GMplanet aggregator

Blobs in Games: Game Component: Radial Base Layout

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:34:00 -0600

I haven't had the time and energy to work on a full game (the transportation game is on hold) but instead I'm playing with lots of little ideas, some of which turn into demos. This week's idea is to algorithmically generate layouts for space stations or space bases, so that they all look different. Originally I had a lot more variety in mind, but for the demo, I only implemented simple radial layouts:

(This is an example layout produced by the Flash demo)

I wrote some notes about the algorithm, the source code, and how to use this in a game.

GameMaker Blog: Game Maker Money System

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:00:41 -0600

Lately, there’s been some talk about an Xbox Live Marketplace/Steam/etc. like “game marketplace” for Game Maker games - there have been a few attempts, including the now dead PCGamesNow.

One of the currently active projects is Game Maker Money System run by GMC troll Caniac.

This project already shows huge promise - as seen from their website. A huge white gap on the top, Times New Roman as the font…

Let’s make our very own account. A basic registration form… so I click the username field, and I accidentally hit the enter button. Expecting to see some kind of validation error (”your username is missing”, “your password is missing”…), I wait for the form to submit… but what do I see?

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 503 Bad sequence of commands. You must specify the recipients of a message before you can send it in C:\AppServ\www\gmms\register2.php on line 60
Your user account has been created!
Please check you mail for a e-mail’s.

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know if I’d trust my money in a service that has a horrible web site, a registration form that lacks any kind of basic form validation and tells the user to check “you mail for a e-mail’s”.

So let’s log in to our newly created account with no username, password, or e-mail, or any user information at all! We hit the login page, see two blank fields for the username and password and hit “log in”.

Sorry, this account has not been e-mail verifyed.

Aww, our account with no e-mail has not been e-mail “verifyed”. But what if we make a real account with real info?

So I enter an username of my choice with a one-letter password. The result?

Your user account has been created!
Please check you mail for a e-mail’s.

I’m glad a service that handles real-life money worries for the security of their users. Anyways, time to check my mail for a e-mail’s!

Your e-mail as recently used to register a account at GM-MS.com,
If you did register please copy and paste this link into you browser this link: http://gapto.co.uk/gmms/verify.php?id=(removed)
If you didn’t ignore this e-mail
Thanks,
Gm-ms Staff.

Ok…

404 - Page not found

Sorry, the page you were looking for was not found.

Well, I guess that’s where our trip with the fantastic Game Maker Money System ends. It was a fun ride!

At the time of publishing this post, their website has been having technical difficulties for many days now: for example, the registration form results in the following error:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) in /home/gapto/public_html/gmms/register2.php on line 6
Could not connect to mysql because Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)

Promising, no? In fact, this post was written a week ago - but we decided to wait until today to publish it because GMMS was supposed to “launch” on December 1. I guess it didn’t.

GameMaker Blog: Zerosoft’s $100 Christmas Competition

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:11:34 -0600

A total of $100 is up for grabs in Zerosoft’s Christmas Game Maker competition.

Writing on the Zerosoft Games forum Jess Horton said “we want your games to be simple, fun, and have a Christmas theme. The genre or style you choose doesn’t matter and graphics will not win the competition so this will be an easy task. I just want a neat little Christmas game that is fun to play”.

The deadline for entries is December 20th after which the winners will be chosen by a judging panel made up of 3 Zerosoft Games members.

GameMaker Blog: GMWeekly releases 15th issue

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:21:51 -0600

GMWeekly have today released their 15th issue (download) which means they have now produced as many issues as MarkUp and more issues than any other Game Maker magazine.

Earlier this week I spoke to the creator of the magazine, Darren Poole, and asked him about the idea behind GMWeekly and got his thoughts on the magazine’s future.

