GMplanet
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GMplanet aggregates the Game Maker related blog posts of:
A new game maker game reviews forum will soon be opening at the official Game Maker Community. Created in response to a recent request for more high quality reviews the currently empty section will showcase “selected reviews of GM games that the reviewer thinks are noteworthy and deserve attention.”
Writing on the GMC administrator KC LC explained the purpose of the Reviewer’s Choice forum as being “devoted to bringing member’s attention to worthwhile games. That doesn’t mean reviews can’t find fault with a game, or suggest improvements. But we won’t allow members to post reviews that bash bad games.”
A discussion is currently underway as to who will have permission to post reviews once it is officially opened.
Rarely are Game Maker magazines given names of the quality that Evan McClane chose to christen his twice a year publication with.
The launch issue of what appears to be the Game Maker magazine with the least regular release schedule contains brief game reviews and short articles on Game Maker news topics. Also present are featured resources such as graphics and game engines and a coding tip.
There isn’t a great deal of textual content but the non-complicated design doesn’t feel like it is lacking anything. There is however a wordsearch.
The pages appear to be made up of images rather than containing actual text which is a minor irritant and I suspect might cause scrolling lag problems for people reading the file on older machines.
A good start but I’m not really a fan of the 6 month wait to read more and I would hope for more content with half a year of writing time.
After getting frustrated at a recent conversation (read from bottom to top) on Twitter with Brian Fetcher on the cost of running YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan has released details of YoYoGames.com’s bandwidth usage for the past 6 months.
This is the first time that Sandy has commented on YoYo Games’ finances at the YoYoGames.com website.
I haven’t been able to work out a reason for the spike in traffic at the end of October/early November but the drop in August can be appointed to over 24 hours of downtime effecting the main site.
The last figures we had previous to this were “upwards of 10TB a month” in June last year. See also YoYo Games record annual loss of £180,000 which Sandy refers to in one of his Tweets.
I had a couple of interesting conversation on Twitter recently, the first was from somebody who accused our web hosting company for being unprofessional for taking the site down for less than 60 seconds during some internal switchover. The other was when I (jokingly) suggested it would cost about $700,000 to run YoYo Games this year (actually…. that’s not a ridiculous figure !!).
It prompted me to take a close look at our web host. Below you can see the actual data from our remote server management panel. The data here is a little confusing as the underlying trend is up (Xmas is a quiet time). By the end of this year we are budgeting for about 20TB a month.
Our original web host was charging £1,000 a TB….so you can see our monthly hosting costs (their servers weren’t cheap either) would have been on their way to about £25,000 (about $40,000). With our current web host we are running at less than 20% of this total. So next time somoene wants to complian that the maintenance schedule is “unprofessional” all I can say is without the deal we have with these guys and their generally EXCELLENT service you probably wouldn’t be reading this post…..
As many of you may have noticed the site has been much more reliable since the Rails 2.3 upgrade , but there are still many improvements planned for later this year, including siting servers in North America for the first time.
GMIndie have released the sixth issue (1.72MB pdf) of their Game Maker magazine and have announced that they are switching from a weekly to a fortnightly release schedule “if we don’t decide to discontinue the magazine”.
The introduction section of the magazine also reveals that the publication is apparently editorless yet this is the best issue so far.
The main review is of the YoYo Games featured Time Still, also present are short reviews of Prototyping the Invaders, Sludge, Wheels of Imagination 2 and Myths.
NAL is the interviewee in a segment which has much improved from the previous release. He provides information on the games development projects he is currently working on and passes on some game making advice.
Although designer Matt Haigh left the magazine after just one issue the improved two-column layout has been retained and aside from some mysterious background image selections this release is very well presented.
Finally I believe I can look forward to the next issue without expecting to find something wrong. The reviews could be a little longer – I wouldn’t mind if less games were featured – but overall a very well done issue.
“Personally, I prefer Game Maker which is a whopping $25. Shoddy DRM and lack of regular updates aside, it’s an immense package.”
-Rob Fearon, Guardian Games Blog
A number of the developers mentioned in the article may be familiar to you.
The results are in for the fourth Game Jolt contest, themed Rogue. Two of the three placing entries were created in Game Maker (the third in Construct). See previous blog entry listing all the Game Maker-made entrants.
Third place: Flood the Chamber by scoz
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 13,152
Current Public Rating: 4.0
Previous placements: None
Play on Game Jolt
Second place: TowerClimb by Davioware
Created in: Construct
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 3200
Current Public Rating: 4.3
Previous placements: First place in Minimal Contest (with Spectrum Wing)
Play on Game Jolt
First place: Super Space Rogues by rotten_tater
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 173
Current Public Rating: 4.8
Previous placements: Third place in Minimal Contest (with Fetus)
Play on Game Jolt
With a total of 15 entries this was the worst turnout yet for a Game Jolt competition, though some of its entrants gained a large amount of publicity. Flood the Chamber, the third-place winner, was featured on sites including Destructoid and the Indie Games blog (hence its massive play count).
