GMplanet
All your Game Maker news under one roof!
GMplanet aggregates the Game Maker related blog posts of:
YoYo Games have released a list of the 275 games which have been entered in their sixth competition and have created a portal where you can see how judging is progressing. The figure for entered games is higher than we reported earlier today as it appears games which were labelled using the old style tags have been included.
Round one of judging, which takes place this week, will remove from the contest games which do not comply with the contest rules or are unplayable.
You might find you need to install a Silverlight plugin in order to view the judging progress page though, at least at the moment, the page doesn’t do anything fancy.
Competition Six Entries Confirmed is taken from: GameMaker Blog
The list of entrants to Competion 6 is now up and available you can access them here… http://competition.yoyogames.com. We have a very simple application that we are using to help with the judging and you can use to visualise the information.
We have also added an RSS feed to the page so you can use your favourite reader, rather than our application to follow what is going on.
This is the definitive list of entrants (in no particular order) that we will be judging and you can follow progress on Twitter using the tag #YoYoComp06.
We will be judging round 1 this week, where we will be looking at the entries that will move forward to the next round and we will be updating the information and the application as we proceed.
Please note that due to the vast number of entries we can’t give feedback to individual games.
Mid-week Competition Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog
We have been notified by our hosting provider that our servers will be down for essential repairs for 8 hours from 00:00 BST on the 2nd September to 08:00 BST on the 2nd September, this should not impact Competition 06 but all our services will be affected the main website, GMC, Forums, Wiki and any purchases of Game Maker for Mac.
We apologise for any disruption but it is out of our hands.
Normal service should be resumed by 8am BST on the 2nd September.
GMIndie and GMVision have launched ‘Game Maker Survey 2010‘ a collection of 60 questions designed to ask about your usage of Game Maker and collect opinions on various aspects of Game Maker.
I waited a couple of days after I first saw (and started but did not finish) the survey to see if others shared my opinions on the survey. I did not want to be accused of undermining a project produced by a site some may view as a competitor to Game Maker Blog by voicing my thoughts on the survey before criticism had arisen elsewhere.
I thought the survey was extremely poorly designed. Some questions don’t let me give the answer I would like to whilst at least one other, question 57 (see below), has two answers which mean exactly the same thing.
And apparently you either “know GML” or “don’t know GML” with no middle ground.
If you start the questionaire you are required to answer all 60 questions even though, as stated by robert680, some of the questions assumed you use Game Maker 8 despite an earlier question asking which version of the software you currently use.
There have been many other criticisms of individual questions and the general style of the survey, some comments taken from the Game Maker Community are listed below.
“Ok the survey had two kinds of questions:
What’s your favourite color? (Who needs this information?)
Aren’t all the useless features that are in Game Maker all useless? And aren’t stupid Yoyogames doing everything wrong? (Answer options: “a) Yes, b) Yes, but not often”.)”
- Tepi
“The quiz has some design flaws and its usefulness is suspect. For example you must choose a single GM version. I use GM8 and GM4Mac. You are forced to answer every question, though some don’t apply. Having a N/A, for some questions is important. Some questions are subjective and won’t have concise meaning to every one. For example, “How often do you save your project?”, the choices are meaningless.”
- NakedPaulToast
“Have answered it, though I should imagine about half my answers are inaccurate because there wasn’t an option for my own response.”
- NAL
[gmc topic]
This survey, which GMIndie list 6 people as contributing to, needed more thought put into it before it was released. Like I’ve mentioned before when offering so many different ‘products’ the quality will suffer. I am unsure of the level of involvement from GMVision (who haven’t released anything since May,) it appears their contributions may be limited to promoting the survey and providing two of the questions.
GMIndie and GMVision Game Maker Survey: Poorly Implemented is taken from: GameMaker Blog
We have now added the #YoYoComp06 tag to all current Competition06 games. You should now check your game to see if it’s been tagged, if not you should add the tag yourself.
The reason we’ve added the new tag is simply because there’s been so many miss-spellings of the Competition06 tag! We will still search for the Competition06 tag, but you must make sure you’ve spelt it correctly. If in doubt, use the shiny new #YoYoComp06 tag and all will be well.
Russell Kay has promised that the judging process for YoYo Games sixth competition, which closes Tuesday, will be more transparent than it has been in their previous contests.
The discovery themed competition has $1,750 of cash prizes up for grabs for the games YoYo Games deem to be the best.
Some Game Maker users had expressed their surprise at the runners-up listed in YoYo’s previous competition, won by 2DCube’s They Need to be Fed, which they felt were less worthy than some titles which did not receive a mention.
It appears the transparency will enable competition entrants (and everybody else who reads YoYo’s blog) to know if their game is still in the running as Russell said that a day after the deadline the titles accepted for judging will be announced. Presumably this stage will weed out all of the created-in-five-minutes, not-actually-playable and blatant rule-infringing entries.
YoYo Games also want you to spread the word about their sixth competition on Twitter. In an attempt to widen the audience of YoYoGames.com and the Game Maker software it has been announced that entries must be tagged with #YoYoComp06 which will also be used by YYG and others to discuss the competition on Twitter. So far no-one has used the hash tag.
