the voters um but for now we can give our Impressions and uh we'll also give our thoughts on Game Maker let's check it out so of course uh looking at the total thing I would give myself like uh maybe like a 6 and 1 half to like a s out of 10 in terms of my ability to navigate the process of making the game in the gy I had a decently good idea at the start the lead was pretty good at the beginning but I think that during this first like 7 8 hours of like investing myself into building the core systems I lost a little bit of that oversight that I needed in order to Pivot effectively when eventually the like fun presented itself so at the end of the first day the idea of putting the wards in the game should have replaced some of the other mechanics rather than being added to them I think a lot of the struggles that I had in the sort of later part of the gam a lot of that had to do with the fact that I had so many different mechanics and um trying to like fit them all in in a way that felt nice if I had simplified the game it would have been simpler to explain and I would have had a bit more space to play with either more polish or different kind of like level ideas you know stuff like that was would have been more possible if the game was a little simpler so finally we can talk about the game in the context of game maker and what I think about game maker so the biggest thing that stuck out to me when using game maker was that my personal workflow for How I build games and the models that I use to think about logic and structure you know my games and the functionality isn't really how game maker expects users to use it particularly things like not being objectoriented or having composition not having um hierarchies in the actual room editor not being able to like pin things to other things the way that the objects work and and object definitions how accessible they are with code um how you create them and modify them and how you access events and script with them the fact that it's handled for you and is by default like standardized across the board makes game maker very accessible as an entry-level programmer learning it in game maker for the first time would be really really quick and easy but extending that stuff out with more powerful custom systems would take more time so I'd have to spend some time building my own systems and getting more familiar with the basically the the coding paradigms that game maker expects the more like functional procedural stuff rather than the objectoriented component based stuff there are things that I really like about game maker just like flat out benefits over other engines that I've used so the first thing that I really like is that the game's um like tick rate is standard so like if the game is a 60fps game if you set that that's the rate that the graphics run at it's the rate that the physics collisions run at everything is running at 60 I really like that um other engines have like fixed time which is separate from Graphics time and then other time scales that are at play uh this you don't have to think about that secondly the actual world scale is also very standardized in game maker so one unit in in game Space is one pixel if you move something over by one you're moving it over by one pixel um which is really cool for pixel art games right uh you don't have to think about the pixels per World unit ratio you don't have to think about like how big is this Sprite going to be on screen I also really liked how fast it was to compile like it was a super lightweight build you could press a button 5 seconds later you have an HTML build of your game press a button 5 seconds later you have a Windows build of the game compared to other engines you know which ones I'm talking about that can be for an HTML 5 build 20 minutes half an hour per build uh which is way way more than you would expect in the context of a jam when you've got like 5 minutes to finish you don't want to spend 20 minutes waiting for the thing to build so uh I really like that about game maker as well I also really really liked when you have a definition of an object like an enemy type so in the code you can just say hey like with this enemy type do something and it will literally iterate through every enemy that happens to be in the scene without you having to go and find like a collection of those things you don't have to do like any kind of search or management of the instances of specific things inside of a scene the fact that all the instancing is handled for you and the collections of those things are handled for you is really nice really really nice of course I like the sequencer the animation editor really really cool I haven't seen much of its tile support although I believe that it would be quite rudimentary compared to what I'm used to um but you know that's to be expected so overall I really think that like if you are a specific type of developer making a specific type of game you know entry level kind of developer making a Sprite based or a pixel art game then game maker will offer you a lot of things out of the box that make that process very easy my take on it is this you can make anything in any engine you want as long as it's like touring complete you can make anything in it right you can make games in Minecraft if you want but all engines are designed to do some things better than others and when that happens other things that you might want to do that fall outside of the scope of that design might become more difficult so those are my impressions of game maker after about a week of use over the ludum Dare jam and the days before this is not a a a review video this is more of an Impressions and so if you're curious about you know getting into game maker and seeing if it's right for you you can actually download game maker for free now with a non-commercial license and uh just tool around and play with it and if you actually use Game Maker then I'd be super jazzed to hear your thoughts on your experiences and any tips that you have for making the most out of the engine so that's it thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 19,150

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, game jam, ludum dare, gamemaker, game engine

Id: X1VoxHZwTQE

Length: 40min 1sec (2401 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024