Tag: YoYoGames

GameMaker Marketplace new checkout system now allows direct downloads!

business, development, games
Comments

Yesterday, 9/7, I noticed a big spike in downloads of my GameMaker Marketplace assets. I also happened to notice when looking around on the Marketplace that they’ve changed the checkout so that you can download the .gmex files directly through your web browser, bypassing the My Library interface in the IDE.

As I’ve remarked several times in the past year, My Library is crippled by terrible performance when the user’s purchase manifest exceeds some number that is far too low. Allowing purchases to be downloaded directly through the browser makes a lot of sense, and is probably the simplest solution to the performance issues, which still plague GM:S as of 1.4.1760.

It remains to be seen whether this spike in downloads will be sustained as the new normal, or represents pent-up demand for users who were reluctant to buy due to the poor performance of My Library. Despite the seeming smallness of this change, I’m really excited that YoYoGames have made it, as it alleviates a significant pain point that I’ve been complaining about for well over a year, and means that I’ll likely be making more use of extensions in my projects.

Graph showing sales spike on 9/7/16. Could this be due to the change in delivery method?

On 9/7, 18 downloads. The other spike earlier in August was due to my Ludum Dare 36 sale, when I put my paid assets on sale for $FREE

Update: 9/8 saw another 18 download day.

YoYoGames discontinues sales of GameMaker for Mac

games
Comments

YoYoGames announced yesterday that they have discontinued sales of GameMaker for Mac (the GM7-based IDE for Mac OS X, not the build target module for GameMaker: Studio to allow building games for Mac OS X).

I don’t expect that this move surprises or disappoints many. This version was long out of date and did not include features from the 8.x and Studio 1.x sequences of the product, and had languished while YYG focused its resources on the success of GameMaker: Studio.

YoYoGames stressed that users who already own GameMaker for Mac are still supported and can install and use the product that they already own. YoYo say that they are still committed to supporting development on the OS X platform with a future release of GameMaker: Studio, but the expected release date for this is as yet unannounced.

One would hope that with the ending of sales for the old version, the replacement product might be coming soon.

It’s good to see YoYo communicating its intent with the product like this. The announcement was clear, addressed possible misconceptions, and came through an official outlet.

GameMaker EULA restricts developer creativity

development, games
Comments

[Editor’s Note: After a busy year or so of low posting frequency, during which I started but never completed many articles, I’ve been going through my old drafts, working to complete old articles that still hold relevance. So this is an old topic, though not out of date, which I started writing in May of 2015, and I don’t mean to stir up new debate over it, but it’s worth being aware of.]

YoYoGames has restrictions in the EULA for GameMaker which states in essence that users agree to allow YoYo the authority to determine whether a game produced by the user is in line with their moral standards, and the right to terminate your license if they wish should you produce something they deem objectionable, without explicitly spelling out what counts as objectionable.

An April 2015 discussion on the old GameMaker Community forums raised this issue, but is now hidden due to the closure of the Suggestion Box subforum, but still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine.

To summarize the discussion, YYG don’t seem to be actively policing their policy, nor are they specific in explaining their standards for acceptable content in games. They seem to be treating the EULA clause as something they can invoke if they so choose, but not actively evaluating published games to ensure they don’t violate it. And currently they seem to be pretty lenient about what they deem acceptable — for example, they deem Hotline Miami to be clear of violating their standards. Accordingly, I don’t read YYG as bad actors here.

But this does give rise to what one would have to do in order to cross the line with respect to YoYo’s standards, and why have them in the first place. It seems the answer to the latter question is to allow YYG the contractual authority to nix a license more or less arbitrarily, in order to make clear that they do not have any relationship with a developer who they deem too offensive. Which is to say that if a game produced with GameMaker were developed and it generated negative publicity for YoYo, that’s probably ultimately what their standards boil down to.

YoYoGames motivation seems to be that they (understandably) do not wish to be associated in any way with a game that someone else develops, if that game is “deeply offensive” (whatever that means — it varies from person to person what offends them). Considering that many games these days address topics which many might find “controversial”, and thus may be offended by, it gives a developer pause. And even those games that are not exactly controversial routinely depict subject matter which upon a moment’s reflection make us wonder why they’re not considered offensive. A huge proportion of videogames depict violence in a casual, matter of fact, even joyous manner. But most games would be instantly get a Mature Audiences rating if they depicted nudity, even if the context isn’t sexual.

It’s tough to say what the guidelines are for producing a game that is free of these concerns, and YoYo weren’t very interested in stating their guidelines explicitly. “Use common sense” seems to be their question-begging non-answer. Common sense falls down in controversial cases precisely because they are controversial. There’s undoubtedly a whole classification of things that are offensive to marms and nuns but that teenage boys think is fine, but the only answer that matters in this case is, “is what’s considered offensive by YYG?” Debating “what is too offensive?” is an endless quagmire but “What does YYG consider too offensive?” is something that can have a start and an end to it, and is probably a succinct bulleted list, which people may be free to disagree with or not as they choose, but still helpless to change.