Why did you decide to launch GMWeekly?
Well, I sort of felt that there was a gap in the ‘market’ if you like. I thought about what other GameMaker magazines lacked - consistency (in releasing issues). I thought I’d overcome this problem by releasing a relatively short GameMaker magazine and making sure that I never get a gigantic team working on it. Also, I was failry bored when I started it up and I wanted something that would keep me busy throughout each week.

You decided to focus more on news than the other features included in the already established magazines - is this something you thought was missing from the community?
Well yes, although of course there are a couple of GameMaker news blogs that I’m aware of. I thought it would make a change to the norm by making the magazine not so similar to exisiting ones. Another reason is because I find news easy to report on, in comparison to writing technical articles and tutorials about GameMaker.

Did you really think that you would still be producing at 15 issues, considering the vast majority of Game Maker magazines produce only very few issues?
Well I planned to keep it going for as long as I feasibly could. I thought that if I could get a decent backing from the GMC I would be able to keep going to until the end of the year at least. I wasn’t sure if people would like the publication and I was somewhat surprised at the fact that quite a few praised if after Issue #1 - it was a pretty poor issue and I should have put more effort into it. I didn’t really think about the record of other GameMaker magazines. Just because they may have failed, that didn’t mean I was going to.

Where do you see GMWeekly in 3 months time?
Hopefully the publication should be still around. Maybe people will become bored of it, but we’ll just have to see. I’m becoming increasingly busy now, with GCSE tests looming and A-levels on the horizon. Though I still think that my determination will carry the magazine forward. Crikey - in three months, I would be releasing Issue #27 or there abouts!

GMTutorials Articles: Clean Coding

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:30:46 -0600

Learn how to code properly, cleanly, and efficiently!

GameMaker Blog: Immortal Defense earns $7,500

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:23:16 -0600

StudioEres (Rinkuhero) has sold 385 copies of Immortal Defense in an eighteen month period, receiving revenues of $7,449.69.

The space-themed tower defense game, originally priced at $22.95, now sells at the lower price of $14.95.

From the ‘Going Commercial’ feature I wrote for MarkUp 7:
Immortal Defense was released with a very open approach to sales. Statistics of the number of downloads; site hits and purchases have been posted in a topic on the StudioEres forum to enable other independent game developers to learn from RinkuHero’s experiences.

A month after its release the game had achieved 56 sales out of 4600 demo downloads - a 1.22% conversion rate. This gives is a very transparent insight into the amounts of money which have been involved so far. A retail price of $22.95 multiplied by 56 gives a total of $1,285.20. However this would only be true if every copy was sold at full price which hasn’t been the case as there is a half price offer available for people who feature the game on their blog or website. The Immortal Defense demo is included on the cover DVD of the October 2007 issue of PC Advisor magazine in the UK.

Bear in mind that as Rinkuhero stated in an interview $1,285.20 in a month is below the minimum wage in many states, although of course you can choose how much time you spend promoting your game. In effect you are left with two jobs – first making your game, and second selling it.

The openness with which this game has been released may be useful to people who are interested to see the effect different promotion methods have on downloads and sales.

The game’s current rating at YoYo? 3.4

Classic Gaming: IGN's "10 Videogame Turkeys"

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:47:16 -0600

Any retro gaming fans with a sense of humour about the objects of their affection might want to check out Classic Gaming sistersite IGN Retro for...

GameMaker Blog: Mid-week community links

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:52:03 -0600

Play this:

Mega Block Man [ YYG | GMC ] - 3D puzzle game which has received a very positive response at the GMC , including “out of all the 3D games made in GM [that] I’ve played, this is my favourite“.

Check it out:

IVGM is a new blog dedicated to featuring reviews with Game Maker community members. So far only 1 review, with Drazzke, is online.

Get involved:

Vote for a winner in a contest to decide the new Roket-Games logo. (Forum registration required)

GMTutorials Articles: Basic enemy creation like example 1945

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:27:30 -0600

To make a stream of enemy's to come from the top of the screen

GMNews: GMac Beta - Having Troubles

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:49:53 -0600

Unfortuantely I haven’t had a chance to test out the Mac version of Game Maker that arrived in my inbox this week, however there is word out that other registered testers are having difficulties running the program.

