This is a milestone for Ludum Dare, as they are running this jam on their new website, ldjam.com. The old website had served admirably for many years, but lately the scale of the event has exceeded its capability, and the ad hoc customizations to the wordpress site were such that it was difficult to maintain the site. The new site will be a welcome renovation as well as a new foundation from which a better LD will be possible.
I am planning on using GameMaker Studio 1.4 one last time (probably) for LD37, because GMS2 is still in beta, and YYG have not yet released the HTML5 module, and I prefer to be able to create a HTML5 build of my project so that more people can play it. I’m looking forward to learning what the theme will be.
Looking at the Preferences in GameMaker Studio 2 for the IDE, we have a lot of them, and they are logically grouped, and well-organized. Most of the preferences allow customization of cosmetic look-and-feel and UI behavior options.
The IDE is very customizable. Most of the configurable preferences come pre-set to defaults that make sense, and I don’t see much need to change them, but it is good that you have the control to change them if it suits you. I’m sure YYG anticipated that users would have countless nitpicky complaints about anything in the IDE that they couldn’t configure, and so wisely saw fit to give us the option to make ourselves comfortable. These options are by and large very straightforward and fairly dry to drill through, so I don’t see the need to go through them in depth here. The online manual has all the detail you need.
One very notable change from 1.x does merit mention, however:
There is no longer a backup folder. The old “save the n most recent backups” method of source control that was the only option available in GM8.x dsays, and carried over to GMS1.x, is gone completely from GMS2. Using a real version control system, such as git, has long been available, and is what everyone should use, but this does make version backups a bit more advanced for complete newbies. Nevertheless, it is now the only way to go.
Source-control integration doesn’t appear to be enabled yet in the GMS2 beta, or if it is I haven’t found it, so if you do want to use version control during the beta, you will have to manage the repository management and file check-in externally to the IDE.
With regard to GMS2’s default preferences, I found very few things that I wanted to change. But there were a few that were important to me:
One of the changes that I made was to set “Disable IDE transition animations” to true. While the IDE transitions are nice eye candy, I prefer things to be as fast as possible, and watching the Object editor open up and seeing the Workspace scroll to its location is time wasted, to me. Others might find it helps them to remain visually oriented to leave the animations on.
Another was to enable “Automatically Reload Changed Files”. If I work on an sprite sheet using an outside editor, or edit a code file in notepad for some reason, I want those changes to be reflected in GMS2 automatically.
The other thing I did was disable showing the background image in workspaces. While pretty, I prefer a plain, uncluttered background of solid grey. You can also set a different background image if you so desire.
Skins
There are two IDE skins, Dark and Light. Dark is the default, and I find that I do prefer it. Light is a bit too light for me, as it has a pure white background, rather than a light grey.
If it were light grey, I might prefer it over the Dark skin. One thing I did like about the Light skin is the code editor’s colors for syntax highlighting, which feels a bit more muted than the bright, rainbow-y colors in the Dark theme.
Fortunately, these colors are all customizable individually, if you want to tune them.
Will we have the capability to author our own skins, or add additional skins? I don’t normally want to spend a lot of time on cosmetic customization, but it might be nice for some to have the capability.
Room for improvement
It would be nice if the code editor settings could be saved collectively, to a profile document, and then loaded, so that you could export them and share with other users, and so you could avoid having to carefully re-set every setting one at a time if you need to reinstall or something.
Indeed, it would be nice to save the entire IDE’s configuration options as a profile, so that I could then switch between different IDE profiles as desired, allowing me to rapidly reconfigure GMS2 for different types of projects, for example I might find that if I’m doing a game that uses 3D graphics, I would want different settings for the Room Editor than I would want to use in a 2D Isometric game, and so on. I can see myself wanting to set up specific settings for grid sizing and snapping in both the Room Editor and in the Image Editor for different types of projects. If I’m maintaining multiple projects, switching back and forth between them, this would be a must-have.
The preferences you set are stored in %appdata%\GameMakerStudio2\[user id]\local_settings.json — this file is human readable, easy to backup, edit, share, and swap if you so desire. This has to be done manually, for now, but it’s my hope that YYG would give us some UI in the GMS2 IDE to save/import/manage preferences as a profile.