YoYo Promise more Transparent Judging for their 6th Competition is taken from: GameMaker Blog
Mid-week Community Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog
Competition 06 is almost finished, entries need to be submitted before Midnight GMT next Tuesday 31st August 2010, anything not submitted by then will NOT be considered, so please submit before then.
We are modifying things a little in that we are changing the tag to apply to entries, this will be #YoYoComp06, this will be the twitter hash tag that we will be using for any announcements with the competition. Any games currently submitted with the old tag of Competition06 we will automatically add the new tag today, so do not worry about anything currently submitted.
Starting with this competition we will have a more transparent process for judging that we will announce next Wednesday, when we will also reveal all the titles that have been accepted for judging.
We are all looking forward to playing the entries, so get those games in on time!
This is a planned series of glog posts focusing on aspects of a game that may cause needless slowdown, and how it can be remedied with alternative methods producing the same effects, as part of YoYo Games’ plan to introduce technical posts about working within Game Maker to the glog.
If there’s anything that ruins a fun game, it’s it running so slowly it verges on being unplayable. Although it will sometimes be down to an underpowered computer or graphics card, much of the time it’s simply down to some some slow code and we can fix this by trying to optimise the offending code.
Remember that even if your game runs smoothly on your own computer, it may not for people with older/cheaper/worse systems. You’ll presumably be wanting to have as many people as you possibly can experiencing the game as you do, so optimisation is still very much worth doing. If you can, test your game on as lousy a system as you can get hold of. Run it in debug mode (or just draw the FPS somewhere), find the areas where it’s slowest, and see if you can figure out why.
The first area of focus will be the first thing you can edit in Game Maker: sprites. The majority of objects in a game will each contain a default sprite, which can then, through code or drag & drop, be altered in a number of ways. And while the Draw event seems like the most logical way to go for sprite manipulation, it is a lot slower than other methods, requiring every step to redraw things while the object already has its own default drawing. One thing to remember is that the majority of transformations can be handled through variables such as image_xscale, image_yscale and image_alpha. Setting these just once or whenever needed is a far quicker way of manipulating the appearance of an instance than using something like draw_sprite_ext() and having it set itself 30 or more times per second.
Sprites, images with optional animation, are each drawn as two textured triangles by the hardware, and in many cases the triangle count can be reduced through simple merging. If you have a man made up of separate head, torso, arm and leg sprites, see if you can find a way to put all or some of these into one single sprite. As long as the resulting sprite isn’t huge (either in the subimage count or actual dimension department), the speed of its drawing will be greatly increased and the slight size increase will be minimal.
There are many other applications in which sprites could be merged. Take a side-on platformer/shooter hybrid, in which your main character has the choice of four different guns. Your direction in creating this would probably be to create the player holding nothing, then the guns separately, using code to bring the player and the selected weapon together as one. However, this doubles the amount drawn. A better method would be to create four different player animations –one for each gun. Though this is a slightly longer drawing process on your part, not only does it bring the number of triangles drawn from four to two, it also reduces the amount of code processed. Another example: an overhead space shooter. Say there’s a powerup which gives your spaceship a temporary forcefield. The quickest way for Game Maker to interpret this is to make a second sprite which displays both the forcefield AND the ship, instead of a forcefield sprite drawn over it.
Though techniques like these increase the size of the game, it’s a very minimal increase (a few kilobytes), and while they increase the amount of memory required to play it, it will reduce the power required to run it allowing low-end computers (or even better ones depending on the complexity of the game) to run to more smoothly. The general idea of game development is to strike a balance between everything being done – a few extra sprites has little impact on the memory a game requires, but shortening the code can increase performance significantly, and allows for other areas to be fleshed out for a better, more polished game as a whole.
After being inactive for almost 2 weeks on the GMC, KC LC quietly backed down from her Administrative position on the board. No official announcement has been made which is leaving many people confused, but her own Profile reads “Retired Staff” under Group where it previously labeled her as Administrator. Currently, there hasn’t been any word on whether or not another Member will step up to the Administrator position.
KC LC retires from the GMC is taken from: GameMaker Blog
If you run a website relating to Game Maker one of the ways you can promote it on other similar websites is through the Game Maker Affiliation programme. Here are five tips to help you get the most out of the system which has now delivered over 26 million impressions.
Check the performance of your banners. You can see the click-through ratio of individual banners uploaded to your account. If the performance of one banner is significantly lower than others in your account consider why – how is it different from the banners which are getting more clicks? You can pause or delete poorly performing banners at any time and upload new banners if you have a new message or design.
Don’t upload multiple identical banners. Uploading a particular banner and linking URL combination more than once is pointless. Because of the credits system (every time you show a banner your banner will be seen once) there is no benefit to flooding the system with identical banners. They simply divide your statistics between multiple pages and the banners can also be shown in the same GMA block on other members sites which wastes the impressions.
Good: 4 different banners
Bad: 4 identical banners
Have a static banner. GMA gives members an option to restrict animated GIF banners from appearing on their site by affixing &angif=1 to the end of the URL in the banner display code. If you don’t have a non-animated banner you will never be seen on these sites.