I surmise that there are things that are commonly topics addressed by the medium of videogames, such as violence and war and crime that are not included in the “truly offensive” category, but that a game could step over the line by being too explicit in its depictions of these things, or by appearing to advocate for doing these things in real life, or by appealing to the player’s “prurient interests” in such depictions. The “common sense” approach seems to be a way for YoYo to say, “We don’t want to say because it’d probably just give horrible people a to-do list, but if everyone could avoid things such as explicit torture, rape, and so on, that’d be great.”

Still, the fact that someone else can tell me what I can or can’t put into a game that I’ve designed, is inherently offensive to me. I think it unlikely that I’d produce something that would cause YoYo to take notice and strip me of my license, but the fact that they can, and that they think that it’s right for them to have such power, is offensive to me. To me, there is a boundary where their responsibility ends and my responsibility takes over, and I should be responsible for my creations; once the tool they’ve produced is in my hands I don’t need their sense of responsibility for their creations to encroach upon my creativity.

It’s tough to see why YoYoGames would be associated with a game that was developed by someone else, even if they happened to use GameMaker. One reason might be their logo is used as the default splash screen and application icon when a game is built with GameMaker. These are removable by the developer, but are often left as-is by amateur developers. But there, a simpler remedy would be to compel game developers to remove YYG logos from games that they do not wish to be associated with at their request. Or, if YYG wanted to, they could ban games that they deem unfit from being sold or otherwise distributed through their online store, while not taking away the developer’s liberty to release the game through other means, or to continue using GameMaker to develop other games.

YoYo declined to change the policy, taking a “take it or leave it” attitude, and then closed the forum topic to quash further discussion. It seems to be the YoYo forums general policy to kill topics when moderators deem that further discussion is “pointless” since they are firm about not changing their minds. Obviously that’s not the case, as there may be much to discuss whether or not YoYo change their minds, and getting YoYo to change their minds is not always the aim of discussing some topic on the forums. Really, it’s about stopping discussions that may lead to users expressing views deemed critical or negative to YoYoGames, which they (wrongly, in my opinion) feel is harmful or threatens their brand.

Which, since it’s their forum, that’s their prerogative, but I can’t say that I like or agree with the practice. And now that they’ve restricted access to that particular forum, the topic is no longer visible. And this is one of the reasons why I have my own website where I can exercise my right to free speech without censorship.

GameMaker: Marketplace vs. itch.io: comparison

business, development, games, reviews
Comments

After two years of selling assets on the GameMaker: Marketplace, still in public beta after all this time, I am less than impressed with the experience.

Development of the marketplace website, as well as the integrated features in the GameMaker: Studio IDE, have not been forthcoming. Initially the news of the Marketplace excited me, and it seemed that the future of GameMaker was bright and full of promise. But two years later and almost nothing has changed with the way the Marketplace works — and it works poorly, I’m afraid.

Plagued by a terrible bug which causes the IDE’s My Library interface to become unbearably slow to load when a large number of assets are purchased from the marketplace, sales have ground to a halt. Worse, it seems that no one is interested in spending any money in the Marketplace.

In over two years of selling assets at the Marketplace, I have grossed just slightly over $100 in sales, lifetime, of which YYG take a 30% cut, leaving me well under the $100 minimum in order for them to release any proceeds to my account. I’m currently seeing “sales” of my free assets at a rate of 2-5/day, and maybe once a month or so I’ll see a sale of one of my paid assets.

I’m not advertising aggressively, and there are certainly marketplace sellers who are doing better than I am, with more impresive wares than I’ve produced, but I don’t think that quality doesn’t seem to be the problem; I have a number of free assets, and they’ve done comparatively well, with several hundred downloads to date each. The paid assets, on the other hand, have sold in the single or low double digits.

GameMaker has had a long history of being an inexpensive software intended for use primarily by students, and these users as well as hobbyists have howled over the price increases to the main product; even when GM8.x went from $25 to $40, there was much complaining. The lesson seems to be, “Don’t expect to ever make any money from such tightwads.”

Mind you, I don’t think I’m entitled to sales, but it is certainly frustrating to put effort into something for such meager reward, and it’s demoralizing to see how little effort YYG have put into improving the Markteplace experience since they went public with it.

Although YoYo Games have tried to transition into a more professional tool by adding numerous features over the past 6 years, it seems that lately development has stagnated. No one really knows when the long-awaited, so-called “GM:Next” (aka 2.0, currently in non-public beta) will be out. No one’s really talking about what’s going on behind the scenes, and with their roadmap no longer available, it’s been extremely frustrating to wait for months and months with only the occasional minor bugfix patches for 1.4 being released.

