Product Review: Pickle 2.0

graphics, reviews
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There are a few dedicated bitmap editors out there with features specific to pixel art and sprite animation. One that I like is Pickle. It features a stripped down feature set designed to give the pixel artist just the tools that they need to use.

A full featured image editor like Photoshop or Gimp can just get in the way of the pixel artist, providing too many tools with too many options, most of which are highly un-optimal in their standard configuration for pixel art techniques. By stripping the unnecessary, Pickle gives the user a streamlined interface that they can learn quickly and use very quickly once they’ve learned the handful of keyboard shortcuts to enable them to switch between tools and modes with great efficiency.

I first tried Pickle sometime in the last year, and since then a new version has come out. While I didn’t quite grok the beauty of the interface at the time, I’ve become more experienced with pixel art since then, and decided to give it another try.

License

Pickle is available now only a paid license, no longer a nagware/donationware license. There is a 7-day trial mode, but after that you have to pay to use it.

If it’s the sort of tool you’ll get a lot of use out of, it’s probably worth the price.

For serious sprite animation, I’d recommend Spriter, which is still in beta, but has been coming along nicely in recent releases. But to create the sub-sprite bitmap resources that you’ll import into Spriter, Pickle is still a good tool to consider, especially if your art style is pixel art and you don’t do a lot of work with gradients and filters and the like.

For simpler sprite animations, Pickle has an onion skin feature that shows the previous and next frames in an animation loop so that you can compare the frame you’re working on against them. I find this really speeds up the process of creating simple animations, and removes a lot of the guesswork and trial and error. While it doesn’t have as many features as the built-in Sprite Editor that comes with GameMaker, it makes up for this by providing a well-thought out interface for the tools it does give you, and providing only what is essential to producing pixel art.

Using Pickle

Couldn’t be easier, really. The manual is simple and fits on a single page on the web site, which covers the entire application from start to finish.

All a pixel artist really needs is the pencil, paintbucket, eraser, and selection tools. When you’re manipulating a bitmap at that level, you really don’t need any other tools. Line and shape tools might be useful, but aren’t really necessary, particularly for smaller sprite and tile bitmaps. A text tool would be nice as well, in a more featureful app, but again, for the intended purpose of creating tiles and sprites, not needed.

Pickle shows its strengths in two areas: Tile making, and animation.

For tile making, it provides a means to shift the bitmap so you can more easily discern hard edge transitions in order to smooth them out. There are also mirroring modes which allow you to make symmetrical shapes easily, by mirroring the pixels horizontally, vertically, or both, as you draw them.

For animation, I really like its “onion skin” feature, which overlays the previous and next steps in the animation as a translucent layer, which you can use to guide where you draw the current frame. This helps you make better, smoother animations in less time because you don’t have to flip back and forth between frames for comparison and preview it constantly to make sure it’s right.

Shortcomings

You can only save up to 10 color palettes. This seems arbitrary and way too small. I’d like to be able to develop a palette for any particular project I happen to be working on. 10 is way too small and there’s really no excuse for it to be so low a number. I should be able to browse a directory full of xml files that define custom palettes, however many I need. Pickle does come with a few built-in color palettes that are useful for game development: the GameBoy an Atari palettes are most welcome, but they should keep adding more: NES and Commodore 64 perhaps being the most necessary. In time, I’d like to see every classic console palette emulated.

I also found the palette to be very tiny and hard to click on, and wished that it was quite a bit larger.

Wish List

There’s a lot in this section, but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that I don’t like Pickle as-is. Rather, I’m so enthusiastic about it that I can’t stop thinking of ways that I’d improve it if I could. I forwarded these suggestions to their feedback email, so I’ll be thrilled if the developer decides to incorporate any of these ideas.

Altogether, I admire the minimalism of the Pickle interface and the easy learning curve that the constrained interface permits. I wouldn’t like it to lose that beauty by adding too many new features, but I feel that if the following ideas were incorporated into the interface, it would make for just about the perfect pixel art image editor.

Indexed color/Palette swapping. Switching to a different color palette from the selection of saved palettes doesn’t cause the colors in an image you’re currently editing to change. This might be a desired capability, however. Old game consoles used indexed color and palette swaps to good effect, and an easy way to replicate this in Pickle would be awesome. An “indexed color mode” which changes the colors in the current image when a new palette is selected, instantly re-coloring the image with the new palette, would be a great feature.