CROS, the administrator and runner of Game Jolt, has announced plans for an interim contest which will be held over a single weekend in February deemed most suitable for those likely to enter.
Regardless of what it says above this is from the Jan-Feb 2010 issue
A serious question this.
Indie Game Magazine is a paid for 6-issues-a-year publication, available both online and in print, that features reviews of Indie games and articles aimed at the creators of such titles.
The cheapest normal subscription price is $19.95 a year (about $3.30 an issue) with an extra $5 on top if you want access to back issues and have access to “insider information” articles on the site. A print subscription costs $40 in the US and $50 in the UK and Canada.
Markup played with the idea of a printed edition long ago (images sadly were hosted elsewhere) and at least one other Game Maker magazine looked at the concept.
Indie Game Magazine are currently holding a “pay what you like” sale on the $24.95 subscription package. I say “pay what you like” but when I tried to get it for free (you will find out why later) I discovered that wasn’t truly accurate as I was met with an error “product:j_id112: Validation Error: Specified attribute is not between the expected values of 1 and 10,000.”
I have seen issues of the magazine before and decided that it wasn’t worth paying $3.30 an issue for. Essentially I judged the quality to be below that of GMTech which is available free. It is also considerably shorter – excluding the cover, contents pages, advert pages etcetera there are 14 pages of material in the January-February 2010 issue. It is not a bad magazine but I do not feel it merits a price tag when similar material is available on blogs – congratulations to the team behind it if they have been getting more than a handful of sales.
This brings me on to my main point. At the bottom of the front cover the magazine has the following notice:
“Indie Game Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.“
A link to the license is here which states “You are free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work”. So I just paid $1 to get something which it is perfectly legal to distribute freely. I had previously found back issues of the magazine on the Internet freely available to download (although the sites they are uploaded to do also contain obviously illegal material).
I paid my $1 so you don’t have to. Is there something I am missing here or would I be okay to upload/link to a copy?
Update: I have decided to make a download link available: Download Indie Game Mag Issue 8 for Jan-Feb 2010 (13.1 MB). Not sure if this is what they intended but it is legally sound. Please post your opinion of it here!
My friends Alex and Rob at Wild Shadow Studios entered the TIG Assemblee competition. In the first 30 days, artists create art assets, and in the second 30 days, programmers create games with those assets. Alex and Rob decided to write an MMO in those 30 days. They asked me about generating game maps.
In the past I had generated outdoor terrain maps by using randomness, erosion, and water flow (see the Simblob Project). However there was a terrible trap in there. I spent years refining the terrain generation system, and far too little time working on combat and the game itself. I had fun, but I never finished that game.
Wary of my tendencies to work on one aspect of a game too much while neglecting everything else, I decided this time to do something simple. I started with Perlin Noise. I generated both a moisture map and an altitude map:
To ensure that some areas are dry and some areas are wet, I renormalized the moisture map to try to produce equal areas of every moisture level. I also renormalized the altitude map to produce far more flat and low lands than high altitudes, following a quadratic function. After renormalization every random map has a reasonable mix of land types.
From these I defined simple rules that assigned a vegetation. High altitudes are snowy mountaintops and low altitudes are ocean or beach. In between, the moisture determines how green or yellow the land is. Since most altitudes are not reflected in the map coloring, I added some shading so that it would be easier to see the mountains and valleys:
There were two things I wanted to add. The first was noise. I find noise to add to the visual appeal, and in this case it would also decrease the sharp boundaries between different terrain types. Compare this map to the original:
The second thing I wanted to add was wind. In many parts of the world, wind picks up moisture from the ocean and spreads it over the land. At mountains, much of this moisture is extracted from the wind and dropped as rain:
You can see this pattern in the United States, with winds out of the west dropping moisture in Oregon and California, passing over the Sierra Nevada mountains, leaving Utah and Arizona rather dry. In Australia, the winds come from the east, hit the Great Dividing Range, leaving the eastern coast wet and the interior of the continent dry. In South America, the winds come from the east but don't hit mountains until the Andes, so the rain falls over most of the continent, giving us the Amazon rainforest. I wanted the mountains in the game map to affect the moisture levels. I added a wind algorithm that spreads moisture from west to east and generated this map:
You can see that the dry areas in the northwest are now green, and the southeast, where the moisture is blocked by mountains, is dry. It seems more “realistic” but I think the players don't really notice such things.