Brian Laclair reports:

The GMac Beta was released, with no luck.

It seems as if on Sunday morning (around 6:00AM EST), the GMac Runner beta was sent to around 50 GM users. Everyone [unverified] has reported the application file has a bug which prevents the user to select which file to run.

This beta however does reveal that most of the program runs on SDL ( http://www.libsdl.org/ ) which in the future will allow the GM Runner to be ported to OS’s such as Linux, Windows CE, BeOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX.

Sandy has yet to reply to any of the error reports on the glog.

Another user who wished to remain anonymous sent an e-mail to let us know that

So far it seems that the runner is the only thing they released and I haven’t figured out how it works yet. I’ll let you know how well it works if I figure it out.

I’ll try to test it out sometime this week and if I have better luck, I’ll be sure to report back with screenshots.

Posted in GM Releases, Informational Tagged: apple, beta, game maker, gmac, mac

GMTutorials Articles: Body Armor

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:51:46 -0600

Guess who's back?! Here I'm going to teach you how to integrate body armor and have it degrade as you take damage in a quest to give GMTutorials a re-up.

GameMaker Blog: The “Instant Play” options

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:52:59 -0600

The belief amongst some people that Instant Play negates the need for a game to be downloaded is an illusion. Files are downloaded when you run a game, even with YoYo Games’ instant play - however gamers do not have to go through the process of choosing where to save a game or extracting or installing any files.

Why instant play?

For YoYo Games the answer is simple - they want people to go back to their website on a regular basis. Whilst an occasional visit and a handful of downloads may be what a gamer wants this will not generate the revenue that YoYo Games’ needs.

Many people like using Instant Play as it makes GameMaker games appear in a way vaguely similar to popular flash arcade games with which many GameMaker games are comparable.

The creator of one such “Instant Play” plugin, James Rhodes, has created a table comparing the features of the different instant play options. The chart has proved rather controversial with both the owners of other Instant Play services and general GMC members disputing the scoring method used.

Sites with features comparable to YoYo Games’ instant play are YAIPP, GMBed, GMArcade, GMX and launched just two days ago Revel Quick Play.

Chart reproduced with permission of James Rhodes

GameMaker Blog: 2DCube is the new FredFredrickson

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:14:29 -0600

Another new GameMaker ‘magazine’ has been released, just a day after Prodigy Game Magazine hit the GMC. This magazine however takes the much more practical approach of being a PowerPoint slide show distributed as a password protected download.

“GRandER” - (suggestions regarding the origins of the name wanted!) - features a review of Iji a very short ‘review’ of Iji, an interview with 2DCube (top marks for originality there). And that’s it.

GameMaker Blog: Gnazine returns… as Prodigy Game Magazine

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:03:13 -0600

ProdigyGM have returned with a new Game Maker Magazine. After their unsuccessful attempt with the unfortunately titled gNAZIne last year which managed just two issues.

“We are not politically correct at all. We give out intense news, previews, and reviews.”

The front page of this new publication is already impressive, containing tiny screenshots, (almost) unreadable text that says “Tutorials, Previews, Reviews, Exclusive Interviews”, and a logo that doesn’t fit at all. Don’t want to download the magazine? Here’s a screenshot:

Next, we have a table of contents:

Letter to the public - p.2
Interview with 2dcube- p.3
Flamewar -p.4
Toonimator Preview - p.4
YoYoGames Update - p.7
GML Coding Errors - p.7
Local News PGM -p. 8
MMO Time - p.9
Wubly Review - p.10
GML Coding Errors Answers- p.12
Mr Noob The Comic - p.12
Adbarlian Castles EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW – p.13
Interview with Desanduin- p.15
East Scripts p. 16
Closing Statement -p.17

What I’m looking forwards to? The “interview”, “Local News PGM”, “Mr. Noob The Comic”, and an exclusive interview with “Adbarlian Castles”. Wait, doesn’t that sound familiar? Oh, yeah, it’s a game by the magazine’s creator!