Easier palette building. It would also be nice if I could define a new custom palette based off of an existing palette (such as “night colors from the NES palette” for example) — by dragging a color swatch (or a range of swatches) from one palette onto a new palette.

Color switching shortcut. A keyboard shortcut to cycle through the colors in the palette to enable rapid switching would be useful. There is a shortcut (x) to switch between the primary and secondary colors, and that is OK for what it is. But when I have a lot of colors in the palette, I want to be able to switch between any of them easily, maybe though CMD+arrow keys or CMD+scroll wheel or something like that. Mousing over to select the color from the palette, then back over to where I want to draw, is slower.

Better color picker. I find the color picker in Pickle to be a step backward from the color picker in Paint.NET. I like when I can control the exact value of RGB or HSV or alpha and see the result as I change it. I find this helps me to select a color that I like fastest. The advanced color picker in Paint.NET is damn good: I really like being able to switch between using the color wheel, RGB/HSV sliders, and the value boxes to find and select the color I want very quickly.

The Paint.NET color picker

The color picker from Paint.NET provides a better interface for rapidly finding and selecting the color I want. I’d like to see something similar in Pickle.

Another great feature to include in a future iteration of the color picker would be a mode that makes it easy to pick colors schemes based on the theory of coloring presented in this tutorial — for each color added to the palette, the color picker could auto-suggest adjacent and complimentary color wheel suggestions, to enable better shading and highlighting, allowing the user to add them to the palette automatically if desired. This would be an AMAZING feature. The awesome web app Color Scheme Designer does it right.

Canvas and imaging Scaling/resizing! Scaling is a must-have feature which is currently missing. My favorite technique with pixel art is to rough in at very low resolution, then resize the image, doubling the resolution of the image, scaling it using Nearest Neighbor scaling so that no anti-aliasing artifacts are introduced, and then refining the details.

I can work extremely quickly when I work this way — i’ll start out at 16×16, and double a few times until I’m at 64×64, or 128×128, and those single pixels in the 16×16 rough version end up doing the work of a 8×8 block of pixels when I’ve scaled the rough image to 128×128, thereby saving me a factor of 64 pixels worth of work for each pixel that I rough in with the right color by the time I get to 128×128 resolution.

Being able to Select All, then CTRL+plus to double the canvas size, and CTRL+SHIFT+plus to double the canvas size while scaling up the image using Nearest Neighbor would be great. And to marquee-select, then CTRL+SHIFT+plus to scale the marquee selection 2x with Nearest Neighbor. (Essentially it’s like working with a large 8×8 brush tool, then switching to a 4×4, 2×2, and 1×1 brush, but it’s quick and easy for me to work this way.)

 Arbitrary rotation: Currently Pickle only can rotate 90 degrees and mirror the image. Arbitrary rotation of the entire image, and pixel selections, would be extremely helpful. Not strictly necessary, as when you are manipulating pixels one at a time, you often want more precise control. But it can come in handy.

Gearing up for Ludum Dare 28

audio, development, games, graphics
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I’m getting myself ready for LD48-28, deciding my general approach to take to this project. I like to do this ahead of time so I can get certain design considerations of the way, impose creative constraints, and focus on a particular goal within the scope of my project, independent of the theme.

Tools

IDE

GameMaker Studio

As usual, I’ll be making use of GameMaker Studio for my development, and probably only targeting Windows .exe build for the initial release, with a possible HTML5 build eventually if feasible.

I don’t have any particular aim this time around to use any specific features of GameMaker, we’ll leave that up to the theme and game concept to drive those decisions this time.

Graphics

Paint.NET, and Pickle

I’ve given the new Pickle 2.0 a try and while it’s no longer free/donationware, I do think that I at least like it for its onion skin feature that enables easier animations. I can see a lot of potential improvement for Pickle, and to that end I’ve written up a number of feature requests and enhancements and sent them along to the developer. I’ll be really excited if any of them get picked up and implemented.

I am going to use my pixel art minimalism technique, and also I intend to use a tightly constrained color palette. Not sure yet how few colors I want, but maybe a 4-color monochrome palette a la classic GameBoy would be fun. In any case, I’ll be making an effort to use only the smallest number of colors necessary, and paying close attention to how color works in the graphics I develop. I am going to see if Paletton can help me make better palette selections, and if I can apply what I learned from this coloring tutorial that I recently came across thanks to Joe Peacock’s recommendation.