Game Options and Configurations
Outside of the File>Preferences dialog, we also have Game Options and Configurations, which is where we find settings that are project-specific. If you’re not sure where to look for some setting, ask yourself: Am I trying to change something in the IDE, or in the game I’m building? If it’s the IDE that you need to change, look in File>Preferences. If it’s some game setting, look at the Options or Configurations branches of the project resources explorer.
A few important things to point out with the project specific Options and Configurations, especially for users coming from GMS1.x:
Room_speed is no longer a thing in GMS2. Instead, there is a setting under Main Options – General, for Game Frames Per Second, which is a global replacement for the old per-room speed. The default is 30.
The default draw color for the project is also configurable here. I’m used to setting this in GML using the function draw_set_color(). To be honest I don’t know why YYG decided to make this a setting, perhaps just to make it simple for Drag and Drop users to find it, but whatever the reason, it’s here.
Interestingly, there are some timekeeping settings here, as well, that allow you to automatically keep track of the Project Start date, Project Use Time, and the DateTime when the Project Last Changed. Potentially, this could be used for billing users for the use of GMS2, if YYG decided to change their business model to something subscription-based, or metered. It’s also neat for if you are trying to track how many hours you have put into a project — although, the time tracked is simply how long GMS2 has been running, not necessarily how long you’ve been actively using it — if you went away for a break and left it up and running, the meter is still counting.
You can find settings for project GUID and author here as well.
In addition to General options, there are also platform-specific options for your game project. In the GMS2 beta, we only get to see the ones for Windows, but I expect users who have purchased additional build targets will find options for each of them here.
For Windows, we can set our display name, project name, version number, company, copyright statement, Graphics options for interpolation, fullscreen, window and mouse cursor, and a few other options. These are much as they were in GMS1.x.
The biggest change in GMS2 is the new IDE. Completely re-coded and largely re-designed, it has some things in common with the old IDE, but overall it has been re-organized and updated in many ways.
Every form in the UI is dockable, and can be moved around into whatever layout works best for you. This is great. Even better, you can pop out any part of the IDE into its own window, which means that you can spread your IDE out over a few display screens if your computer is set up this way. GMS1.x didn’t play nearly so well on multiple displays.
The resource tree is probably the most familiar element of the new IDE. By default, YYG have positioned it at the right side of the screen, presumably to follow other development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio. It’s a simple matter to drag it and dock it to the left side of the window if you prefer the GMS1.x way.
Workspaces
Probably the biggest change to the IDE is the introduction of Workspaces. These are tabbed regions where you can dock different forms, so you can organize your project in a way that makes sense to you. For example, if you have a set of objects that are related to each other, you may want to set up a workspace where those objects can be arranged together. You can have as many workspaces as you wish, and you can name them something meaningful. This helps greatly to reduce clutter, and should improve productivity as you can leave workspaces set up and switch between them at will, without having to re-arrange windows and forms all the time.
I love the idea, but after using them for a few weeks, I’m convinced they have some serious issues that need to be addressed.
Workspaces can get very spread out, and this implies scrolling a lot. There is a new shortcut, ctrl+T, which will help you navigate the project more quickly than scrolling:
Another navigational shortcut is to middle-click on a resource name in the code editor. Doing this will take you to the resource’s editor window.
A major problem with Workspaces is that the Workspace region only fills a small section of the GMS2 window. Dockable regions at left, right, and bottom make the Workspaces area relatively small compared to the size of a maximized window.
Inside the Workspace area, you have (potentially) multiple Editors open. Certain Editors use Chain View (see below) which spreads out the sub-editors visually, in a way that takes up quite a bit of space, and will all but certainly require you to scroll, both vertically and horizontally, in order to see the whole thing. Vertical scrolling can be done by mouse wheel, but horizontal scrolling is done by CTRL+Clicking in an empty region of the workspace and dragging, which is slow and awkward.
Another problem is the Dockable areas in the GMS2 window. These do not update contextually according to which Workspace you’re in, or what Editor you’re in. If you open the Room Editor in one workspace, the Room Properties will appear in the Dockable area at the left side of the GMS2 window. Switching to another workspace and opening up a Sprite, the Room Properties are still there in the left Dock, where they are useless for the current context, and serve only to distract and confuse, and take up valuable screen real estate that could have been used to present the Sprite Editor UI and/or provide a larger portion of the screen to display the sprite canvas. Fixing this should be a simple matter of showing/hiding the appropriate panels in the Docks for the current context you’re working in. Whichever editor has focus, its Dockable panels should be the only UI visible (apart from the Menu bar and Resource tree).