After this, a small letter to the public:

We are pleased to bring you one of the best Game Maker Magazines out there. I do have a history with making Game maker magazines. My 1st Game Maker Magazine was called the Gnazine. The Gnazine failed because of lack of coordination. I have made all the necessary improvements to this magazine so that the professionalism is shown. I have a real team who is helping in the production of this glorious magazine. With hard work and teamwork this magazine shall not be departed, forsaken, or irrationally created. I ask that if anyone would like to join our magazine team please email me at: hardcoregamer24@yahoo.com. We are accepting new writers, interviewers, artist, jokers, and experts. Anyone is accepted here. This is a community project, so let us all participate!

Maximum professionalism has already been shown, Nate, don’t worry!

Next up? Interview with 2DCube… usual boring interview stuff. But then:

Flame War

Yes the most cyber war is being unleashed once again! Today’s victim is going to be “GM Weekly”. GM weekly has gone Bi-Weekly! The writers seem to have become lazy. We have no idea whether or not if the magazine will continue to be known as GM Weekly.

I am just kidding. GM Weekly is a great magazine. It is impressive that it can release an issue so often. I recommend GM Weekly to anyone. Do not despair about unmatched release dates.
Source: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=392597&st=0&start=0
Source Author: DPoole

…Wait, what? Next up, random app, some GML puzzles… Local News PGM:

ProdigyGM is going under construction. The site has acquired new domain names. The webmasters plan to link together all of the websites for a full community. Also Adbarlian Castles is getting a major upgrade. The game will have features never before seen in any indie, commercial, or GM Game. Hardcoregamer/Nateistoraw intends to release THE REAL DEMO of Adbarlian Castles soon. Also the time period for the game is now 2100, but Adbarlian is not on planet earth, so expect to see a crazy world.

I have to admit that Nate has me confused here… The ProdigyGM website is talking about a game called “Adbarlian County”… so what’s Adbarlian Castles?

Next up… article on GM MMO’s. Here’s some interesting highlights:

The games posted on the GMC are MOs (Multilayer Online).
The 39dll and Sock dll typically are the dlls used in online game creation.

And then there’s a review of “Wubly” by 2DCube:

…Wubly is not even a chick! According to the game, Wubly is asexual, and pink. Asexual is usually used for plants and fungi…

…The game_end() function is kinda, inappropriate, because when you close the game, you see the game’s size decrease, until it closes, but who asked for that animation? …

…Wubly has a brother, NOT REALLY ACCORDING TO
THE STORY…

…I recommend this game to anyone who wants to have a ball, oooops, Wubly…

Genius. Next up, solutions to their GML puzzles and their comic:

We can’t wait to see what happens (on page 17). But first, exclusive preview: Adbarlian Castles!

Adbarlian Castles (RPG) is one of GM’s Most innovative 3d games. The game allows you to take the role of a wizard/magician. It is well known that the game was supposed to be a mmorpg; however, the People at ProdigyGM had a different style of humor. They allowed NPC to behave as if they were real life PLAYERS!

As you can see, the Prodigy Game Magazine presents unbiased opinions and exclusive insights on game development.

The NPCs respond to many KEYWORDS, including, yes I said it, profane phrases!

Oh dear.

The enemy models and scenery is [sic] simply genius. The camera is also wonderful.

So when do you mention that this is your game?

Well, some random interview, GML script… and closing words:

Thank you for reading the PGM Magazine. We expect to make this a monthly magazine. We can meet our deadlines only with your help. Free Advertising is available! You can become a writer
also! Got content! Send us anything that is valuable via email at:
hardcoregamer24@yahoo.com. The PGM Magazine releases this magazine ‘As Is”. All products mentioned are the responsibility of the owners/ creators. Once again thank you for your support.

