issue fourteen
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Welcome to Issue 14 of GMTech Magazine. GMTech
has been up and running for over two years now. Our
first release on November 30 2006 was an amazing
time for all who were involved in the production,
however since then we have come a lot further and
are proud to be releasing this fourteenth issue. This
issue, just like the others, didn't come without its
problems that we did our best to overcome - delays
mainly.
We didn't want to produce an issue that was
'boasting 50 pages of content' because we know that
it isn't about the quantity but the quality. We didn't
want to make an issue like issue 13, so long but
nothing really special - we wanted to create an issue
in which you will be amazed by the content. Forget
about those pretty images that make a 600 word
article span over 4 pages and actually read the
fantastic content that the members of GMTech have
so wonderfully put together. With this issue we could
have easily made it span over 60 pages and made it
the longest issue yet, however after spending two
years in this 'game' we worked out that you are more
interested in the what the words say than the length.
We arranged an Interview with Sandy Duncan, CEO
of YoYo Games, we got some fantastic answers that
you can find on page 21. We also got in contact with
someone who has masses of experience with
creating and selling games and he agreed to talk to
us and explain a bit about what he does and his
techniques, check out Russell Carroll’s interview on
page 23. Along with those fantastic exclusives our
writers have stormed up some treats for you to get
your teeth into 'What Makes a Game Addicting',
'Game Difficulty', 'Getting your Game Seen' are just a
few of the features that we have for you to read.
We have also arranged a massive giveaway of ten
copies of GM7 Pro, to be in with a chance of winning
a copy of GM7 Pro, then turn to page 4.
As always it is a great issue, we didn't focus on the
past (that we are two years old) we focussed on the
content, quality and the enjoyment of it. Hope you
like it.
GMTech Team
_______________________________________
Website: www.gamemakertech.info
Forum: www.gamemakertech.info/forum
Wiki: www.gamemakertech.info/wiki
You waited so long for Issue 14, but now that wait is
over and you have begun to tuck into it. The bad
news is you're going to have to wait a little bit longer
for Issue 15 to come round, as we are taking a
break over Christmas. Production of Issue 15 won't
start fully until February/March next year with a
releasing a few weeks after that. We plan to return
from the break with loads of new ideas and
techniques to produce an even better magazine for
you to read.
If you turn to page 4 of this issue you will we see
that we are giving away 10 copies of GM7 Pro for
free. All you need to do to win is read the rules and
fill out an application form; the more interesting it is
the better chance of you winning. For details can be
found on Page 4.
After a long wait, the GM Mac beta has been
released as a private beta a few weeks ago. For
those of you without Mac computers, but are still
interested in keeping up to date with the various
testing on the beta you could take a look at
Dangerous Dave's Blog, where he plans to keep on
testing the software and write all about it .
A blog dedicated to interviewing GM users has been
created and launched to a positive reception. The
website found a niche in the GM market and has
gone full steam ahead to fill it. Despite only being
around for a couple of weeks they are already
receiving rave reviews from many visitors to the site.
YAIPP, Revel Quick Play, and GMArcade are just a
few of the new Instant Play scripts and plugins that
have been released within a few weeks of each
other. They each seem to be dedicated to creating a
system that can rival the YYG model. If you’re
interested in features like hosting them game on
your own server and not having any links to YoYo,
then take a look at the different scripts and plugins.
Since issue 1 gmjab has written for this
magazine, and from issue 6 through to the
13th issue he has been the editor and
graphic designer. He was responsible for putting the
magazine together and producing some outstanding
looking content which has helped GMTech become
what it is today. He also created the design on the
now closed GMTech wiki, so good was the design
that it was featured on the Wikidot main website and
was praised very highly for having such a brilliant
look. However, as can happen to all of us, gmjab
has become increasingly busy in his offline life and
understandably could spend less and less time on
this magazine. He has not formally
resigned from GMTech but he has not
been active on the GMT forums since
September so from now on, me (Timoi),
and GMTech owner gamez93 will be co-
editting the magazine.
By Timoi
You have been waiting for Issue 14 for some time and
we have made sure not to disappoint along with the
fantastic articles, features and exclusives we have
arranged with Sandy Duncan (CEO at YoYo Games) a
special give-away of 10 GM7 Pro keys. If you're
someone who is unable to get the right amount of
money or for whatever reasons you can't get GM7
Pro, then this is your chance to get a registered copy.