Audio

Bfxr

Bfxr, of course, for sound effects. Maybe also some recorded audio samples for stuff that I can’t do well in bfxr.

Famitracker (maybe)

It’s probably still ambitious for me to try to pick up and learn Famitracker in a weekend and use it to good effect. I’ve been putting off learning it, though, and I want to have some kind of bgm in my game. Whether I end up using it or not in my LD project, I’ll be making an effort over the next few months to figure it out and put together some compositions with it.

Pixel Art: Star Wars characters

graphics, Pixel Art
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After the Ohio Game Dev Expo, I felt like doing some pixel art exercises, so I did these.

The style I’m employing here is chunky minimalism, so I’m not striving for a lot of detail. Rather, I’m going for the least amount of detail and work to make a recognizable character. This style enables me to work very quickly (it took me maybe 20 minutes to do the entire set) and emulate a resolution and palette constrained system like the Atari 2600.

I could definitely add more detail, and especially shading, to improve the depth and likeness. It would slow me down considerably, but would be worth it if I was interested in prettier pixel art, not emulating the look of a classic console. Properly speaking, for a preliminary pass, they are acceptable as far as the recognizability criteria goes, but most of them have palette challenges, mainly due to light color on light colors. If I was going to do something serious with these, I’d work on them more to address those issues.

I did these up at 64×64, and blew them up to 512-wide to display on the web site without having to scale them up.

R2-D2

512x512_R2D2

C-3PO

512x512_C3P0

Luke Skywalker

512x512_LukeSkywalker

Obi Wan Kenobi

512x512_ObiWanKenobi

Han Solo

512x512_HanSolo

Chewbacca

512x768_Chewbacca

Princess Leia

512x512_PrincessLeia

There are so many different characters and costumes that I could keep doing Star Wars pixel art pretty much endlessly.

Ohio Game Developer Expo 2013

development, games, life
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This Saturday, 12/7, is the first annual Ohio Game Developer Expo. I will be there and am looking forward to meeting people and participating in the discussions and activities.

http://www.ohiogamedev.com/

http://www.ohiogamedevexpo.com/

How’s that kickstarter doing?

reviews
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I’ve backed a few kickstarters over the last couple years… I guess 15 altogether. Since I’m a busy person, I haven’t exactly followed each project closely. I figured it was a good time to review the projects I’ve backed to see how they’ve done.

In alphabetical order:

Aaron Swartz Documentary – The Internet’s Own Boy

Still in production. I funded at the DVD level, and supposedly should be getting my DVD in March 2014.

Beautiful vim Cheat-Sheet

This one was successfully completed, a bit delayed but not too bad.

Big Blue, an underwater adventure game

This sequel to the videogame Ecco The Dolphin failed to achieve funding, raising less than 10% of goal. I guess the team is still trying to find a way to get a game developed somehow.

Chip Maestro – An NES MIDI Synthesizer Cartridge

This project completed successfully, albeit delayed by over a year. It was frustrating to wait so long, but the finished product was good. I didn’t get the feeling that Jarek wasn’t capable of delivering, just that his estimates for how long it would take to do the things he promised were overly optimistic, and the response was larger than he anticipated, which added complications.

Code Hero: A Game That Teaches You To Make Games

This one doesn’t seem to be as well managed as the others, with the main project website having difficulty remaining up, and delays in releasing updates. The primerlabs.com website is currently down. :(

The Jason Scott Documentary Three Pack

In progress. Jason has been doing a good job at keeping followers updated with the project. Jason did an amazing job on his first kickstarter project, Get Lamp, and the self-funded BBS documentary before that, so I’m confident that this project will be completed successfully, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final results when they’re ready.

Light Table

I consider this one a success. Beta builds have been released, the latest 0.5.0 in August 2013.

Metal Savior

A game developer friend of mine recommended I back this one, but it failed to achieve goal.

Neurodreamer sleep mask

I received my reward (the “trip goggles” that serve as a sort of prototype for the sleep mask) for backing this one a long time ago, and just saw Mitch announce about a week ago that the sleep masks had been produced.

OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console

The fundraising effort for Ouya was a huge success. I received my console a few months ago. It’s

Project Maiden – a Zeldalike in reverse

I only backed this one for the minimum level, which gets my name in the credits. I figure if/when the game gets released I’ll buy it… but I see that he’s actually releasing it DRM-free, free to download, forever — a gift to the world. Really amazing, and I think if the game is as good as it looks that I’ll send him a rather large tip as a thank-you.

