Ok, I realize that GameMaker isn’t a hard core developer environment. It does serve a purpose though: to provide a more accessible means for aspiring game designers who are not primarily programmers to be able to give life to their ideas. This is a truly noble purpose, in my view and I will never say anything bad about GameMaker’s technical limitations as long as they’re limitations which must exist in order to achieve that goal.
That said, I am really starting to get frustrated with the GameMaker community. Not its members, mind you — the handful of interactions that I’ve had with GamMaker devs have been helpful and positive. But what is really driving me nuts in the community forums is the way people will post links to filehosting sites, and the link is dead because it’s a few months later. This is totally counterproductive to the goal of making a game dev environment that’s welcoming and forgiving to newbie programmers and non-techie types.
The forum thread is there, the tantalizing discussion about how awesome a solution is to just the exact problem I needed to solve is there, but the .gmk or .gex file that would make my day is gone. And not enough discussion around the gaping hole to figure out what the solution was that was demonstrated in the downloadable file.
But it’s not just an everyday occurrence. It’s damn near mandatory. And super frustrating.
.gmk files *usually* take up very little space, and if you don’t need all the resources embedded to create a full-fledged game, you can make *extremely* lean .gmk files that can provide a reference implementation of your nifty solution…. AND, we live in an age where 2TB hard drives cost under $100.
So, WTF? The GameMaker community would be so much better serving its users if it provided permanent hosting space so that discussion threads could remain relevant.
I really don’t understand it, I mean if you go to yoyogames they have graphic and sound resource packs that you can download. They’re of poor quality, and searching for anything in them is atrocious, but they at least have links that still point to extant resources. They even host all the games that people submit to the site.
Clearly they have the technology, why are they not using it in this way?