I finally decided to check out alternative marketplaces, and have been very favorably impressed with itch.io. Itch.io is easy to sign up for and use, and much more flexible than the YoYo Marketplace. The only downside being that you can’t integrate itch.io assets with My Library (although, with it’s current buggy and awful performance, it’s not much of a loss) but at least My Library notifies you when updates are available for assets you own.

Itch.io allows me to set prices to whatever I want, or whatever the buyer wants, create bundles of assets for sales, and schedule these sales to start and end at defined times. None of these features are to be found in the YoYo Marketplace. Itch.io seems to be more for finished games, but there are also assets for game developers, and other types of things for sale, such as digital books and music. Best of all, itch.io only takes 10% of your gross sales (and they allow you to change that figure if you wish). The diversity of the itch.io store means of course that only a fraction of shoppers there will have any interest in GameMaker extensions, which may prove to be a downside. As well, their store is populated by thousands of great games and other high quality goods, many of them offered for free, so while the barrier to entry is technically low, the expectations of the customers of this marketplace may be high.

Itch.io’s analytics also provide me with better information than YYG. With YoYoGames, they consider you, the publisher, to be a “third party” to sales through their store, and therefore they do not share your customer’s personally identifiable information with you, so you can’t contact your customers. Itch provides the email address, so you can engage your customers, for example notifying them when an update is released, or when a new product is available.

In all, they’re basically eating YoYoGames’ lunch in terms of e-commerce user experience, both as a publisher/seller and as a customer. YYG really need to get it together and catch up with the competition, and soon.

YoYoGames: “No roadmap for GM:S. Our Hands Are Tied!”

business, development, games
Comments

For a long time, YoYoGames used to publish a roadmap, showing their plan for the future of GameMaker: Studio. Interested parties could look and see what new features were in the works.

Since PlayTech took them over, they’ve taken this information offline.

In a recent Forum conversation, YoYoGames employees Shaun Spalding and Mike Dailly explained that while they wish they could communicate the future of the product, their hands are tied, and when they can talk about things like upcoming release dates and new features, they will.

This is very disappointing to serious GameMaker Studio users. A roadmap is an important document for developers. Software development is all about maintainability. In order to write software that is maintainable, it’s important to know how the tools you are using will be changing over time. Knowing the future plans of the tools can help developers avoid wasting time using features that will be deprecated and removed in the future, or avoid wasting time writing their own implementation of a feature that is planned in an upcoming version. A roadmap also prevents the repeated asking of the same questions, “when is [X] coming out?” or “I suggest you implement [already planned feature].” A roadmap is part of the conversation that happens between a software developer and the users, and not having one harms both the company and its customers.

Most software engineering projects intended to be consumed by other developers have a roadmap. Other game engine developers such as Unity3D and Godot Engine have public roadmaps.

It is my hope that PlayTech will change their policies surrounding information of their products, and allow their employees to engage in open conversation about their products. In the meantime, concerned GameMaker users should speak out and make their voices heard.

Follow Up to GameMaker: Exodus

development, games
1 Comment

My earlier post airing my dissatisfaction with GameMaker since YoYoGames was acquired by PlayTech has been unexpectedly popular. Shortly after the post went live, prominent indie game developer and owner of the ersatz gamemakerblog website, TrueValhalla, retweeted the article, bringing a great deal of traffic to this site, and many other retweets, likes, and comments.

This evening, the article received some attention from Shaun Spalding, of YoYoGames, and I had a brief exchange with him on Twitter, although due to the time zone difference it was late for him and we weren’t able to go in depth. Shaun’s a recent hire at the company, and has been in charge of the community forums since joining. Previously, his YouTube channel has provided a great series of GML tutorials. He’s an all around good guy, and I have nothing against him personally. In fact, I’d like to be clear, I have nothing against any of the other prominent YYG personalities such as Mike Dailly or Russell Kay, or GMC forums administrator Mark “Nocturne” Alexander, or former YYG CEO Sandy Duncan. All of them have been friendly and accessible, and have always responded to questions, suggestions, and even the occasional complaint professionally. It’s great to have such accessible and visible people standing behind the product. I’m not looking to make enemies or get into a fight with anyone. I’m interested in frank dialog.

TrueValhalla characterized my post as detailing the “decline of GameMaker” since the PlayTech acquisition. I didn’t use those words myself, but it seems like a reasonable way to characterize my position, given the numerous disappointments and failings I had outlined in my post. I would say that my confidence in YoYo and in the future of GameMaker is at a low point. In my opinion, GameMaker hasn’t declined, exactly — it’s improved over what it was a year ago — but the rate of improvements has slowed noticeably over the last year. With the failed migration of the GMC Forums n the last couple months, I’m very concerned.

Absent insider knowledge of what’s going on, I am left to speculate that it’s due to the way PlayTech have managed them. A large part of the problem has been YYG’s failure at maintaining community relations to let concerned users know what’s going on with the product.