Looking at the project pages update log, it looks like Kevin & Co. have been working diligently and productively on this project. I’m really looking forward to playing this when it is released. Considering that the team only raised $12000 for this project, the fact that they’re releasing the finished product as a free, no-DRM download is amazing.

SPORTSFRIENDS featuring Johan Sebastian Joust

I backed this project on the strength of BaraBariBall, which I had the opportunity to play at the Cleveland Game Developers booth at Cleveland Ingenuity Fest in 2012. The game was quite playable and fun even then, and so it’s a bit disappointing to have waited this long and still not seen the game officially released yet. The release was supposed happen in October 2013, but has been pushed back. I don’t really care about the other games, I want my Barabariball!

Spriter

Still in progress, but they have been releasing beta builds and making strong progress for some time.

Star Castle 2600

Completed successfully. I received my game cartridge and downloaded the ROM to play on emulator. It’s a VERY difficult game in emulation. I would have liked a slower-paced version of this game.

Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Anita Sarkeesian has been somewhat slower than expected at churning out her series of videos, to date having produced just four videos of the series so far, out of a total of 12 announced (7 of which were made possible by reaching stretch goals). The videos have been about what I expected in terms of quality and content, which is to say pretty good, overall. They have generated a lot of negative response from certain segments of the gamer community, which deserves more analysis than I’m prepared to give here.

The twelve topics announced on the kickstarter page were as follows (the bolded ones have been produced):

  1. The Damsel in Distress (parts 1, 2, and 3)
  2. The Fighting F#@k Toy
  3. The Sexy Sidekick
  4. The Sexy Villainess
  5. The Background Decoration
  6. Voodoo Priestess/Tribal Sorceress
  7. Women as Reward
  8. Mrs. Male Character
  9. Unattractive Equals Evil
  10. Man with Boobs
  11. Positive Female Characters!
  12. Top 10 Most Common Defenses of Sexism in Games

So, despite the four videos being released, it feels like there’s still a long way to go for this project to be completed. It would be nice to see the release schedule sped up, but not at the cost of quality.

Kickstarter… Good? Yeah, I’d say so. YMMV

Over the last year or so, I’ve read and heard about backers regretting backing one project or another because it was poorly managed and failed to deliver once successfully funded. And, to be fair, there have been some high profile projects that raised a lot of money and ended up failing. It seems that there is a danger with overfunded projects succumbing to scope creep, hype, and unrealistic expectations.

It’s definitely worth keeping in mind that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success. If you look at kickstarter projects like a pre-order system, I think you’re more likely to be disappointed. If on the other hand you look at kickstarter as an opportunity to give an inventor or creative person a chance at making something cool, it’s a different story. While a failed project is still disappointing, understanding that failure is a possibility and that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success, it can put things into proper perspective. Limit your contribution to what you’re comfortable losing, and hope for the best.

At some point I realized that, despite there being many projects out there that seemed interesting and worthy of support, I couldn’t possibly keep up with all of them if I wanted to, so I limited my backing to projects that I really wanted to see make it, and that I felt would deliver rewards that I would enjoy or find useful. I also begged off funding projects if I heard about them after they were already above goal, so as not to contribute to the overfunding leading to unrealistic expectations problem. I figured if the project was successful I could probably go out and buy the product when it became available.

Overall, allowing leniency on time, I’d say that the kickstarters I’ve chosen to back have been mostly successful. With the exception of Code Hero, I haven’t felt like I’ve been burned yet. Delays are disappointing, but understandable, and as long as progress is communicated regularly and honestly, I can live with them, within reason.

Outage(s)

administrivia
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Sorry for the downtime. I’m looking for working on migrating to a new webhost. Hopefully will be on a more stable one in a few days.

PayPal are Jerks

reviews
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It’s no secret that PayPal is a favorite target of hatred among web-centric companies, for many reasons, but basically boiling down to customer-unfriendly policies, poor customer service, and abuse of a more-or-less monopoly. PayPal has competitors these days — Google and Amazon most notably. But because PayPal is owned by eBay, and eBay has a commanding marketshare in the online auction market, they can be dicks with almost complete impunity.

Everyone hates PayPal for something. Everyone. Except maybe the founder, the CEO, and the CEO’s mom. So I am not anything special in hating them and using them only grudgingly, and when I absolutely have to.

