What can (should) you make with GameMaker?

hello everybody before we keep this video off I've got a bit of exciting news if you go down to the description for this video you'll find a link to where I'm doing a giveaway for three copies of gaming studio 2 and that's the permanent desktop license these Keys provided to be very graciously by yo-yo games Thank You yo-yo I know there is a bunch of you my owners still using one point AK so if you are thinking it was about time to jump on the 2.0 train and now it's a chance to do so possibly for free just hit that link all the rules in those terms and conditions all that just thought you have to just follow me on Twitter and on twitch or one of those things and you'll be in with a chance of winning one of those pretty cool that will be running from when this video goes live for about 10 days the exact dates are in the in the link below but I'm going on holiday from basically when this video goes out for about 10 days so here's a chance for you to get something from me even while I'm not gonna be pretty getting videos out on that point I'm obviously going on holiday I won't be making I don't have time to make like a tutorial video at least a couple of weeks don't have time to be working on an action RPG because I'm gonna be on holiday so I want to do something at least for this this space of time so that's why I'm doing this video just to talk about something so it gets asked a lot and something I think would be nice to kind of create a definitive place for people to come get the answer to because this is something I've answered a lot and this is something this is a question and a topic I think pretty much everyone every game maker tutorial career everyone every kind of community person kind of focused around game maker has probably had to feel this question we'll deal with at some point and that's the question can I build X in game maker can I build an MMO and gaming can't build a 3d gaming game again I can I build fps and getting makeup and so on so forth alright the answer to the question can I make X in game maker it's pretty much always yes but half of the time it is yes it is just straight up yes you can do that this is a good tool fit for purpose and I recommend that and the other half of the time the answer is yeah with an asterisk or sometimes several asterisks cuz I think the question of con is very very simple but the answer can be misleading whereas the question should you build your thing in game maker there's a lot more interesting a lot more nuanced and a bit more interesting to talk about so should you build your game in game maker studio to organ you see you won't make sub game maker right so should you build your game in game maker a lot of the time this question actually comes from a position of just not knowing much about the tool and because I guess the name game maker and the kind of the image of the the tool has that even presents like itself through its marketing is of a tool that makes creating games very easy right it's oh it's written on the tin game maker right and people want to know like how far that stretches right it's like all this makes games what kind of make this game gonna be exacting and so on so forth and there is a stigma around game maker thinking it is a very simple easy base entry level tool that can't be used for anything too complex that will have hard limitations that will only be able to do so much because if this tool called game maker can just make all kinds of games surely all people making all kinds of games would all use this tool right but they don't so you know there must be limits to this tool and so on that's kind of where the logic takes people obviously most of you watching this channel where we know that yes you can actually do quite a lot with game maker there are lots of commercially successful games that have been made with game maker I'm not going to spend this video defending the use of tools that game maker do make commercial games I think those you know I think the the evidence of that speaks for itself but what I do want to talk about is what projects are better suited specifically to game maker and the things game maker is good at and just a bit about how you would decide to you to use a particular tool for a particular project so should you use game maker to make your thing well when asking should you use a particular a tool I think the first thing you need to work out or to know about a particular tool is what is that tool good at what things about your particular problem does the tool make easy so what does game maker specifically do to make game development easy what problems does game maker solve in the field of game creation game maker is very good I think three main things the first is drawing 2d stuff to the screen okay it's um and by what it's good at I mean it's sold these problems for you okay it involves the least amount of work on your end to get these things going because that's the asterisk part of like can you make the thing is how much work it is to make that thing a lot of the time and it's very very little work in game maker to draw some things anywhere that's drawing a sprite to the screen drawing a tileset drawing a map or level during effects and you are using shaders and things like that makes all that stuff very very easy okay it's all lots of built-in functionality for that it's all built around that makes it very very straightforward Souls that tool solves that problem very very well you don't have to write your own engine for drawing all the triangles and drawing every pixel to the screen yourself okay all that's done for you good at that the other thing I think it's good at is level design and a lot of people argue with me on this one people have spent ages building their own level design tools through that game maker games and so on but I think since game mix video 2 and the new room editor honestly I really like the room editor I think it's got loads of great useful things about it being a modify like variables on an instance level and placing being able to draw of tilesets and