To be in with a chance of winning you need to go to
the Entry Form, fill it out and click submit. It’s that
simple and it will only take a couple of minutes -
maybe even less.
We have put together a quick list of questions that you
are probably thinking right now, if your question isn't
answered here then get in contact with us via the
contact form on the GMTech website.
Once - If we find out you entered more than once then
you will be disqualified.
It’s not down to luck, you need to impress us (the
GMTech team) with what you write in the form. We
aren't just looking for length, we are look for quality - a
bit like the issues of GMTech.
The closing date for entries is 20th December, the
winners will be announced on 21st December and will
be contacted. It will be the perfect present to end the
year.
Once the winners have been chosen, we will send
them an email with full details on how to obtain their
copy of GM7.
Click here and fill out the form on that page.
You will be contacted on the email you used to apply,
so make sure all the details you filled in are correct.
We plan to give away 10 copies of GM7 Pro, we will
give out us as many as possible and the rest will be
saved up for another contest.
Read through the rest of the issue and enjoy it, then
get down to business and enter the contest to win a
copy of GM7 PRO. Remember, if you have any more
questions then feel free to get in contact with us via
email or by PM.
In a recent topic at the official Game Maker
Community a user asked members which
characteristics they thought made a game addicting.
The poster rightly pointed out that some high-quality
games don’t pull you back to play, whereas a number
of lower-quality games manage to have gamers
coming back for more.
In order to attempt to create an addicting game it is
important to consider what it is that turns people away
from a game once they have made the choice to start
playing it.
Long game load times, looped music that cannot be
turned off without touching your speakers and
awkward keyboard configurations which would make
the manufacturers of Twister proud will drive gamers
mad. Menus that make starting a new game more
complicated than you thought possible, screens that
must repeatedly be clicked-through will have the
same effect – as will a glitch that makes a level
impossible to win or a bug that causes the game to
crash midway through.
Picture in your head a game with none of these
problems - a slick game without any of the above
annoyances. If a user enjoys a game and are skilled
enough they may well play it to its conclusion. But
then what? Will they start a new game straight away?
Will they play again tomorrow, next week, in six
months or never again? You need to consider
whether it is worthwhile for someone to replay a game
that they have already won – if there are strict winning
criteria and little room for freedom within the game
they will probably have already made use of every
aspect of your game.
Randomisation is a vital ingredient which will keep
your game fresh and ensure that every time it is
played it is slightly different. Consider, for example,
the basic puzzle games that have long been bundled
with Windows. Every game of Minesweeper or
Solitaire is always different which means whilst the
gamer has some idea of what will happen after a few
games there is always a unique aspect -something
they haven’t seen. Imagine what would happen if
mines were always placed in the same locations, or
cards always dealt in the same order – after you’d
won the game once there wouldn’t be any point in
playing again!
One of the suggestions made at the forum was that
the inability to complete a task which you feel you
should be able to do will have people playing for
longer. Whilst a slight level of frustration should be
imposed upon gamers it is hard to strike the right
balance between making a game challenging enough
but not ridiculously hard which will have the effect of
driving players away. You can minimize the risk of
this happening by having multiple levels slowly
increasing in their difficulty. Level codes in arcade-
style games or a save game feature can also be used
to enable a user to resume from a place they have
worked hard to get to, without forcing them to waste
time slowly replaying levels or rooms they have
previously completed successfully.
Including multiple game modes, for example, having a
central story as well as individual playable missions,
can make people consider playing when they might
not otherwise do so. Who knows, they may enjoy
certain levels and despise others – better to let them
play the ones they like than have them avoid them all.
Rewarding gamers for their achievements through a
top scores or best times board can encourage them to
play again and compete against members of their
family to be crowned King of the Game. Better still,
make use of an online high-score table through which
players from around the world can compete. Having
a weekly table as well as an all-time list also ensures
that users are not too disheartened when they glance
at the top scores that have been achieved – then
there is a real chance that their name could be on the
list for all to see!
It is also important to respond positively to user
feedback. Sadly many Game Maker programmers
seem only to care about the number of downloads or
the rating their game receives. Reacting to and
learning from criticism of your game will make your
game more enjoyable to those playing it –would you
continue playing a game you didn’t enjoy? Many
flash games do this well as revenue for the sites they
are on depends on the number of times they are
played, and the adverts that surround them are
viewed or clicked.
