The greatest thing in Game Maker that I ever anticipated has finally starting to unfold right before my eyes. I’m talking about endless opportunity here for anyone to create great games which can easily reach audiences all around the world through a web browser. Yes Game Maker now, has evolved into a powerful game software authoring tool getting ready to make a name on par with the likes of Adobe Flash and other multimedia/game developer software.
In case you don’t know what Game Maker is (which I doubt, but anyways…) well, Game Maker was a 2d game development tool born by the programming prowess of Professor Mark Overmars who aims to get school children into learning how to program simple computer games. It was a very remarkable piece of free software (a game programming tool freeware back then) that deserves its own home website and a wider audience to support it, and it was in 2004 when I finally discovered this easy game development tool Game Maker during the time it was upgrading to version 5. Game Maker has quite a humble beginnings, never even rose to compete with the more popular Flash MX rich multimedia authoring tool. It also received so much criticisms about it being a kid’s toy and not something to get serious with. To tell you the truth, Game Maker becomes a great 2d game development tool with the proper and confident user, that came evident when I actually used Game Maker to built a game, a CAI (Computer Aided Instructions) project as a completion of my thesis in college… so its not just a kid’s toy at all. But year after year GM counts additional features to extends its capability, and there’s never been quite a speed in progress than the involvement of YoYoGames Inc together with Mark Overmars. YoYoGames received cynical reactions at first, but held its ground well for almost 5 years now. Today, YoYoGames is now a big company, with many talented developers to help find GameMaker’s way to further evolution. Most of teej creations here in TradnuxGames are proudly developed using GM.
GameMaker is evolving indeed, from supporting the Macintosh version, to the expansion to IOS (mobile games), and now the addition of the most awaited integration of HTML 5. Yes the portability of GM has been improved a lot, so finally… Game Maker is not just a hobby anymore, it can be used to monetize those independent developers’ skills to profit. I can only dream about what I can do with GM once I get a hold of its newest versions. There will be many variants of GM being developed right now; GM Studio, GM Mac, and GM HTML5… but nonetheless, all will satisfy my hunger for Indie Game Development… which is always a fun activity for me… and apparently will make some money from in the near future. Tradnux Games will always support and have GameMaker as it’s tool to create exciting TeejCreations and stuff. So to YoYoGames, I salute you for making GameMaker to what it is now today.
Much appreciated for the information and share!