Over the life of my use of their service, I’ve been the buyer approximately 90% of the time. It’s relatively simple to send money to another PayPal user using PayPal. Bravo. Congratulations to them for figuring that out.

I understand the headaches are even worse when you’re the seller receiving funds at your PayPal account — or more to the point, extracting funds so you can put them into a real bank account. I’ve done a little selling on eBay, and for the most part the process has gotten better over the years, but it’s still almost too much work to list things when you consider the payoff that you get when you actually sell.

Since I recently started selling again, I basically had to connect a bank account to my PayPal account, so I could transfer funds back to myself and get my money. At this point, using my PayPal account to make payments has turned into an unpleasant experience.

Previously, when I’d used PayPal primarily to make payments, I used my credit card to provide the funding source. It was the only account connected to my PayPal account, and it was actually beneficial since using the PayPal account as a proxy for my credit card keeps the credit card number from being exposed to anyone but PayPal. So as a buyer, I kindof liked PayPal for that.

But now, with a bank account connected, PayPal’s strong preference is that I fund my PayPal purchases with funds from my bank account, because doing so avoids giving business to the credit card companies who they regard as competitors, and having to pay merchant fees to the credit card companies, so they basically force me to use my bank account to be the default payment method. Meanwhile, I vastly prefer to use the credit card, because I can never overdraw my credit card, and also because my credit card gives me reward points for spending money through my credit card.

So PayPal and I am at loggerheads. I want one thing, and they want another. And I’m not really a believer in “The customer is always right.” but I am a believer in “You should make your customers happy.” They… are not making me happy.

So… I can override their default setting, but only per transaction, not by setting my default account to the one I prefer. And it turns out, even when I’m really angry and determined to make sure that I always change the funding source, I still somehow manage to fail to do so very frequently. And even when I succeed, it’s several extra steps, which is an inconvenience and reinforces my tendency to feel angry about the whole thing. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to order the payment source priority to my preferred order.

So I wrote to their help, asking them to help me arrange things thus. I got a response fairly quickly, in about an hour, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn’t a helpful answer. Basically they told me that I couldn’t do it, and that if I didn’t want the bank account to be my default payment source, I would have to remove the account. In other words, they don’t care what I want, it works the way they want it to work, and if I don’t like it I don’t have to do business with them. Or I can, but I can just not connect a bank account with my PayPal account, which makes it a one-way proposition and not very useful if I’m trying to receive money.

Well, that sucks.

So, what to do?

Well it occurs to me that I could solve the problem pretty effectively by holding TWO PayPal accounts.

One account, I’d use ONLY for spending money and receiving payments. That account would have my credit card attached to it, so that when I need to make a payment, the credit card comes into play, I get reward points, my credit card number is protected so that only PayPal sees it, and I’m happy.

The other account, I’d connect to my bank account, and use ONLY for receiving transfers from the first account, and then transferring again to my bank account.

I haven’t read the Terms of Service yet, but I expect somewhere in there I’ll find some clause that prevents me from doing this, such as a rule allowing only one account per person, or something, but I expect that there’s still some way around it, such as setting up one account for a business, and another for me, or another business I create. Either way, it’s a lot of extra work, but if I really want to do it, I can.

So, that being the case, then, PayPal, why don’t you stop being jerks and allow me to fund my payments through your service as I prefer?

Reflections on Mortal Kombat

Best Of, games, life, reviews
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Mortal Kombat came out in 1992, the year before I graduated from high school. It’s 2013, which means that MK is old enough to drink. Last weekend, I met it at a bar and caught up with it for old time’s sake.

I first saw Mortal Kombat at the local bowling alley in my hometown. The graphics looked impressive, the photograph digitally sampled sprites and rotoscoped animation giving the game a lifelike feel that no other game had. Yet, somehow I felt turned off. I wasn’t really interested in playing it at first. It looked like it was trying to be too hardcore, and the blood and violence felt more like gimmicks to me. Plus, it cost $0.50 to play.

It wasn’t until I went away to college that I first played it. The student center building at my college had a bowling alley in the basement, and there were a few arcade games there, one of which was a Mortal Kombat. There weren’t that many options, and it seemed to get a lot of play from the other guys who hung out there, so I gave it a try. It wasn’t long before I grew very well acquainted with that machine, and I probably dropped over $100 into it by the time I graduated. It was the first videogame that I ever played that I felt was worth two quarters to play.