Thank you for your support. No problem!

That sure was an interesting read… but wait, there’s more… let’s not forget “Mr. Noob - The Comic”, and its thrilling conclusion:

Well, that sure made my day.

GameMaker Blog: More YYG Instant Play Vulnerabilities

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:32:06 -0600

After earlier discovering an exploit that enabled a Firefox extension to secretly be downloaded whilst a user runs an Instant Play application James Rhodes has discovered several more vulnerabilities in YoYo Games’ Instant Play feature.

One vulnerability can fetch the login hash of Windows XP user’s logged into YoYo Games if they have selected the “Remember Me” feature. This feature uses cookies to store login data and when Instant Play is run from Internet Explorer the cookie, and hence the hash, can be accessed.

The Remember Me feature gives the user one month of automatic logins, and the extracted data could easily be sent back to a server using 39dll which could give a hacker access to your YoYo Games account.

A simple path modification means that the same opperation can easily be performed to users of the Windows Vista OS.

This proves another point I’m going to make about Game Maker/Instant Play security.

Why does Game Maker have access to the user’s cookies? Why does Game Maker have access to the system32 directory?

None of these things should be able to be accessed by Game Maker, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed when it’s running as Instant Play.

This example grabs your login information for YYG (if you are using Internet Explorer), and shows it to you. THE DATA IS NOT SENT ANYWHERE.
- James Rhodes

Another vulnerability supposedly gives games an automatic 5-star rating however at the time of writing I was unable to verify this.

GameMaker Blog: Instant Play: YYG Vulnerability

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:33:44 -0600

Go back a couple of years and the standard answer to “how to I get my game to work online?” was, “you don’t”. However in the present day you would probably be greeted with a variety of options. Think YoYo Games’ Instant Play, GMBed, GMX, GMArcade and YAIPP.

These are the better known of the many pseudo-Instant Play implementations (so-called because they perform similar actions to the Instant Play feature first seen on the YoYo Games website).

James Rhodes, the creator of the Yet Another Instant Play Plugin, today revealed that a vulnerability exists within YoYo Games Instant Play enabling any game uploaded to the YoYo Games website to secretly install a plugin for the FireFox browser. The exploit can be seen in action in this example James created and uploaded to the website.

Once the plugin is installed and the user navigates to any game page on the YoYo Games website the application is automatically launched.

Over the coming week GameMaker Blog will feature several posts relating to the various “Instant Play” implementations available.

GMNews: InstantPlay Exploit Published

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:17:17 -0600

InstantPlay Exploit (image by sk8m8trix)

Today James Rhodes posted a comment on the YYG GLOG stating that he has constructed a GM game which demonstrates a vunerability in the way InstantPlay handles game launching. It allows the GM executable to silently install a Firefox plugin with no confirmation. This apparently should be an easy fix: the InstantPlay plugin need only change the way it handles the game’s launching.

It should be interesting to see how long YoyoGames takes to patch this, considering the seriousness of the vulnerability.

Posted in Uncategorized

Lost Garden: Tidbits from the garden

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:45:00 -0600

A few odds and ends have collected in my inbox lately.

Video of the Princess Saving Application is up!
All the videos from the night are posted up on OfficeLabs.com. My talk starts 10 minutes into the first video and lasts approximately 30 minutes. There’s also a bit of Q &A after all the talks finish up. You can get the original slides here.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:d0cabdcc-97bc-4799-a579-4da3b73f865b&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Video: Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

FishingGirl update
I’ve seen some sneak peeks of the FishingGirl prototypes and people are making great progress. It will be possible for someone to win a gold medal this time around. If you’ve started a prototype, finish it! There is solid fun lurking in that design and you still have a couple of weeks left to build something wonderful.