things like that in preview animations and stuff in the room I think it's it's sold a lot for you you know you don't you could go off and write your own level design tools but you don't have to it's got a really good set of level design tools built in and a veil before you so it solves that problem very well the third problem I think it solves and probably the biggest one is mechanics prototyping and iteration right so like like all together as well I can think of one I guess mechanics you could think of as the one thing right it's very very easy game maker to get your mechanics going to write the simple the logic of your gameplay and to get it playable and testable and iterate upon it and see oh and play with them be like as this fun I let's let's tweak this a little bit and change this around though what if this enemy behaved like that actually getting the stuff going and behaving the way you want it to very very very very fast and they make it to do those things compared to other tools the unity or writing your own engine or any of those other different things it's very very very good at that so there's the three things for me that game maker is super super good at and so if you're if the thing you're trying to do if the thing you're trying to make um if the problems presented to you are mostly made out of those three things then you're gonna have a very very good time using game maker to do that thing this is why game maker for me is the number one tool for game jams okay if you're if you enter a game game you need to make a game in 48 hours you you have all the key components you need four that are sold very very well by game maker it's very very good at drawing stuff very very good at getting your mechanics going so you can test and iterate on it make it good and fun faster than anyone else because everyone else is still just trying to get those things working at a basic level it's very fast rebuilding your levels and and just do everything about the game game and the things required from a game down entry to be good and successful all just sold really well by game maker that's why I think when somebody if someone said should I use game maker for a game jam the answer is absolutely yes and you can you know extrapolate from that to realize that making most small games like if you want to make a small 2-d game and a week to a month to a couple of months absolutely game maker is an excellent choice because your three biggest problems are building levels gang stuff drawn on the screen iterating and testing and implementing your viewer your mechanics and your gameplay right is the the biggest problems and those big problems are all solved by game maker so one of the the most common things people ask about is can I make a first-person game what kind of make a 3d game in game think people like 3d games a lot of Triple A games or all 3d and very pretty people wanna know kinda make 3d fun see Triple A games and this is where things get more complicated because game maker can make 3d games yes asterisk so yes game maker has the functionality to draw 3d even technically it's always drawing in 3d if you just rotate the camera around it can kind of blow your mind you realize everything is actually being drawn in 3d but crucially game maker does not do a lot to help you with 3d games it has all the basic functionality you can build pretty much anything 3d game maker um but you have to do all of the work yourself unity for example or you're working on unreal you can import a model and then put it in your scene your 3d scene and you have it there in front of you and it's done all that work for you and or it's already built to render 3d models off the back in game maker you can't import a 3d model that's not a resource type support by game maker you actually that you can draw all the vertexes and stuff yourself so what you have to do is if you want to bring in like a dot opj file or something like that or draw a 3d object in game maker you have to write or find someone who has written lots of people have done this stuff a script to interpret that model file and the texture files everything right and draw each one of those and then write scripts to then draw those vertexes and draw that model in your game wealth and there's no way to preview what that looks like in 3d because the room editor doesn't support 3d and so on that's why yes you can do 3d game gaming it but it's a lot of work is made much harder for you so the Conners are always yes but there's always the there is the asterisk the asterisk in this case is the game maker doesn't solve those problems for you um you can do it but there are other tools that are better suited for it that said because you're working at this very very low level when you're dealing with 3d in game maker and you're just drawing very basic shapes and vertexes install there is a certain kind of 3d game when you're thinking like kind of really old-school doom Daggerfall kind of really early pioneer game in 3d if you're going for that kind of aesthetic or really really low fidelity 3d style and you're making something very very simple and low level in 3d in game maker and you want to do some of that work yourself there are certain kinds very very very thin slither of 3d games that I think are actually quite well suited to be made in game maker perhaps more so than other tools so statements a little sketchy I don't know how well I stand behind that but III think it exists I think there is there is a sliver of games that could potentially be made better in game maker because you're already working at that really low level you've already got if the game you're making requires that kind of those kind of techniques and those kind of kind of 3d it might be the tool you want because otherwise in something like unity or an unreal you've kind of got to you the tool could be seen as overkill for something like that you've got to strip a lot of stuff away to get what you want my lack of experience with unity and unreal means that I don't know maybe maybe I'm probably on my ass that maybe it's perfectly easier