Maximizing an Editor should make it fill out the entire visible area of the Workspace. And whenever an editor has focus, its entire form should fit on one screen/workspace area without the need to scroll the workspace. I’m fine with a scroll bar within an Editor, for example if I’m in a really long code file in the Code Editor, or if I’m zoomed way in on an Image in the Image Editor. But I don’t want to have to scroll about the Workspace just so I can see from one end of an Editor to the other. I really don’t want to scroll around looking for different editors that are floating about in the Workspace. I would much prefer a tabbed interface where I can easily switch between tabs. Workspaces could be better implemented as groups of related tabs.
The worst part is when you go to open a code editor. The code editor is used in three situations: 1) when working on a Script resource; 2) when coding Events in the Object Editor, and 3) when editing Room Creation code in the Room editor. In the Object and Room Editor use cases, the Code Editor is chained to its parent editor. The code editor is almost never entirely visible in the visible area of the Workspace pane, meaning that very often the right and bottom of the Code Editor will be out of frame, and necessitate scrolling to see. So you’ll often be unable to see the ends of your longer lines of code, and the helpful code tips that appear at the status bar area in the bottom of the Code Editor will also be out of view. This is awful, and needs to be addressed. Code Editing is a primary activity in GMS2, and when doing it, the Code Editor deserves a maximized view, with minimal distractions surrounding it.
I believe the issues with Workspaces are fixable, but as they are now, they’re a bit of a disaster. I find that they make it easier to get lost, and I spend a lot of time flipping between them and scrolling, hoping to find what I’m looking for. They navigational shortcuts may be helpful, but they don’t come second nature to me, and so far I find that they’re so unfamiliar that I have to shift my mental focus form the programming task I’m working on to “how do I navigate to the bloody resource I need to look at?” which takes me out of “The Zone.” They make a 2048×1152 screen seem small and cramped.
Chain view
Another major new feature is called “chain view”. This is a new view for forms that have several sub-forms. For example, the Object editor has a main form that allows you to set the Object’s properties, and then if you add Events to an Object, these are managed in a sub-form that is chained to the main form. From there, Actions are in a sub-form that chains off of the Events sub-form, with a separate tab for each Event’s actions. This keeps related forms together, making it easier to see relationships between different open windows, and reduces clutter. They do spread out more, since the sub-forms do not overlap each other, and this takes some getting used to.
Menu and Tool bar
One thing that can be a little weird, and takes some getting used to, is the Menu bar. Depending on what form you have focus on, the Menus that appear in the main window’s menu bar will change.
For example, if you’re in the Image Editor, the main window will receive some Image Editor menus, to the right of the Help menu, and not in the Image Editor form.
Open the Image Editor, and some additional menus will appear in the menu bar.
This felt weird to me, at first, when the Image Editor is sharing the main window with whatever other forms you have open — I expected all controls specific to the Image Editor to be contained within the Image Editor’s form. However, if you break the Image Editor out of the main window and into its own window, it feels right.
Quick import your Asset files
Importing sound and image files into GMS2 is easier than ever. Just drag a file icon, or even a folder, into the resource tree, and the file will automatically be imported into the project, and a resource created for it.
There is a lot more to cover in the IDE, but rather than make this article too long, I will be covering them separately in future articles focusing on the various Editors: Sprite, Image, Object, Room, etc.
Keyboard shortcuts
I won’t list them all (look in the manual, under Quick Start) but these are some of the most important/useful shortcuts, which everyone should know and use.
F5 – build and run the project.
Ctrl+T – Opens the Goto window to search the workspaces.
F2 – In the resource tree, rename the selected resource.
Ctrl+K – In the code editor, comments out the selected text. (Ctrl+Shift+K to un-comment.)
F2 – In the code editor, opens the code snippets menu.
YoYoGames apparently has added Creative Commons licensing to their standard EULA for purchases made through their Marketplace with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
The old GameMaker Marketplace EULA is still in use for some assets:
Assets sold under the Creative Commons license show a different EULA:
Oddly, though, YYG have set up the checkout so that people purchasing assets for GameMaker Studio can make a donation to Creative Commons during checkout. At first, I thought that this was a donation to the asset maker, which would effectively allow a “pay what you want” model for free assets. But after clicking the Donate Now button, it became evident that it was for donating to Creative Commons, the organization that created the Creative Commons licensing. While I’m glad to see the Creative Commons organization getting support this way, it’s a bit confusing at first to someone who just wants to pay for their marketplace purchase.