Mortal Kombat was mega popular in its day, and notorious for its blood and fatality moves. Frequently cited by social critics who tried to call for censorship of games, it was a game parental groups hated, and it rode the publicity to the top. But all that controversy masked that the gameplay was solid, and the game was a lot of fun to play, offering tight balance, considerable depth, and a learning curve that took weeks if not months to master.

I got pretty good at it, but always felt like a second-rate player compared to some of the other guys I played against. I could hold my own against anyone using Scropion, but I secretly felt ashamed, like he was an entry-level character, certainly the first one I tried with any success, with easy to learn moves that did a lot of damage and were easy to land a high percentage of the time, and I felt like my victories were cheaper when I used him, though I never would have admitted it.

I got to like the cheesy Bruce Lee ripoff character, Liu Kang, and, to an extent, Raiden, who seemed to have been ripped off from the cheesier (though great) Big Trouble in Little China —although, due to an unfortunate leg-sweep vulnerability, bug he was a broken character.

But there were two players at my local arcade who were definitely better than me all around — who knew the moves of all the characters, not just three of them. I watched them play, and tried to learn the moves and the timing, and with a lot of practice I developed skill, which was what caused me to respect the game. Mostly I tried to play the single player tournament mode, where I had a decent chance of lasting a few rounds, but when they were around, I’d inevitably have to face their challenge. I got my ass handed to me a lot, but eventually I got good enough with Scorpion that I was pretty evenly matched against anyone.

Still, I never managed to beat the single-player tournament. I got to where I could get up to Goro, occasionally on one credit. But beating Goro was a seriously difficult feat, which I might have managed a handful of times. And then Shang Tsung, seemingly a weaker boss than the underboss, was somehow deceptively able to beat you before you knew what was happening. I had a rule about playing, I would never let myself spend more than $10 at a time, so if I couldn’t do it for that much, I had to walk away.

Last weekend, I was at 16-Bit Bar in Columbus, where they have a lot of great classic arcade games on free play, and I got to give Mortal Kombat another run. It’s been a good 15-16 years since I put my last quarter into it, and at first I couldn’t remember Scorpion’s fatality move. Embarrassingly, I lost a round in the second fight. I continued a lot. But it was on free play mode, and it started coming back to me.

Somehow, this time I managed to beat the single-player tournament. I’m not sure how I managed to do it. Somehow, it didn’t feel as difficult as I remembered — despite having noticeably diminished skills, I just kept trying until I got to the next level. Oddly the game felt slower than I remembered it — probably, I think, because of how later fighting games have gotten progressively faster over the years. Also, I started to notice what worked and what didn’t, and figured out timing and spacing that would enable me to land the powerful attacks that normally get blocked. Instead of going in headstrong and aggressive like my old playing style, I took a more methodical approach and picked apart the AI’s defense. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt to me like I was able to see the weak points in the AI, and exploit them with predictable certainty.

I actually wondered whether the old game I used to play was set to a higher difficulty level — it’s certainly plausible, although I hope not. The endurance matches took several rematches, and it took a bunch of rematches before I beat Goro. I worked my way up the ladder, and knocked Shang Tsung off the top. I felt elated and accomplished for hours afterward. Taking 20 years to beat a game that has taken your measure is pretty indescribable.

And yeah, when I did it, I screamed “Mortal Kombaaat!!” like in the movie soundtrack, and felt every eye in the bar directed at me for a few seconds before turning back to whatever it was they were doing. Let me tell you, it enhances the experience, even more than you’d think it would.

 

 

GameMaker Studio 1.2.1146 update greatly expands tutorials

development, games, Uncategorized
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From the release notes:

  • Tutorials and Demos are now downloaded from our servers, reduces installer size – allows us to add many more tutorials and demos
    • Uses an RSS feed to get the information, allows other feeds to be added
    • Users can create their own RSS feed for their own Tutorials and Demos
    • 16 New Tutorials added that cover a variety of subjects from getting started, through touch controls to ads and facebook integration.

This is a very cool feature indeed! The ability to add third party RSS feeds to the Tutorials and Demos promises to make the GameMaker developer community even tighter, by accelerating the sharing of knowledge and techniques. While there is a great deal of information on how to do things in GameMaker at the GMC Forums, on various websites, and on YouTube, now users will be able put everything into a nicely aggregated channel accessible directly through the GameMaker: Studio IDE.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community of developers, which likely numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, comes up with.