In the demo app you can click on the minimap to see the zoomed area, change the number of wind algorithm iterations (then press Update), randomize the map seed (the Randomize button), or type in a random number seed and press Update. I find that 83980, 59695, 94400, 92697, 30628, 9146, 23896, 60489, 57078, 89680, 10377, 42612, and 29732 are seeds that produce decent maps. The demo differs a little bit from what we used in the game but the overall map shape and features are the same.
For Realm of the Mad God we exported the map and then made vegetation and monsters based on the terrain characterstics. The tree density was higher in jungles than on hills, rocks mostly were on mountains, and dead trees littered the deserts. Monsters too were terrain-specific at first, but they ended up spreading throughout the land. On top of the map we added random temple ruins and were hoping to make those areas special in some way, but ran out of time.
Looking back on this project, there were lots of things I did that don't really matter to the players. I tried to make the algorithms “scale independent” so that I could generate maps of different sizes and they'd end up with similar features, but in practice we only wanted maps of 2048x2048. The noise, which looks good in the overview map, looks awful when playing the game, so we ended up smoothing it out. I tried to make a two-step process that would generate the large scale features with one algorithm and the details with a different algorithm, and I never got that working well; I ended up just generating everything with the large scale algorithm. I had a river algorithm that carved out canyons, and I didn't get it working well enough in time for the game contest. I tried several ways to make the edges of the map into oceans (so that players would never reach the edge of the map) but none of them worked out, and players didn't seem to mind reaching the edge. The edges of the map never worked out right because bands of weirdness would form (you can see this in the demo). The simplest thing would've been to cut off the edges.
There were also lots of things I'd like to add, but probably shouldn't because I should move on to other projects. It would've been nice to create a map rating algorithm that could automatically pick out maps that look good (plenty of water, beach, mountains, variety, etc.). But for Realm of the Mad God we just looked at a bunch of maps and picked seed 72689. It was a pretty nice looking map, except the peninsula turned out to be a little frustrating for players, and we don't want the bosses to spawn on islands that players can't reach. For the expansion pack we'll probably just pick a few random seeds that look good and make maps from them. It would've been nice to automatically pick spawn points for players and monsters but those too were just placed manually. It would also be nice if there were some landmarks and regions with names so that the players could talk about where they were.
Try the game and see how different it feels to be exploring the map in the game than it does to look at it in the demo app. For example, the god monsters live on the mountains; it's much easier to see where these are on the map than to figure it out while playing the game. I think the 30 day time limit really helped keep me focused on things that would be useful for players. After the contest was over I found I was spending time on much less important things. I'm planning to stop working on the map generator for now, and only revisit it if there are specific features I need to add. The source is available under the MIT license (however the Oryx tileset is not licensed the same way so the version I put on github uses solid colors instead).
The first attempt to revive last weeks GMLive resulted in little audible other than a chicken sound effect. Finally a week, 2 hours and 14 minutes after the intended broadcast of their 8th show we heard a run down of three weeks Game Maker news from presenter Joshua Pedroza and producer Jonathan Martin. The show was about 32 minutes in length (excluding music) much shorter than any previously.
Listen again:
Direct link: gmlive-30-jan-2010.mp3
Next show: 13th February.
GMIndie appear not to be content just hosting two live radio shows and releasing a magazine every week. They plan to run a third radio show each week and to launch “GMIndie TV“.
Their site lists thirteen twelve members who aim to release “the best game maker entertainment”. I think they mean media.
Why can’t they just concentrate on improving, or even just actually producing, their existing output? Today’s episode of their radio show was cancelled (as was GMLive’s unrelated show last weekend) and the sixth issue of their magazine was not released at the weekend as it should have been. We don’t need to be given similar content in audio, written and now video formats – one high quality platform would suffice.
The most successful Game Maker media outlet GMTech had just one product.
After December’s announcement that Game Maker 7 for Mac had been “delayed indefinitely” following the resignation of the the programmer responsible for building the IDE there was speculation on if and when the project would resume.
Work has now continued as the original programmer has agreed to continue working on the software alongside a new developer. Sandy said “We should hopefully have a release candidate ready in a month or two”.
Also on GMB: Fourth Game Maker Mac beta, Exclusive Videos: Game Maker Mac Development Progressing
Good news for Mac users …we’ve contracted with a new developer to support the previous contractor who has also agreed to stay with us and finish the work on GM4Mac. We’ve effectively doubled the effort we had before and work has started on getting the bugs fixed. We should hopefully have a release candidate ready in a month or two. I’ll keep you updated here.