Creative Commons licensing is a great idea and is exactly the right fit for the purpose here. I’m thrilled to see YoYoGames using CC licensing as another option in addition of their own license.
[Rather than posting a long article that takes days to organize, I’m opting to do short-form posts that focus on a narrow aspect of the new GameMaker. This means more frequent, smaller posts, which will hopefully be more timely and more digestable for readers. For more articles in this series, just follow the GameMaker Studio 2 tag.]
This is all very early to talk about, and I recognize this, but a lot of people are talking about how much GameMaker Studio 2 will cost.
First, I am very happy that YYG did not try to go with a subscription-based model with their pricing. This shows that they have listened to their users, nearly all of whom despise the idea of paying a subscription on an ongoing basis for software. For hobbyists and occasional users, it’s not a good deal to pay for a subscription if they’re not going to use it all the time and really get the value out of it.
I find that the costs are basically in line with what I was expecting. Sure, Master Collection is a few more dollars than it was when they released it 6 years ago, but guess what, that was 6 years ago. Stuff gets more expensive as time goes on. That’s how it’s always been
The upgrade discounts are reasonable. 40%-50% off is not bad for an upgrade.
I do question why certain modules are so much more expensive than others. I would rather see the Android/iOS bundle and HTML5 bundle cost the same as the Desktop bundle. The UWP an Console bundles, I can understand somewhat more, as those build targets are of prime interest to commercial game developers who, it’s understood, make money from the games they produce, and it makes sense that they should be willing to pay more for those tools, and if by paying more for them, it helps subsidize the other users, then great.
I’m sad to see no free edition, apart from the Trial edition. Depending on the limits of Trial edition, it could still be viable for hobbyist developers, but it sounds like it’s more intended as an evaluation edition to allow people to decide whether they want to pay for a real edition that can actually build games.
Community Chatter
So, predictably, most people who are talking about it are complaining that the cost is too much. That’s a subjective judgement, and of course everyone wants to pay as little as possible, and get everything for free if that were possible somehow.
Some people think that all software should be free (as in beer). Mostly, these people just don’t have enough money to afford to pay for software. They spend as much money as they have on just getting a new computer, and then they can’t believe that the cost of the software they need to run can more than double the price of the system. I sympathize, because when I was younger I was definitely one of those people, and if it wasn’t for deep discounts on student licenses, bundles that came with new hardware, and so on, I couldn’t have afforded to buy much software.
Fortunately there has always been a lot of good quality, low-cost or free software available, as well. Different products are aimed at different markets. Companies that sell to big businesses charge a lot of money for their software, in part because they can, but also because they need to, because in order to develop they need big budgets and a lot of employees. But some software is the product of a single developer, who doesn’t have all the overhead that a large company has, and they can afford to sell for a cheaper price, or even give away if they feel like it. Additionally, there are developers who feel that they get paid to program, not to sell copies of software, and they can get funded to do a project that someone who has money needs, but then turn around and give away the software as a public good, and as long as the cost of development is met by a few, everyone benefits from it.
GameMaker’s history started out with a single developer, who sold the software very cheaply at first, and always had a free edition, and a paid edition that cost $20-25. Later, as GameMaker grew, it became too much for one person to maintain, and he sold it to YoYoGames, who are a larger company, and who therefore have more overhead and need to charge more in order to cover their costs, pay salaries, continue R&D and support, and turn a profit.
YoYoGames initially raised prices, from $25 to $40, around the time of GM8, and users howled that it was too much. And we can see in retrospect what a bargain it was, and how childish people who complained back then were. GM:S has been considerably more expensive, anywhere from $70-200, although they have continued to provide a free edition. YoYoGames can’t continue to exist if they just give away software for nothing.
And YYG charge more for extra GM:S features, up to $800 for their “Master Collection” bundle which includes everything, including stuff they haven’t come up with yet, later for no additional cost. $800 is very expensive for most people, and unless you’re making money with the software, or are wealthy enough not to care, it’s probably not for you. It’s aimed at companies that can look at the purchase of software as a capital investment that is part of the cost of doing business. And if by charging more to these customers, it enables YoYo to keep costs lower for individuals, students, and hobbyists who otherwise couldn’t afford to buy what YoYo would have to sell it for, I think it benefits everyone.