to do those things in those tools but that's it my main point here is that I think it's very viable tool for a very certain kind of 3d game very limited though you don't want to try and make something that's super polished and shiny with loads of like shaders and post-processing effects and stuff in 3d and GameMaker because all that stuff you have to do by yourself from scratch another than just for the sake of you know going down a mad enthusiast rabbit hole and seeing what you can do with game maker just because you can there's not a lot of benefit to use and getting make it to make that kind of thing that's what unity and unreal are built to do those are the problems that those tools sold very well so that's 3d games the other big one is that's a big one it's not as much to talk about with it but mmo's should you make an MMORPG in game makers if you build a world of warcraft and this I think is people just against want us to see water level limits of gaming you know can you build an enormous huge MMORPG in game maker now the main thing with this question is that and again the answer is yes you can do that and neither the I wouldn't say has the biggest asters but it has the most asterisks on the end and now I can't talk too much about this because I don't know anything about networking why no tiny amount I know very little about networking I know nothing about like online infrastructure for mmo's or server based games and crucially if you're asking this question neither do you there's the crux of it because as with 3d games game maker does not solve the problem of online infrastructure particularly easily for a debate right most people I know who have attempted this kind of thing have usually used other like servers or tools in conjunction with game maker to do the online infrastructure side of things and game makers primarily then responsible for the client-side because that again it's the things game maker is good at the the mechanics the rendering and so on right game maker can do networking it's got those functions build in but again it's it's not built to make a huge online infrastructures and servers and that kind of thing and again if you don't know anything about those topics which is fairly evident and asking the question then yes you might be able to make an MMO in game maker but not within your lifetime or the lifetime of the son one caveat to all these things is that sometimes you may find people using a tool like game maker to do something like a 3d game that isn't necessarily suited for or eyesu it for as another tool just because they are very familiar with gaming core very familiar with the tool that they've chosen to use that's also very valid if you have a lot of experience in at all that the the time saving and skill that comes along with that the problems that allows you to solve much more quickly than you code in a tool that you're not experienced with my outweigh the fact that another tool solves those problems better than the tool you're very familiar with it's there's a lot of things to weigh up and your experience with the tool can be a big one of them so for certain kinds of 3d games and stuff like that my you might see some people going through yeah but to do that work and build the tools to import a model and do the stuff and gave me because they're so familiar they're an expert with game maker they're not an expert with tools that maybe makes some of those things easier the last thing I want to talk about quickly is this doesn't get asked a lot but I think is interesting is the notion of should you build a big gaming Game Maker it's very hard to define what I mean by big but I kind of mean things that take several years or require a lot of team members and it's generally quite deep in scope or complexity and again the answer to come is yes but there are asterisks to this question now obviously I send you the start of this video game maker result it's very capable of making commercially successful games very very good games things like undertale high point drifter hotline miami that the list is analy's and grows by the day but you'll notice a lot of the successful game maker games are not overly complex I don't want to be very careful with how I say this because I don't want to be derogative about as the games that have been made with gaming that are successful um I think it's unfair to call them all simple games but they they tend to be within a certain level of scope and there are indie games made with other tools that have levels of complexity you don't often see with game maker games such as rim world or factorio games with a very very large kind of scope that's not necessarily a game maker can't do those things again the answer is always yes asterisk but game makers sometimes struggles to scale another project not always but there are key ways in which other tools put the tools or other systems and ways of making games can scale of the systems and paradigms that can be used on the aren't supported or don't really work in game maker because game maker encourages or constrains you to a certain style of development some of these problems are being sold in game maker which is very very exciting if you're honoring some of the specifics about this me and lazy-eye from OB duty podcast did a bit of a chat about this in a video a little while back about some of the changes your games are making to game maker in late twenty nine way it's August now when are you doing these changes again yes specifically I'm talking about things like method variables lightweight objects exception supports so I won't get into all the specifics up but the point is that experienced developers especially will know is some of the problems the game maker has when it comes to scaling project I'm by scaling I mean things like you know creating a project that can sustain on a lot of complexity and still be main having a maintainable code base and something that can sustain a lot of work by a lot of team members and be able to your merge change as well and and and generally cope with having loads and loads of resources