The minute the new GMC Forums release was late, or better still, the moment they knew it would be late, YYG should have communicated to the community to let them know what was going on, why, and what to expect, and when.

I’m not slamming YYG by saying this; I’m trying to help them by calling attention to problems, so that they can make improvements. My dissatisfaction with GameMaker doesn’t mean that I want to see GameMaker fail, or even that I don’t like GameMaker. Quite the contrary, I love it and want to see it thriving. But, the fact is, I don’t see GameMaker thriving right now, and I see numerous reasons for concern as I outlined in my previous post. There should be no controversy: a company must listen to its customers and be responsive to their needs.

But, given their track record over the last year since the PlayTech acquisition, I don’t have much hope for improvement. And so I’m looking at alternatives, and I’m currently very interested in the Godot engine, which seems to be delivering improvements with great velocity and doing all the right things to attract my attention as a developer. It’s good to have alternatives, and anyone who’s passionate about game development is constantly looking for better tools anyway. However good GameMaker is, they have to improve continuously in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. Slowing down or stagnating is death in this business climate. I really don’t want to see that happen.

Let’s look at Shaun’s responses in detail.

First, he responded by tweeting that he disagreed with “basically everything” in my post, but couldn’t articulate why in 140 char. So, ok. That’s fair. This blog post is an invitation for Shaun or anyone else at YoYo or PlayTech to respond in depth to my points.

Next, he tweeted a link to reddit, where on May 26 he responded to someone asking about why the new GMC Forums were so late. The explanation offered there is that PlayTech does gambling software, and so has much more stringent regulatory requirements for security, and because of these requirements, their IT security hasn’t cleared the new forum for release yet due to unforseen issues with the security of the new forums.

This is really sub-adequate, for at least four major reasons:

  1. This explanation happened on May 26 — the GMC forums went offline on April 8, with a promise to return in about two weeks, which would have been April 22. So this explanation is over a month late.
  2. The explanation is buried on a subreddit, not on the front page of yoyogames.com, or even on the front page of gmc.yoyogames.com, where it belongs.
  3. Someone had to ask what was going on. Didn’t it occur to anyone at YYG that the community would want to know what was going on with its forum, and that they should proactively communicate what’s been going on? YYG seem to have completely disregarded the importance of the community of active users who support their business.
  4. The explanation reveals that they weren’t prepared to perform the transition, and did not plan adequately. Good IT practice says that:
    • There should have been a rollback plan in case the deployment couldn’t happen as planned.
    • The gap between the old forum going readonly to the new forum going live should have been minimal. Even the planned two weeks of no GMC forum was far from optimal. There really isn’t any good reason why the old forums should have gone readonly until after the new forum was up and running.
    • You should understand your security posture and ensure requirements are met before you start deploying a new system. During deployment is not the time to start testing the security of your new system!

It sounds like YYG went about the transition thinking that it wouldn’t be a big deal to make changes live on the production server, and midway through PlayTech caught wind of what was going on, at which point their IT Security department said, “Hold up, just what are you doing? Oh, hell no.” And since then, they’ve been stuck trying to comply with whatever PlayTech IT Security’s requirements are. And this has been going on for two months now, with no announcement or explanation in the most obvious place to make announcements, and no end in sight, and no rollback. GMC forum users are without a forum that they can post discussion on.

There’s no way you can convince me that “it’s all for the best” or “this was the way it had to be” or “this was the best we could do under the circumstances.” It’s a disaster born of mismanagement, poor planning, and poor communication. It harms the community of customers, and it harms YoYo’s reputation.

I highly, highly doubt that since the PlayTech acquisition that the YoYoGames web servers were integrated into PlayTech’s infrastructure in such a way that a security compromise in the GMC would have any impact to PlayTech’s compliance with any gambling regulatory concerns.

Absolutely, YYG should be implementing a secure web forum to replace the old GMC. But they should have had an acceptably secure solution ready before they went to deploy it.

You can bet if the GMC forums were directly generating revenue for YYG, this would never have been allowed to happen. But YYG seem oblivious to the fact that the community of GameMaker users is the lifeblood of their company, and that trust in YYG is essential. Users do not become customers without faith in the vendor.

Next, in response to my question of why YYG haven’t fixed the performance issues in My Library for over a year, Shaun’s response was that they have a small team and struggle with prioritizing fixing existing stuff and delivering new stuff.

I don’t doubt that. However, nothing about that admission inspires confidence. It generates a little sympathy, perhaps, but I can’t build video games with sympathy.