Place one promotion code on every page of your website. Promotion codes display from one to ten banners at a time in lines, rectangles, squares or as a single banner. It is easy to find space to fit a code. Remember though – you are only allowed to place one code on each page, if you use more duplicate banners may appear on your site which wastes advertisers credits and can result in a system ban.
Make sure you have at least one active banner in your account. There are currently more than 3.5 million credits held in accounts that do not have an active banner. The owners of these websites have helped to promote other Game Maker user’s websites but are not reaping the benefits by having their site advertised elsewhere on the network.
How to get the most out of Game Maker Affiliation is taken from: GameMaker Blog
I was drawing tile maps in Flash and found a cheap trick that improved the appearance of the maps, so I thought I'd share. Here's how I had been drawing the tile map:
In a bitmap-based graphics engine, you can smooth the edges of the tiles either by adding transition tiles (see this article or this article) or by using a blending mask between adjacent tiles.
Flash, OpenGL, and DirectX are vector-based engines. The bitmap techniques still work, but there are new possibilities available. I'm drawing each square tile by filling a square polygon with a bitmap texture. The engine doesn't care that it's square; it works on any polygon. I'm taking advantage of this with what I call “vertex displacement”:
I look at the four tiles touching each vertex. If three of them are the same and the fourth is different, I move the vertex to expand the area of the three common tiles and shrink the area of the uncommon one. It's easier to see the effect with the polygon borders:
It turns out there are other fun things you can do with this trick. For example, a little bit of random noise on each vertex makes for a map that looks a little more hand drawn:
I've also used it to animate the boundary between the ocean and the beach. I added vertex displacement to my simple map generator; see the demo (Flash). Try changing the corner setting to adjust how much the corners get moved when three tiles are the same, and the random setting to adjust how much vertices get randomly moved. I have a separate demo (also Flash) to show the animated coastline.
The technique has its limitations. Terrain boundaries that don't fall on a 45° angle look wavy (see example). Some terrain types shouldn't meet in this way. And the biggest limitation is that it only applies when the terrain texture has no major features (such as trees, rocks, etc.). But it's a cheap enough trick that it's worth keeping in my toolbox.
Dundee College, along with key project and other industry partners (including YoYo Games), are holding a 3 day International App Development Conference. The event will run from the 8th to 10th November 2010 in Dundee, Scotland.
The Conference:
If you are already an app developer, or someone who is looking to get into app development, this conference is for you – with a program of essential information to get you developing that killer app and connect you with all the people to make it happen!
The AppJam:
Running parallel to the main conference will be a 48 hour ‘App Jam’ where selected participants will have the challenge of developing and presenting their app concept. Participants will be working together in small, international, multi-discipline teams to develop original ideas and IP with the aim of releasing any new titles developed, and exploiting routes to market immediately after the event. Supported by industry lead workshops and surgeries, the teams will be encouraged to help each other out with problem solving and production while sharing their skill set to achieve final publication.
If booked early conference tickets are £100 or £30 for students (excluding VAT). Entry to the AppJam is free.
YoYo Games an Industry Partner at AppJam 2010 is taken from: GameMaker Blog
Also on Game Maker Blog:
Immortal Defense Pay What You Want Sale – Results so far is taken from: GameMaker Blog
As many of you know Game Maker has supported the ability for others to provide Extensions that will expand and extend the functionality of Game Maker, with the release of Game Maker for Mac many of those extensions will not work as they require native extensions, and these are not available yet. This situation will change over time as authors start to provide extensions that will work on both PC and Mac.
To help this situation I have uploaded an example project for developers to look at, this extension will work on both a PC and a Mac, and uses native code, see the information at http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Game_Maker_for_Mac#Extensions.
Two days ago former Game Maker Community administrator Smarty posted a GMC topic urging anyone who is not confident with their system’s security settings to stay away from yoyogames.com.
Over the past few days visitors to the site have reported virus infections on their Windows machines caused by an exploit in the Acrobat PDF reader browser plugin.
There have been no public comments from YoYo Games on the issue. Although YoYo Games is a bespoke site the makers of Game Maker have a history of using out of date software which has been exploited on more than one occasion in the past.
Update (~12:35 BST): At around the same time as this post was initially written YoYo Games made a post about the matter. Russell Kay writes that the problem was caused by an attack on the OpenX ad server which was used to manage the advertisements displayed alongside games on the website. The ad server has now been removed with ads being served directly from Google and it appears that the issue has been resolved.
GMC Urges YoYoGames.com Stay-away is taken from: GameMaker Blog
We have been the target of a consistent hack on our adservers which no matter what we did to lock it down, meant that our adverts have been compromised on the main web site… We use OpenX as our adserver and this appears to have a vulnerability that the hackers could just enter the adserver site at will and modify the database behind the scenes… Several avenues have been followed to purge the adserver of any contamination and no matter what we did were still compromised, so this morning we have removed the adserver completely (all adverts are now served directly from Google), these are not compromised in any way and we are going to ditch OpenX completely.
Apologies to everyone who has been affected by this, and we have been working behind the scenes to fix this but the hackers have stayed one step ahead of us.
