GameMaker Studio 2 announced

Today YoYoGames released an announcement with some details of the impending release of GameMaker Studio 2.

The biggest news in today’s release:

  1. It appears that they are not moving to a subscription model at this time. YoYo will be selling permanent licenses on a per-module basis for $99 each. There will be upgrade discounts for users who hold a paid license for GM:S1.x, for a limited time. This is very good news for casual users of GameMaker, who would be turned off by a subscription for something they don’t use all the time.
  2. At launch, the IDE will only be available for Windows, but a Mac OS X version of the IDE will go into beta shortly after launch.
  3. No word on a Linux IDE. This was something I had very much hoped would be introduced with GMS2, but at this point at least it seems like there is no plan for it. I really hope that it does happen, so I can get off of Windows.
  4. Confirmed that this is the total re-write that we’ve been waiting on for years, which has been known about for some time. Still not a lot of details on what improvements have been made with the IDE, or whether the GML programming language has changed dramatically. Ideally we’d all like old projects to import into GMS2 and just work, and we still don’t yet know whether they will. There are some significant changes to GML that will impact compatibility with old projects. No doubt this will generate a lot of complaints, but we’d also like GML to add new features and modernize so that it will be more powerful, more easy to use, less prone to bad programming, etc. So this is a balance/trade-off kind of thing. There is a porting guide to help projects that were created in 1.4 migrate to 2.0.
  5. The public Beta for GMS2 begins today, but they are limiting the number of users who have access to the beta for now. At the moment there are no slots available, but YoYo will be adding more slots gradually in the near future.

Additional information

More specific details about changes in GMS2 are available at the YoYoGames Help site.

They’ve brought back a product roadmap! I’m extremely happy to see this.

Deeper dive

Over the last few years, I had been an active contributor on the Suggestion Box subforum in the GameMaker Community Forums. Many of my suggestions were denied, because YYG interpreted the forum as being for suggestions for the 1.x line only.

This wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the forum rules, but came out after numerous ideas that I’d suggested had all been shot down with some mention of “Not feasible in 1.x” and I kept replying, “OK but I don’t care what version it gets delivered in, I still want a GM:S that works this way someday.”

It’s nice to see that one of my suggestions, to have an inheritance system for rooms, has been adopted. Reading the article on this new feature, it sounds a bit more complex than I would have expected, but it is powerful and more fine-tunable.

It should be fun to discover what other ideas from my wish list may have been made a reality in this new version.

5 Comments

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  1. http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio2 – the most important bit for me: “Backwards Compatibility. Import your GameMaker: Studio projects directly into Studio 2 and have them ready to run in a matter of minutes.”

      

  2. If they’re implementing Mac OS X support, I really hope they consider Linux. It’s really not that far of a stretch from Linux.

      

    1. To be clear, I’m referring to the IDE running on Linux. A lot of developers exclusively use Linux. Cross-platform is a big deal these days.

        

      1. I am also very interested in seeing GMS2 on Linux. It’s the last application (apart from games) that is keeping me from switching to Linux full time and being done with Microsoft forever.

          

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