Here’s what’s wrong with Shaun’s response:

  1. Having been acquired by a larger company, YYG should have resources to hire additional staff to get to these tasks.
  2. YYG project managers need to assess the capability of their team and release only what they can maintain.
  3. The Marketplace is a major new feature. Releasing a beta, and then not continuing to develop it is not the right way to do a beta. Beta releases should be actively developed, and given priority. The purpose of doing a beta release is to allow the users an opportunity to use the solution, and provide feedback that can be used to improve it prior to the official release. Failing to act on feedback about the beta defeats the entire purpose of releasing it. Labeling something “beta” is not an excuse for poor quality.
  4. The workaround solution offered by YYG limits the number of assets a user can effectively own. Any defect that limits or discourages users from purchasing assets in the Marketplace should be considered a critical bug and given top priority. The whole purpose of the Marketplace is to generate sales of the assets sold there.  Anything that discourages or limits the number of assets a user of the Marketplace can own is a top priority problem. Imagine if Amazon had a bug whereby every time you buy something from them, it makes the amazon user experience slow down, eventually preventing people from using anything they bought from them. What priority do you think Amazon would give to fixing that problem? Do you think the fix would be to advise customers to not buy so many things that it hurts performance, where “so many” is a number that can be represented in 7 bits?
  5. The performance problem of My Library is embarrassing. YYG should prioritize fixing it out of pride. Or shame. Either way. There’s no way a computer built after 1977 should have a problem managing a list of 100 items! Even an Apple ][ should be able to generate the list in under a second. Whatever is wrong with the code in My Library that causes this performance degradation, it is very, very wrong. No matter how bad Delphi is, surely it was always capable of managing a list of 100 items in a few milliseconds. It shouldn’t take a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 8 GB of RAM 11 minutes to populate the list! It shouldn’t take another 11 minutes each and every time the list needs to be refreshed!
  6. If your team is hard pressed to balance fixing current issues vs. building future solutions, your team needs to stop working on building future solutions immediately, and start fixing problems until you’re free enough of technical debt that you can advance while maintaining what you’ve released. Ideally, fixing problems can be accomplished by releasing the future solution. Get off the Delphi codebase and work on releasing a clean, maintainable rewrite. But don’t introduce more new features that you can’t support until you’ve gotten a handle on supporting what you’ve already released. If Delphi makes development difficult, stop using it.

My conversation with Shaun ended before we could get very deep into these points, so I don’t mean to bury him before he’s had a chance to address things, and I hope to hear more from him or others at YYG about how they intend to address these problems. But the response that I’ve seen so far haven’t been what I’d hope to hear, and do not inspire confidence.

I sincerely hope that YYG can turn things around and give its customers the GameMaker they deserve. But how they can accomplish this, given what they’ve shown lately, I don’t know. Getting the new GMC Forums up and running as soon as possible has got to be a top priority for them. Addressing the performance problems with My Library for “large” manifests has got to be a top priority for them. Releasing GM:S 1.5 or GM:Next, and getting off of the Delphi codebase that has given them so much technical debt has got to be a top priority for them. YYG need to understand what’s important to their users, and act to deliver the most important things. They used to do pretty good at this, prior to being bought by PlayTech. They need to get back to that, right away.

GameMaker: Exodus

business, development, games, programming, reviews
Comments

I’ve been doing game dev programming in GameMaker since 2010, and lately I’ve been feeling rather frustrated by the pace with which they’ve been improving the tool. Since being bought by PlayTech in February 2015, YoYoGames seem to have hit a brick wall.

Languishing, poor quality betas of (potentially) exciting new features

The GameMaker Marketplace debuted almost two years ago. Today, it is still in Beta. Much worse than that, there has not been any substantial development in the Marketplace website, or the integration with the GM:S IDE, in about the last year-plus.

There’s been a long-standing bug with their marketplace integration, when you have purchased a “large” number of assets from the Marketplace, the interface for managing them bogs down and becomes nearly unusable. I reported this defect, a year ago, and YoYo have acknowledged the problem, but done nothing to address it in a meaningful way, other than to warn users not to buy too many marketplace assets. That’s right: YoYoGames built a store for its users to sell assets they’ve made to each other, and then told them not to buy too many assets.

The interface for My Library is terrible — very basic, and lacking in features to allow you to organize the assets you’ve purchased. The performance problem especially is infuriating, and makes the My Library feature basically useless. I offered some ideas for improving the My Library interface on the GMC Suggestions sub-forum, which is now unavailable — apparently YYG have done more in “archiving” the old forums than simply setting them to readonly. [Internet Archive snapshot of the forum thread.]

YoYo acknowledged the problem, but rather than fixing the performance problem, they recommend a workaround of disabling assets from your purchase manifest, until the number of purchased assets is at a number that GM:S can manage without choking. That is, YoYo recommend that you disable assets that you’ve purchased through the Marketplace store, until you’ve disabled however many assets you may need to get below a number that their terrible interface can manage. We’re talking modern computers with billions of bytes of memory and multi-core gigahertz processors, choking on a list of perhaps 75-125 assets. It’s an embarrassment, and the worst part of it is that it discourages users from purchasing more assets from the marketplace, or using them.