loads and loads of scripts and lots and lots of complexity and depth while still allowing people to make changes and work on the thing because any project grows it becomes you know harder and slower to work on the more the stuff grows and gets tied together but the way GameMaker kind of encourages you to build your project and then in some ways constrains you to build a project a lot of your code necessarily sometimes begins to tie itself in knots and dependencies to the point where it can become quite difficult you can you can account for a lot of this just be very good coding practice and so on but some of the things that are just built into game maker sometimes make it struggle um with very large long term project it's not to say that you can't do it that you shouldn't attempt it it's just that that is one of the reasons you maybe don't see a lot of really deep complex games coming out of game maker because the game aikka developers often when the project actually gets that big it becomes harm very very hard to maintain or as if it had been built with other tools they might have been able to use practices that aren't available to them in game maker that made maintaining the code at that scale easier as I said there are some changes coming to gaming at some point or other hopefully absurd that improve a lot of these these issues but are there's something worth bearing in mind if you're deciding whether or not to use game maker for your particular thing I know I said that was the last thing but the one other thing I want to mention very very quickly so people sometimes ask about can i make a program in game maker that's not game something like a tool a piece of software and again the answer is yes you can the byrds master is that think again this one's quite simple though think again about what game maker is good at it's good rendering 2d stuff and animation and sprites and tile sets and it's good at mechanics and logic iteration and that kind of thing do you need those things for the particular app or piece of software you're making maybe for example is pixel FX designer that was actually made in game maker and it's use a useful tool for game maker to do particle effects and stuff and a lot of the stuff that tool does it makes sense that they built it in gaming you know the rendering of the 2d particles in the first place and so on the things that maybe struggled with the game maker is not so good after that kind of tool is UI and then creating all those little dialogues and stuff like that it's kind of a pain did you got someone game maker not a lot of easy stuff provide for you for that kind of things common complaint my game accuses UI and stuff can be a bit tricky and chances are you're gonna build a non game piece of software in game maker that's probably gonna be an issue for you it depends what you're making but again just consider the things that game maker is good at do those things apply to your project in which case gaming is probably a good tool for it if not maybe consider something else but also your experience with game maker might come into effect so that's all I really wanted to say about this can you make a thing in game maker the answer is always yes should you make the thing in game maker questions a little more interesting and I think the answer of yes that I very often give to the question can you make something game maker is a bit misleading because of the more interesting question of should you make something in gaming and the answer that question is still more often that yes then you would think you should make a lot of things in gaming you should definitely make games and games in game maker you should make 2d games and game make especially 2d games with low scope I think you should make most 2v games and game maker even those with particularly high scopes but later on the project I have to admit a maker does have some issues this scale should you use game maker make a 3d game maybe it depends should you use it to do a program it depends should you use it to make an MMO almost definitely not there's there's a lot of different things and variables to consider all these different types things you might want to make but ultimately I'm not your dad not the boss of you you can go and make whatever you want it's a tool and it can do many different things it's some things it is notably better at than others but might not stop you so go ahead make whatever you want can you make the thing in game maker yes should you up to you thanks guys catch you next time thanks for watching guys also don't forget about the giveaway that I've got going on you can check out that link in the description if that's interesting to you thank you as always to my patreon supporters you can see all these lovely people scrolling by now these people are the ones responsible for me being able to do any of the stuff that I do they support my work and they're the reason it exists so thank you to all of them and thank you in particular and in no particular order as always to animation spirit boughs of the dog the titi Carlos c-dac Adan to go do what doobie Gabe Charles Montgomery hair hey engine James al Anderson James Sagan's Jason Jason McMillan Joseph Wetmore kim osama Lampe lemon s Kate max M Michael Ward Howe and Morgan Peirce relentless Rex Renee Dan Robert churches Rove and arlynn run roopinder Sean show goes zero four one zero Simeon yeah like a glow I'm almost certain I got that one wrong please let me know if I said that right Chromeo in studios Steven Hagen Timothy Hamilton Travis Womack Victor Stewart Zachary Locke Sofia flame and Zinn on May thank you all ever so much Hannah thank you again for watching catch you all next time

Channel: Shaun Spalding

Views: 56,228

Keywords: Game Maker (Video Game Engine), GameMaker Tutorial, GameMaker, Game Development, Indie Games, Tutorial Series, Game Maker Studio, Making Games, How to make games, GameMaker Studio 2, GMS, GMS2, GameMaker 3d, Can you make 3d games with GameMaker, What does GameMaker do

Id: Qdnq7vqrRsQ

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019