Maybe low-budget amateurs will gripe about not being able to get all the features, but they do get something.
You also have to compare GameMaker against what else is out there. And there’s a lot else out there. There’s stuff that’s completely free, like vi + gcc, which is very high quality and extremely powerful, but that isn’t necessarily the best option for everyone, because it requires a huge amount of learning and knowledge and work to create games with. In more direct competition are tools that are geared specifically toward game development, such as Unity3D (which is more expensive, and uses a subscription model now) and Construct, and free tools such as Godot, Love, and Defold, which may not be as well supported, well documented, or easy to use. And many others besides these. The bottom line is, if you don’t like GameMaker because of what it costs, you have plenty of options to choose from, many of which are very good.
So for people who are complaining that it’s too much, I don’t have much sympathy for you. It’s very likely that at various points YYG will have sale events, as they’ve had in the past. If you don’t want to pay the release day price, you can probably wait a year or two and hit a Steam sale or a Humble Store sale and get it at a pretty good discount then. By that time, it will be even better, with more polish and more features. In the meantime, if you have GM:S1.x you can continue use it, it will continue to receive support and bugfixes, and 2.x will be ready for you when you decide you can afford it.
[Rather than posting a long article that takes days to organize, I’m opting to do short-form posts that focus on a narrow aspect of the new GameMaker. This means more frequent, smaller posts, which will hopefully be more timely and more digestable for readers. For more articles in this series, just follow the GameMaker Studio 2 tag.]
If I click on New Project, I have to choose between creating a Drag & Drop project or a GameMaker Language project.
Weird; I can’t use both in the same project anymore? [I haven’t actually created a new project yet; I don’t know. But that seems to be the implication here.]
Really, I expect that most GMS users use GML, but I’m glad that they’re keeping DnD, because for beginners and non-programmers it is much easier to learn. And it looks like they’ve really improved the Drag-n-Drop system by leaps and bounds over what it’s been up until now. (I’ll cover this in a separate post in more detail…)
But I think it’s odd that I have to pick between one or another coding system when I create my project.
Really, what I had hoped for was that there would be a “Convert DnD to GML” button that users could use, and this could facilitate learning how to code in GML by starting out in DnD, then converting to GML and seeing what it generates for you. I don’t know whether this is a feature that YYG have planned or not, if it is I haven’t discovered yet. Or, even better than a one-way conversion, YYG could have made DnD and GML completely equivalent, such that there was full coverage of the entire GML language with DnD actions, and allowed the developer to switch between views, viewing the code as visual drag and drop actions, or as GML code, and develop however they’re more comfortable at the moment.
I think this “one or the other but not both” approach could potentially cause problems, and will result in pushing users to using GML-only. When a new programmer begins to learn GML, at first they typically start out by going through a project they’ve created using DnD, and replacing the DnD actions an instruction at a time with equivalent GML. If you can’t do that in GMS2, it will make transitioning that much harder, because you would have to start a new project, and code exclusively in GML, before you’re totally ready. Rather than make a gradual transition to becoming a GML coder, the neophyte GMS2 developer will need to develop sufficient confidence in their understanding of GML to start a new project from scratch and use it exclusively.
This pretty much destroys GMS’s gentle learning curve that makes it great for first-time programmers. Update: GML-DnD conversion is exactly how it works! Right-click in the object-editor and there’s an option to convert from DnD to GML, and vice versa.
GMS2 allows you to convert DnD directly to GML, and GML can be converted to DnD (it just shoves the GML code into an Execute Code DnD action, so it’s only semi-reversible).
Oddly, the DnD2GML conversion warns you that this is a one-way change, but that is apparently not the case (although converting GML to DnD simply puts the GML code into an Execute Code DnD action).
I suspect that many users look down at DnD disparagingly, but really there’s nothing wrong with using it. It’s quick, and if it’s all you need, it’s all you need. For what would be a simple, one-liner GML script, I often opt to use DnD when I’m in a hurry, because it’s expedient.
