Tag: options

GameMaker Studio 2 impressions: Preferences

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.

GMS2 Preferences

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Make a Configuration System in Game Maker, part 1

One thing that’s still currently harder than it should be in Game Maker is creating an interface to allow the user to configure the game preferences. It’s a real pain to have to implement a configuration system in each game you make from scratch — it takes a lot of time away from the development of the actual game.

Game Maker is supposed to make game development faster and easier. It really should have features to allow making the parts of the game program that are not the game itself faster and easier as well. One may consider this a weakness in Game Maker, if one takes Game Maker to be intended primarily for making game development quicker and easier. Which, it is.

But, Game Maker also is intended to be an educational platform, so I see this as both an inconvenience and an educational opportunity. How often do you get to devise your own UI widget and implement them out of primitives rather than use some library?

Since Game Maker does not provide this out of the box, and due to the difficulty of implementing such a system even once with good quality, it’s very worthwhile to try to build a generic system for game configuration options, something flexible enough to allow it to be used in many game projects, rather than have to build anew for each new game you develop. The up front investment in development for the system will be regained in the re-use of the system in many projects.

This article is the first in a series which describes in detail how to design and implement such a system in Game Maker: Studio. In the process, I’ll be generating a number of Extensions which you may use in your own projects.

Unfortunately, these articles will necessarily be Windows-centric, as I do not have the means to test what I’m building on anything but Windows and HTML5. I’ll be making the source available, though, so if you want to try these out in Android, OS X or iOS, or (if needed) modify/extend them to work on these platforms, you’re very much encouraged to do so, as long as you share the source and keep it open.

I would welcome other Game Maker Studio users who are building for OS X, iOS, and Android who want to collaborate on this project to contact me.

Going wild with UI design

Many games (especially professional games) go crazy with interface design. The designer is encouraged to (pardon the clichés) think outside the box and reinvent the wheel. More than simply coming up with new skins for buttons, sliders, pulldowns, and listboxes, etc., they do something really special to integrate the game, or its theme, with the configuration screen controls.

For a superb example of such an implementation, check out the configuration screen for Derek Yu’s Spelunky.

Spelunky's ingenious in-game configuration screen

By the way, did you know that Spelunky was originally created in Game Maker? Later on, its developer re-did it for XBox Live, and released the source for his Game Maker project, so be sure to go check that out. Play the game, and see how the configuration screen is cleverly set up as a special room in the “normal” play world, where your explorer can trip switches that control the configuration of the game. Then look at the source to understand how this was implemented.

Keep in mind that while Spelunky’s solution to the config screen is original and innovative, it’s not perfect — for example, it’s not terribly fast to use. There are always tradeoffs with any design — do what makes the most sense for your game and always with the user foremost in your thoughts.

If you want to, you can create an interface like this, but it’ll be more of a custom job. This series is geared toward building a foundation out of generic, reusable code. But the good news is, much of what we cover in here will end up being useful, because really the only difference between a custom configuration screen and a generic one is the interface, and we’re going to keep the other parts of the system abstract enough that they should be re-usable even in a custom system.

So, keep reading! Besides, it’s better to learn these basic approaches before trying to tackle something more innovative and complicated.

A word of caution, though: many times these highly customized interfaces look cool, but are terrible in how they function. They aren’t intuitive or understandable, or the controls are actually difficult to manipulate. Always strive to make your UI user-friendly.

There are entire bookshelves worth of books you could read to learn about good User Interface design principles. I don’t have space here to say it all, but in summary:

  1. Avoid forcing the user to have to think about how to do what they want to do. The UI is not a puzzle. Its purpose and function both should be immediately obvious.
  2. The UI should convey information clearly to the user. This information should be: the purpose of the control; the current configuration state.
  3. Controls should be easy to use and easy to understand how to use.
  4. There should be as few controls as are necessary. It’s a myth that people want lots and lots choices. They think they do, but what they really want are choices that are relevant to them, and the options that they want. A good designer can make most of these choices for the user without having to ask them their preference, but also knows which choices need to be offered to the user.  Look for ways to reduce the amount of controls you give to the user. Show only controls that are relevant in the current context. Combine controls when they represent mutually exclusive options.
  5. Provide sensible defaults. The default option should be the most sensible choice for the most people. Often, this is one standard option, but not always. Sometimes there are two or three good candidates for what may be a sensible default, and it is not obvious which one the default should be. Knowing which is the best configuration for a default setting may depend on environment and context. So, if your program can sense these things somehow, that can aid in selecting the most appropriate default.

There are always exceptions to the above rules. Like, I’m sure that for a certain puzzle game, a really innovative configuration screen that is itself a puzzle, and in its way serves to introduce the player to the game’s mechanics and gameplay would be awesome. But if you’re going to pull something like that off, you need to be very careful that your design works.


A Game Maker Weakness: No UI widget libraries

Game Maker has nearly nothing in the way of traditional interface control widgets. This alone makes creating a Settings screen very difficult for a novice Game Maker user. However, figuring out how to do this is an excellent opportunity for an aspiring Game Maker user, provided of course you can figure it out. Learning this will give you a lot of useful skills and insights about how to design both software and user interfaces.

In the long run, I believe it will be better for everyone if YoYoGames extends Game Maker to provide better built-in tools to allow developers to create polished, professional configuration screens without having to sink huge amounts of time into it. Preferably, some widget objects based on the native OS, but skinnable to allow the game to have its own look and theme would be the best way to go.

Until then, we have to make do, so we might as well come up with some useful approaches and share the knowledge about them. Fortunately, creating our own widgets out of Objects, a few sprites, and a little GML isn’t that difficult.

In the next article, we’ll talk about the Design of our Configuration System, and brainstorm the features we want it to have. I’m not just being editorially cute by using the “royal we” either — if there’s something you’d like to see in what I’m building, drop a comment.

Part 2