None of this has stopped YYG from taking 30% of sellers’ revenue from Marketplace sales. In many cases, sellers are building assets which provide features and functionality that YYG should have developed themselves. For example, GameMaker 8.x used to have something called Room Transitions, which gave a neat visual transition when switching between one room and other. These were implemented in a way that took advantage of native Windows system calls, and couldn’t be supported on other build targets easily, so rather than re-implementing them in a cross-platform way so that all build platforms could make use of them, the room transition functions were deprecated and removed from GM:S.

Developers were told to write their own room transition code, and not expect the built-in transitions to return in any future updates. A few enterprising GM:S users have done so, and now sell room transitions asset packs through the Marketplace. The result of this is that a feature once included in GM:S now a separate add-on that you have to pay for. Except YYG don’t have to pay the developer anything for the work, and instead take a 30% cut of the developer’s income. This makes the Marketplace a very cheap way to outsource development that should be happening in the core product, not as aftermarket add-ons.

Of course there’s also a lot of assets for sale in the Marketplace that are free, and/or do things that are useful but should not be core engine features. The Marketplace was a great idea, and has a lot of promise, but has languished since the PlayTech acquisition.

Hamstrung by legacy cruft

YYG have been stuck with an old, crufty codebase written in Delphi C for the main IDE, and haven’t gotten off of it in 4 years. They always blame the old codebase for why they can’t deliver new features to the IDE, and promise to consider ideas for new features in “GM: Next”. They had made excellent progress in the first 2-3 years, focusing first on improving the performance of games built with GameMaker by introducing the YoYo compiler and runtime, porting those to modern C++, and incorporating exciting new features like Box2D Physics and Shaders into the old IDE. But since then, we haven’t seen much. GM:S 1.4 was released in late 2014. The PlayTech acquisition was announced a few months later in early 2015. Before the acquisition, we had a major update about once a year: Since the acquisition, YoYo have only released minor bugfix updates to 1.4. The biggest missing deliverable by far is the replacement of the old IDE with something modern and coded in a more maintainable way. The old Delphi codebase has left them hobbled, unable to deliver new features, and having to work harder than they should have to to add simple enhancements and fix bugs in the old.

In the meantime, a third-party IDE for GameMaker has been offered by at least two different groups. Parakeet and Enigma are the effort of frustrated GameMaker users who got sick of waiting for an official rewrite of the GM:S IDE, and took matters into their own hands and built their own. While it’s good to have alternatives, these are precariously positioned as GameMaker is closed source and any third party efforts such as these are prone to breaking if YYG change the way GameMaker works.

Promises undelivered and unfulfilled

“GM: Next” feels more and more like vaporware as time goes on. There’s no timetable for its release any longer; YYG have actually withdrawn their old roadmap that charted out their plans for the future so you could know what features might be coming and when.

The last straw has been this failure of the migration from the old GameMaker Community Forum software to a replacement running something with better security and features. They put the old forums in readonly mode in early April and promised the new forum in a couple weeks, which was itself a pretty headdesk move on their part, since there’s no reason why there should have been any downtime — archive the old forum only once the new forum is up and running, ready to launch.

But, almost 2 months later, they still have yet to deliver the promised replacement forum. Inexcusably, they’ve been all but silent on the matter. No apology for taking so long, no explanation of why it’s been taking way longer than expected, no revised ETA on the new forums. I’ve seen one tweet from a YYG source saying that they don’t know when it will happen, and they’re sorry but their “hands are tied” — presumably by PlayTech.

Shaun Spalding of YoYoGames commenting on the delinquent GMC forum upgrade.

Acquisition: What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!

Say it again!

When the PlayTech acquisition happened, I expressed some concern but optimistically said I’d take a wait and see approach before judging whether it was a good thing or not. It’s pretty clear by now that it’s been a very bad thing.

It’s been my experience from watching small companies get gobbled up by large companies again and again that it’s almost always a bad thing for the small company and those who care about what it does. A small, successful company has drive, passion, and vision. A large company wants to secure its position and diversify its risk, and cares more about maintaining the status quo and staying on top than it does about disruption and shaking things up. When a large company buys out a small company, they say the same thing every time: “We’re not going to change a thing. We’re not going to risk disrupting what’s been working so well. We want to get on board and help them succeed to even greater heights.” It’s almost always a bunch of happytalk to put customers at ease and give investors a warm fuzzy feeling.

But what really happens is the small company totally gets disrupted. There’s usually a round of rebranding that happens, and the small company is paralyzed by Find/Replacing $OLDNAME to $NEWNAME, to no actual productive gain. Then there’s another round of aligning the small company’s goals to the greater strategic vision of the big company, at which point anything interesting or cool that the small company was working on gets squashed or distorted. Oftentimes the best people who made the small company great leave, pockets flush with money from the boost in the stock price from the buyout, in order to pursue other opportunities, where they can remain nimble and free to innovate without all the dead weight overhead from the large company. Products and services shift in ways that alienate former customers, the operation hemorrhages money, customers, and employees for a time, and eventually the burning dirigible crashes to the ground. Oh, the humanity.