[Rather than posting a long article that takes days to organize, I’m opting to do short-form posts that focus on a narrow aspect of the new GameMaker. This means more frequent, smaller posts, which will hopefully be more timely and more digestable for readers. For more articles in this series, just follow the GameMaker Studio 2 tag.]
Here’s what the new Start Page looks like:
Observations
My display resolution is 2048×1152, and yet the Start Page still doesn’t fit all on the screen without scrolling. Wow.
The top third of the Start Page is taken up by a rotating slide show of images. Personally, I find this annoying. Granted, the Start Page is not a screen I’ll be spending a lot of time looking at, but I just don’t care for the rotating images. I find them distracting. I want a dev tool, not a marketing delivery system. It’s one thing to have the “did you know” tips that provide useful information, and I of course love the news and release notes, but a image that updates every few seconds when I just want to set up a new project is a bit much for me. The images don’t do anything for me, and they take up a lot of space that could be used for something more useful.
Hovering over the rotating slideshow, I noticed the cursor changed to the pointing finger which indicates I’m hovering over a hyperlink. Intrigued, I clicked, wondering what would happen. This is what happened: Where did Getting Started and Explore go to? How do I get them back? Why did clicking the image at the top of the screen make that happen? It took me a few minutes, but I figured out that if I click the GameMaker Studio logo at the top left of the Start Page, in the transparent ribbon overlaying the rotating slideshow, it puts the Getting Started and Explore sections back.This is really weird navigation. They should just have left and right arrows at either side of the sections, or tabs.
UI suggestion: Rather than switching between [Getting Started|Explore] and [Tutorials] by clicking on the slideshow or the GMS2 logo, which have no apparent connection to these sections, just use a straightforward left/right arrow navigation system to switch between them.
Clicking links on the top, which aren’t even obviously links, which have no apparent relationship to the bottom half of the screen, just isn’t good UI design.
I notice Start Page is a tab within the GMS2 window, but I can’t close the tab. What other tabs will appear here when I start using the software?
One of my biggest wish list items for GameMaker Studio is to have the IDE on Linux, so I can stop being a Windows user. I’m on Windows 7 currently, and Microsoft will not support this version forever. Already they have stopped selling new computers with Windows 7. After the way Microsoft treated Windows users who were not interested in upgrading to Windows 10, using unethical, underhanded, and very likely illegal tactics to try to force Windows users to upgrade, I am not interested in ever purchasing another product from Microsoft, and my preferred platform to migrate to would be a popular Linux distro such as Ubuntu or Mint. GameMaker is the only Windows software that is holding me back.
In 2014, then-YoYoGames CEO Sandy Duncan had teased us with the possibility that GMS2 would bring an IDE that ran on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Obviously things can change, and a lot of things have changed with YoYoGames since then. Whether or not we see a native Linux IDE for GMS2, it’s still my #1 wish list item for GameMaker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nintendo just dropped their big, long awaited announcement of the console heretofore known as the NX. Now we know that the official name of the new console is Switch.
It is an impressive, ambitious design that shows Nintendo are deeply committed to innovation and reinventing how we play videogames.
Portable, handheld, yet capable of connecting to docking station, playing through a standard HDTV and acting like a full-size console, with detachable controller-handles that Nintendo calls “joy-con”. It also looks like it is very easy to do social/party games, with easy to configure multiplayer, where every player brings their own Switch and they communicate wirelessly in an ad hoc manner.
The Switch logo evokes the detatchable controllers, and looks like a yin-yang. Very cool.
Nintendo Switch “yin-yang” logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5uik5fgIaI
It shows that the console is essentially like the Wii U controller with the large screen in the middle, with controls at the wings, which also serve as handles. But beyond that, the controller wings are detachable, and can be held in the hand, while the screen is propped up at some distance. Or the console/screen can be mated to a dock which allows the console to use a full size TV as its screen.
This design is so smart, it’s like something that you’d see in an art student’s senior portfolio for industrial design concepts — concepts which tend to be more whimsical or ambitious, and less practical. That it’s actually a working piece of engineering is jaw dropping. Switch is reconfigurable, almost like a Transformers toy.
I’m still digesting it, but I do think that my initial impression is that this is somewhat gimmicky and the “neato” factor will wear off unless Switch is better than everything it’s competing with in all its configurations, and not a “swiss army knife” game console that does everything but none of it better.