Some observations:

The store and the acquisition of the various rods adds a great sense of exploration and progression to the game.
The gameplay improves substantially if you give your fish a small dash of intelligence so that they move towards your lure if it is in their sight.
Making the game winnable. There is a story arc to the game and it feels incomplete if you don't let the player finish.

Skill atoms in action
Tex, over at the delightfully titled Tin Man Tex’s Slap Dang Blog, put together skill chain describing his mod. I liked how he intuitively started writing down skill atoms and then only later began connecting them together in a skill chain. Analyzing a game using skill atoms has an element of mind mapping to it that is pleasantly organic. Check it out. I hope to see more such examples in the future.

http://tinmantex.blogspot.com/2008/11/ill-atomize-your-face.html

Other prototyping notes
BuschnicK created a nicely fleshed out version of Play with your Peas. It is a faithful implementation of the game and deserves a very solid silver reward. However, I still think the fun hasn't been completely uncovered.

At this point, we've had some reasonable implementations of the original concept. I suspect that the design may require some big changes to make it work. So here is a question: Why isn't Play with your Peas mind-thunderingly fun and what could be done to improve it?

http://www.buschnick.net/Personal/2008/09/ninja-peas.shtml

Best wishes and may you have a sinfully glorious Thanksgiving.
Danc.

GameMaker Blog: Limited Graphics Competition Results

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:59:12 -0600

The results of TIA Productions’ limited graphics competition have been released, despite the fact that the main site continues to say that judging is still in progress.

The $100 first prize has been awarded to Spring Loaded [play online | download .zip], a fast-paced platform puzzler, by kbyoyoa.

Explaining the reasons behind the result TIA Productions’ pure-evil020 revealed what it was that made Spring Loaded stand out: “a good menu, good gameplay, well fitted sounds, titles for each level to keep player going, and I think that having a tutorial in your game is very important! a lot of people give up when they just don’t get how to play the game…”

Classic Gaming: Retrofit: SNES Alarm Clock

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:43:01 -0600

If, like me, you've got a few consoles that are so old and knackered that they don't actually work anymore, then why not consider doing...

GameMaker Blog: Which game deserves $100?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:08:57 -0600

There are now just 5 days to go until the winner of the TIA Limited Graphics gamemaker competition is revealed as the contest ends. So far only 2 votes have been placed and they are both by entrants of the competition voting for their own submissions!

A $100 first prize is up for grabs so more votes should have been attracted by now. Whilst the number of votes each game receives from the public does not directly select the winner, TIA are asking for reasons why you voted for a particular game which will be taken into consideration when deciding who to award first place to.

A total of 10 games have been submitted - the first three of which were reviewed last month on GameMaker Blog. Get voting! (You will need to register at the TIA forums to cast your vote).

Download all 10 entries in a 34.5MB .zip from GameMaker Blog

GameMaker Blog: GM-Most-Weekly

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:11:21 -0600

After two consecutive missed release dates GMWeekly have published their 13th issue (left click only download).

“First of all, I should apologise for the absence of an issue last week. Both me and Broxter were extremely busy and it became obvious to us that we would just not be able to get an issue out. We’re sorry if we disappointed anybody, but we hope to get right back on track. Because of this, we now have a new release policy: the publication will be released on most Fridays. So, this means that some weeks (probably about one in six or seven) there will be no issue. Hopefully you agree with and understand this.
There wasn’t much news around GM last week anyway, to be honest,…”
- Darren Poole, GMWeekly 13

Changing release schedules is certainly nothing new when it comes to GameMaker magazines, but GMWeekly did manage to stick to their original release dates better than any other magazine has done so previously - something that they should be proud of.

GameMaker Blog: GMWeekly or not so

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:39:16 -0600

Last Friday Darren Poole’s GMWeekly magazine did not publish an issue and earlier today Darren confirmed that an issue would not be released today either, instead promising that issue 13 will be released tomorrow as well as a reason for the delay.