That’s what usually — almost always — happens. I don’t know that that’s what’s happened with YoYoGames, but I’ve seen it happen time and again with countless small companies in all kinds of fields.

There’s still a lot of things I like about GameMaker: its simplicity, it’s easy learning curve, the speed with which an demo can be built. I still think it has a great deal of potential for a bright future, but I fear that PlayTech have squandered it for much of the last year. The acquisition has caused YoYo to fumble badly, and from what I’ve seen so far, I have little hope for a turnaround.

Unfortunately, for a proprietary tool a fumble like this is generally fatal. Around the time I got into GameMaker, there was another popular tool, called Torque, that was a bit more sophisticated, and went through a similar ownership transition and died shortly thereafter, to be reborn as a MIT licensed open source project. I guess it’s technically still around, but exist today largely as an afterthought. This situation is starting to feel eerily similar. Although… if GameMaker were to be open-sourced, that would be one of the best possible outcomes of the current situation. YoYoGames have stated on many occasions that this will never, ever happen, though.

Another door opens

For the last two years, I have also been watching an open-source project, called Godot. Godot is a 2D and 3D game engine with many features comparable to GameMaker, but is all modern and open source, and as of this writing is now at version 2.0. The development environment for Godot runs not only on Windows, but on Mac OS X and Linux as well. It looks really good, and I am planning to use it for my next project.

I’m very excited by this. If it works well, and I like it, I will be able to say goodbye to Microsoft, finally, and after the debacle of Windows UpdateRape, forcing users to upgrade to Windows 10 without their affirmative and informed consent, the timing couldn’t be better for me. GameMaker: Studio was the last proprietary Windows-only application that was keeping me on the Windows desktop platform, and I had been hoping that GM:Next might allow me to run GameMaker on Linux, but with Godot I may not have to wait to see if that day ever comes anymore.

I won’t be surprised in a few weeks time if I am kicking myself for not making the transition sooner.

[Update: be sure to read the follow-up post]

YoYoGames’ GameMaker Community Forums seemingly in limbo; promised upgrade overdue more than 2 weeks

development, games
5 Comments

Back in April, I posted about an upcoming transition with the GameMaker Community Forums. YoYoGames had announced that they were going to start a new forum, move off of IPBoard as its forum software, and give the community something fresh and modern that would be better. The old forums were to briefly become unavailable, and then would be restored in a read-only format, to preserve the history and knowledge they contain.

This was to have taken about two weeks. It’s over a month later now, and we still haven’t seen a new GMC forum. The old forums have been archived, and are available now at gmc.yoyogames.com, after being completely offline for over two weeks. YYG have not spoken much about the new forums since they announced their original plan, which has left me wondering what’s going on.

At this point, it’s difficult to characterize the transition as anything but a failure. But as to why the failure, and when things will be coming back, we’re left to speculate. I will, however, offer a few criticisms:

Archiving the old forums should have taken place instantly, not taken more than two weeks

I don’t have any insider information to justify why the transition from an active state to a read-only, logins disabled state took more than two weeks to accomplish, and I’ve never managed an IP board site before, but for this to require the site be completely offline for more than two weeks, it must have been quite a broken implementation design. It should have been very simple, and possible to achieve nearly instantaneously: disable login for non-administrator accounts. Demote non-essential administrator accounts, such that only YYG Staff directly involved in the forum migration can still log in and manage things.

Boom. Done. No one can post anymore; the site is in a read-only state for all users but the administrators. No downtime need be incurred.

So why did this take more than two weeks? I’d love to know.

Taking the old forum down should not have been done until the new forum was ready to go

Again, I don’t know why YYG did things the way they did, and it’s possible there’s reasonable explanations for it, but I just can’t imagine any. Normally, web development is done by having a production environment, which is the live web site exposed to the world, and a development environment, which is accessible to developers and operations folks. Development takes place in the development environment until all systems are go, at which point the site is migrated to the production server. Normally this migration is something that can be accomplished within minutes, or seconds. It might well take weeks or months to get to the point where the migration is ready to happen, but the actual migration doesn’t have to take longer than a few minutes if planned properly, unless the migration is truly massive, which I cannot imagine the GMC forums new software qualifying, since they had announced that the new forums would start off empty. I understand they need time to test and configure the new forum software, test it for security vulnerabilities, and so forth but all of that could have been — and should have — been done in a test environment well before the old forums were taken down.