And that’s a really tall order. Especially considering that it’s virtually certain it won’t have the power of the PS4 and XBone. Nintendo have always done well with lesser hardware by bringing better games, though. So I think ultimately the success of Switch will hinge on the software and whether Nintendo can keep us interested in another sequel to their 30+ year old gaming franchises.
But from a practical standpoint, it may not be as fun to reconfigure and transport the thing all the time. While the “take anywhere, play anywhere, same experience everywhere” factor is pretty cool, I’ve yet to see what Switch will offer gamers that is actually new. The Wii gave us motion controls, taking a bold new direction from the then-standard gamepad paradigm, and thus offered a new way to play videogames. I’m not sure that Switch does anything like that, or what a new direction for playing games would look like. I’m even skeptical that a new direction is needed at this point, or whether an incremental evolution is all that we need. But it does impress that Nintendo have put so much thought and creativity into the design of the new hardware.
There’s also practical considerations such as the pieces becoming separated and lost, their locking mechanisms wearing out and not working securely, and so forth. This could slide the Switch more toward the gimmicky, impractical end of the spectrum, and away from the cool, does everything end.
At this point, it appears that the writing is on the wall for the DS handheld line. If the Switch is portable enough, it seems like this is the new handheld platform, and it can do more than the DS did.
It doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to offer backward compatibility with the DS library, either, since the Switch doesn’t have dual screens. We haven’t seen yet whether the Switch tablet screen is even touch sensitive (although I have to assume so) or whether it will support the 3D effects introduced by the 3DS (which at the moment I doubt). It’s possible they could emulate the dual screen DS by doing some kind of split screen windowing effect, or perhaps by using the tablet screen in conjunction with a TV. Nintendo has said that they do not intend to release any new information about Switch’s specs or capabilities until the official launch in March 2017. But if the aim was to unify the customer bases, bringing the living room and handheld markets back together, Switch looks capable of delivering.
Ultimately, whether the Switch succeeds or not will depend entirely upon the catalog of games released for it, and support of third-party game developers. If these are good, and compelling, and different from what the competition are able to offer, Switch will be another big hit.
Price is another consideration, of course. People seem to be saying that $300 is about what they feel it should be. If it turns out to be more than that, it could hurt sales. With the lackluster sales for the Wii U, Nintendo cannot afford to have a slow start with Switch. But I expect that Nintendo will bring its usual first person exclusive titles and draw fans of Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Kirby, and the rest in, almost regardless of price, so long as those games are top-notch. And from the teaser video’s snippets of the new Zelda, it looks like they’re on target.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Switch handles battery life. With separate, detatched controls, there are three different distinct units that make up the system and will need to be powered somehow. This appears complex, perhaps overly so, and may not work out as great in practice.
One of the neatest ideas I’ve seen for the Nintendo Switch is the idea of having variant joy-cons, the modular controllers that clip to the sides of the tablet-thing. If they could produce a variety of inexpensive yet high quality joy-cons with different layouts or different types of controls on them, it could open up home gaming in a big way.
One thing I miss about the early 80’s arcade was that every arcade cabinet had its own unique layout of just the right controls for that game, whether it be a joystick, buttons, spinning dials, trak balls, light guns, or whatever. Game design was more inventive back then, more experimental, as companies were trying to find out what games were, or could be. Of course in time this converged into some more-or-less standard layouts, but to this day the arcade enjoys a wider variety of control schemes.
The home console market by contrast has usually tried to offer different types of controllers, but in order to reach the widest possible market these controllers usually have to conform to a design spec enough so that the controller can be used with any game, which tends to make them all same-y. You may get a gamepad and an arcade stick, but that’s about it. Nothing crazy, like track balls and flight sticks and more exotic stuff. This changed somewhat with Guitar Hero’s unique controllers, and more so with the launch of the Wii and the Xbox Kinect. But the possibilities enabled by modular controls hinted at by the Switch are tantalizing.
But one major problem is that any unique controller that isn’t packed in with the console doesn’t get games developed for it, because the smaller install base of the unique controller makes the games market for games that work with that controller that much smaller. The NES Zapper wasn’t part of the cheapest basic package that Nintendo sold, and so the number of games developed to use the Zapper was very small — game studios wisely targeted the largest market, which was everyone who had a NES, and everyone who had a NES had a gamepad.
In any case, I’m sure this new system will get a lot of talk and attention over coming days and weeks, and more information will be forthcoming shortly.