Whilst it may widely be considered that releasing a second issue is the biggest hurdle when producing a Game Maker magazine, even successful magazines such as GMTech and MarkUp took 2 months to release their second issue, GMWeekly proved many of its critics wrong by realising 12-weekly issues to (or close to) schedule.

The magazine is different from more traditional Game Maker periodicals as its primary focus is on community news with little focus given to game development advice, although game reviews are now included.

Although I am not superstitious you may care to know that the thirteenth issue of MarkUp was the first of that publication to be released late after a string of 11 back-to-back monthly issues following the pilot edition.

Actual figures are higher as files are mirrored at a different host

GameMaker Blog: “Instant Play” on your site

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:25:18 -0600

GMArcade, a website that mimics the instant-play capabilities of YoYo Games, have released for free a script that will enable Game Maker users to make the ability available on their own site.

Classic Gaming: Help Release An Atari Computer Game For Charity!

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:59:40 -0600

Sector Wars is a previously unreleased Atari 8bit computer video game from 1985 written in 100% assembly language. The game was completed in the mid...

YoYo Games Glog: [Update] Trouble uploading games?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:49:15 -0600

Hi all, this is an appeal from our dev team,

We’ve had reports of users having difficulty uploading games using the new system. The stats seem to confirm this as we’re seeing more incomplete uploads than we did before the switch.

Obviously we’re keen to get to the bottom of this but we need a bit more information to work out what exactly is going wrong. Could anyone who has experienced difficulties please post below with details of the browser and flash versions you were using (and the nature of the error you encountered).

In other more exciting news, see Sandy’s post yesterday about the GM Mac beta.

Thanks,

Jim

[UPDATE] We have just released the latest build of the site which should address the upload issue, so please do have another go and let us know if the fix worked for you.

Lost Garden: Project Horseshoe 2008: There and back again

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:40:00 -0600

I’m writing this on the long flight back from Project Horseshoe 2008. The last bittersweet night, we stayed up till five AM playing games and talking about games. The conversation shifted from the slow death of games as we knew them, to fresh games that will change the world, to the little tips we use to thrive each day. There is something distinctly surreal about chatting quietly with such an intimate knowledgeable group during the wee hours of the morning, there on a lonely porch in the uncharted depths of Texas. And yes, there were indeed baby racoons.

This year, I took a risk. If you’ve been following this blog for a bit, you know that I’ve been working on skill atom techniques for modeling gameplay. I’ve written about it. I’ve used it myself. There has even been a talk or two. Yet, aside from a few furtive emails with other happy heretics, I’ve never had a chance to do the following:

Explain the model to a crowd of natural skeptics, working designers who have been successfully building games for years.
Get them to tear it apart.

The cautionary tale of the secret paint formula
I’m reminded of a story that Norman Rockwell used to tell. He once became good friends with a fellow painter who was famous for his rendering of luminescent, sensual skin tones. The painter used a secret formula for his paint and he guarded it jealously from potential imitators. When the painter died, he willed his greatest gift, his secret paint formula to Rockwell.

Rockwell excitedly tried out the formula, but ultimately found it disappointing. The paint was too slick and difficult to control, so he gave up on it and instead fell back on his own preferred techniques. The real secret had never been the paint formula. It was just one little piece of the painter’s vast organic, highly individual process. The real secret was the intuitive wisdom that comes from making a thousand paintings. Sadly, such a thing is not transferable to others. When he died, his specific way of creating paintings died with him.

Are skill atoms the same thing as the secret paint formula? Are they a glossy coat of theoretical hand waving that only works for the people who invented it? Many people I’ve talked with see ‘game grammar’ as nothing more than a time wasting intellectualization of a fundamentally intuitive activity. I went into the weekend with this thought very much at the forefront of my mind.

Why stop there?
If all we had done was validate or invalidate the skill atom model for simple games, it would have been a useful weekend. But by god, this is Project Horseshoe and people are nothing if not psychotically ambitious. To up the ante, our group decided to apply skill atoms to multiplayer games. I’ve never done this.

