D’oh! Game Maker Studio requires a Mac to build an OS X game

So, last night, for the first time I tried building a Game Maker Studio project to OS X. I was a little surprised to discover that apparently GM:Studio needs to connect to a Mac OS X system in order to complete its build process. This makes it a little bit of a problem to build OS X projects.

I guess the upshot of that is that it means that it is impossible to create OS X builds in a dev environment where there is no means to test them. On the other hand, I guess the true cost of Studio is around $2500 since I have to buy a Mac. But hey, I suppose that could be a tax deductible expense if I’m buying it for business purposes. I know they make them cheaper, but I probably wouldn’t buy a mini. Eh, maybe. I’ll have to kick it around and decide, but I’m more into the idea of getting a MacBook Pro.

4 Comments

Add a Comment
  1. As I understand it — we’ve run into this at work — almost any kind of cross-platform development tool requires a Mac for actual distribution. I forget the details, but has has something to do with creating the certificates for your stuff I think. Kind of a bummer. If I ever get to that point, I’ll probably just borrow my wife’s Mac to do debugging and building.

      

    1. It makes sense to me that YoYoGames might not be able to license specific things that are needed in order to build for OS X, but I just don’t know what the details are, so it seemed funny. I kindof wish that their marketing would have been a little more forthcoming about the requirement — I never saw anything that stated that having a Mac system was actually necessary to compile an OS X .app, and I don’t think that’s self-evident unless you’re very familiar with Mac development.

        

  2. Here’s what it says on the YYG website “Note: to publish iOS apps, you must be a registered member of the iOS Developer program and will require a Mac OS X computer for development.” Main reason is the signing tools and Xcode don’t run under Windows. I’ll see if we can make this requirement clearer when we refresh the website today.

      

    1. Thanks, Sandy. I must have missed that bit of information on the site. I’m glad to know that you’ll be making it more clear. I think it’s great to see YYG being so responsive to members of the community such as myself, with matters like this.

        

Leave a Reply