Remaining quiet when previously-announced deadlines slipped disrespects GM:S users

When it became apparent that the transition was not happening according to plan, and this impacted the publicly announced timetable, someone at YYG should have handled communicating the news to the user community. To date, I have not seen any announcements explaining what’s going on. No explanation of why the release date has slipped, no announcement of a new date. Even if they have no idea how long it will be, there should have been some kind of communication. Without this, it creates an impression that YYG does not value the forums or the community that uses it. This is surely not true, but the lack of transparency here is inexplicable and harms YYG’s reputation. Considering the huge efforts they had made over the last 5 years with branding GameMaker: Studio as a professional-caliber development tool, and making numerous improvements to give that branding credibility, this is a serious stumble on their part.

Because of these failures, GameMaker users have been left without an official community for over a month, and have had to make do with alternatives such as gamedev.net, Reddit and Facebook. This can’t be good for YoYoGames’ reputation or the GameMaker brand. The community’s self-support for GameMaker has long been one of it’s greatest assets, and YoYoGames seems to be acting as though they do not understand this. I only hope that they can fix whatever problems have been preventing them from moving forward and complete the release of the new forums.

GMC forums upgrade

development, games
Comments

YoYoGames recently decided to overhaul the GameMaker Community Forums. Formerly run on IPBoard, they are moving to a new solution.

YYG did the right thing, by asking the community for feedback on how they’d like to preserve the historic threads in the old forum system. The old forum will be retained, frozen in read-only mode, with no sign-in allowed. I’m a bit concerned about not being able to log in any more, since it was easier to find content that I had posted or replied to that way. It would be nice if the forums could be read-only but still allow existing users to log in. But, as I understand it, the IPBoard has had many security problems, and so disabling login probably helps mitigate privilege escalation attacks.

When the new forum goes live, users will need to re-register their username. I had suggested that YYG reserve the user IDs of all existing users and send an invite email to them, to claim their old username. I don’t believe that this suggestion was adopted, however. It would have been a good thing, though, as there’s been concern that pranksters might claim famous user names from the old forums and impersonate users. Hopefully this will not be a big problem, but a way to either carry over the old user accounts or else reserve the account names and send invites to users to claim their old username would have been a great way to avoid the problem altogether.

Currently the old boards are down while the upgrade is happening. The migration is taking several days, during which the boards will continue to remain down. I don’t understand why it should take such a long time and having the boards unavailable for an extended time is disappointing; I would think that YYG could have the new forum software staged in a testing environment that could be moved to the live server with a simple press of a button to trigger an elevate script. Likewise, I would think that putting the old forums into read-only mode could be achieved without taking the forums offline at all. Why this wasn’t possible, or wasn’t the best way to take on the migration, I don’t know. There was a very active thread discussing this, but… it was on the old forums, which are currently down.

Based on what I read, it’s unclear at this time whether the url of the old forums will continue to be gmc.yoyogames.com, and the new boards take a new domain name, or if the old forums will be moving to a redirected url. My hope is that the old URL will be preserved, so deep links to old threads will not be disrupted, and the new forums will have a new domain name. However, my guess is that the new forums will use the existing gmc.yoyogames.com domain, and the old forums will probably be redirected, or simply moved.

It will be interesting to see the new forums, how they are organized and curated. Hopefully YYG have learned from the years they maintained the old forums, and will have many improvements. The biggest item on my wish list is to allow file uploads and hosting, so that project files no longer have to be hosted on external services, which tend to fall victim to link rot over time.

The developer community surrounding GameMaker has long been a valuable asset to YYG. In a lot of ways, it’s probably their best asset — the community has always been very helpful for helping new users solve problems and turn into seasoned, experienced programmers. Hopefully the new forums will continue this tradition for many years to come.

mmap mini maps 1.2 released

games
Comments

Today mmap mini maps 1.2 was released on the GameMaker Marketplace. It’s a really great asset, which ads a powerful, configurable, easy to use mini map system to your GameMaker: Studio project. I’ve spent dozens, if not over a hundred hours developing this asset to the highest quality, and am selling it for just $4.99.

Experience the Live demo in HTML5.

New features:

  1. Vector arrows: configuration option allows moving blips to have an arrow drawn to the map screen showing the direction and relative speed.
  2. Edge blips: configuration option allows distant objects that are out of range to be drawn at edge of map screen, showing the direction to the distant object.
  3. Sound support: configuration option allows for sound effects to be played when a sonar pulse is emitted, or when a radar blip is refreshed.
  4. Room, View Borders: configuration option draws a border to the map screen, showing the edge of the View or Room boundary.
  5. Documentation updated: Includes a new section showing example code to make setting up your oMmap easier than ever before.

Bug fixes:

  1. I noticed that the functions that I had added to the mmap_mini_map.gmez extension are not working. I’m not sure why they are not working, but I have replaced the .gmez functions with Script resources for now, as these do work. This is a temporary workaround, as the Scripts don’t have autosuggest support to tell you what arguments the script takes. Once I have figured out how to get the functions working again, they’ll be converted back. Additional functions to support the oMmap object will be forthcoming at that time. They were planned for 1.2.0, but were held back due to this issue.