How do you model a deeply psychological behavior like bluffing? Gifting? Competition? Collaboration? Goodness! I didn’t have a lot of answers prepared for this topic and honestly expected that the skill atom model would immediately collapse under the weight of all the crazy things that happen as soon as you add two or more players to a game design. All it would have taken is one smart designer to raise a single counter example and my fragile model would burst apart, defeated by reality.

Some questions that I had included:

Could we even begin to talk about multiplayer with skill atoms? The alternative is that this is a model that is limited to only single player experiences. That would be like coming up with a model of physics that worked for one ball in a vacuum, but wasn’t useful for something useful like say…building bridges.
Would the system scale to complex systems? Often when you use a diagramming technique (like UML or state diagrams) to understand real world projects, the resulting diagrams becomes so convoluted that the model does more to confuse than to illuminate.
Would the system be useful to designers during every day work? It is much easier to come up with a academic system of analyzing games that works best if you are an ivory tower dweller who can devote hundreds of hours to breaking down each interaction into pretty diagrams filled with obscure invented lingo. However, I’m looking for utilitarian tools that can be applied in that critical 10-minute gap between playing a prototype and deciding what to try next.
Can this system be taught to other designers? Like the secret paint formula, most game models I run across are only useful to their inventors. If I can’t observe other designers applying the model successfully without my intervention there is something horribly wrong with the approach.

We ripped the skill atoms apart. We analyzed multiplayer M.U.L.E. We looked at charades and then took on football and buffing in MMOs. We used skill atoms to prototype a new multiplayer game about gifting using a bag of plastic Indians. At some point, not so long from now, our group will come out with a report. In that report, we’ll be blunt about what we found. What worked? What was flawed? The results are fascinating.

Our team’s report will be one of several reports to come out of Project Horseshoe by groups of game designers just as crazy and inspired as we were. If any one of these reports starts gaining momentum, the world of gaming as we know will change. It turns out that moving our industry forward isn’t about complaining. It is about getting smart people together where they have the time and the space to think. Grab a beer (Aventinus Double Bock, no less), join the mind meld and use the vast pool of centuries (!) of game design experience to come up with real solutions. Then follow up again and again and again.

In that spirit, I can't wait to share our final report with everyone.

Time for some much needed sleep, chock full of dreams.
Danc.

PS: Warm kudos to George, Linda and Teresa for putting Project Horseshoe on. It is obviously a labor of love and is utterly unique compared to the other events and conferences I’ve attended. If you ever get an invite, don’t hesitate to go.

Classic Gaming: 25 years IBM's gaming computer, the PCjr

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:41:21 -0600

Via Hack A Day[Trixter], connoisseur of old hardware, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PCjr. IBMs PCjr was killed only 18th months after...

GMNews: GMAC Beta - Signup now

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:52:17 -0600

Announced today on the YoYo Games glog was the upcoming private beta program for the highly anticipated Mac version of Game Maker.

The testing will start out as a closed private beta that users can signup for by e-mailing applebeta@yoyogames.com with their contact details, GMC and YYG usernames. The beta program is due to begin by the end of next month and it may be some time before a public beta or final version will be out.
The YoYo Games team is currently looking for those who have a Mac running OS X Leopard, Windows only users need not apply. As for hackintoshes and emulators, it couldn’t hurt to try but I doubt there will be any promising results.

Sandy Duncan also commented to say that although the Mac port should run well on UNIX based systems such as those running BSD, there are no current plans to provide support for UNIX or Linux at this time.

Posted in Game Maker (General), GM Releases, Informational Tagged: apple, beta, game maker, glog, gmac, mac

GameMaker Blog: Game Maker Mac Private Beta

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:40:13 -0600

If you are interested in applying to be part of the private beta for the beta version of Game Maker for Mac check out Sandy’s latest post on the YoYo Games blog.