The most important factor when attempting to make
your games addicting is to consider playing them from
the gamers’ perspective. Get your games tested
before you release them, take the feedback on board
and don’t disregard things you don’t see as a problem
if other people do.
Written by Phil Gamble
Keeping games challenging can be a difficult task for
aspiring game makers. In most cases, especially in
independent work, the challenge to a particular game
sways one way or the other - easy or hard. Finding
that balance in the middle is important, though. You
could have the best idea and implement it well, but if
it's too hard, it won't be played. Same goes for if it
were too easy (which usually isn't the case in
independent games). These are a few thoughts as to
exactly why it's so frustrating to find that perfect center.
Firstly, by definition, games should be challenging.
This is in direct response to any game that offers itself
as "easy" or "basic". Games are for players to play -
either for fun or satisfaction (or both, in a lot of cases).
I'm sure you've seen a movie or read a book in which
the character has everything they want. It sounds
great, right? That is until they realize it's actually more
of a burden to get everything they want and then go
back to regular life. Same goes for any sports team -
it'd be great for your team of choice to go a full
season without a loss, but after a few years of never
losing, they actually lose the whole reason to play the
game, and that's competitiveness; either player
versus player, or game versus player. So why would
you play a game that you never lose at? You'd have
fun at first, sure, especially if you're used to losing
more often than winning. Keep playing, though, and
you'll lose the desire to pop it in or run it.
In contrast, games should never be impossible, as
that would ruin the point of playing. Of course, having
a so-called "impossible" game would attract a lot of
attention, and you'd get a lot of people wanting to give
it a shot to see if it's true or just a rumor. You might
even get a few devoted fans that play it as much as
any other game, always looking for a way to win.
However, to the casual player, an "impossible" game
would get old quick, and it wouldn't survive in their
library. Not only does it seem hopeless to play when
you know you're going to lose, who wants to feel like
a loser?
So game makers are always looking for good ways to
balance the game to where it's not too easy, yet not
too hard. If you know anything about game design in
general, you'd know balance is the key to basically
anything, and you'll get nowhere without it. There's no
reason why anything should be totally one way or the
other, including difficulty. Now, to be fair, there are
definitely valid games that are too easy and too hard.
A lot of games try to appeal to younger players, or
more casual inexperienced players, and the game
prides itself on being easier than most. There are
games for hardcore players that go for the difficult feel
that aren't just for anyone, but the ones that can
devote a lot of time into it and have that natural skill.
My point, though, is that if you're looking to make a
game for anyone or anyone, you're going to want to
balance it as best you can.
A good way to do this is different difficulty levels. You
see this a lot in previous generation games (My main
memories of difficulty levels was from the Playstation
era), but not so much anymore. One modern game,
though, that does it very well, is the Guitar Hero/Rock
Band series. Levels of difficulty range from Easy to
Expert, allowing new players and hardcore players
alike get into the game. Easy to pick up, difficult to
master is the phrase that passes through my head
every time I think of it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say
difficulty. So, it doesn't work 100%, but it's a nice idea,
and I'd like to see more from it.
Games are difficult to balance out because there are
so many different kinds of players. No player is the
same. One player might be good at any given game,
another might not. Games might be too hard for one,
but too easy for others. Trying to balance a game to
one single difficulty level just doesn't work anymore,
especially in such a critical gaming society. Simply
put, games absolutely need more difficulty levels to
appeal to anyone wanting to pick up and play. It's
imperative that games be balanced nowadays,
because it'll get murdered by reviewers if it's just
slightly too difficult or easy. Nothing's worse than
pouring hours and hours into a game, only to get
stuck at a certain part and never playing it again.
Broken controllers everywhere speak for themselves -
games should be balanced in most aspects, even
difficulty level. There are plenty of tried and true ways
already out there, and new theories all the time. Get
out there, do some research, and put together a game
that's fun to play for everyone.
these games perfect the balanced difficulty levels.
When I first picked it up, I never thought I'd get far
with it, neither did probably most players. Now, if you
look hard enough, you'll find mass communities of
players all going for just slick scores. Looking back,
most players probably never thought they'd get this
good at the game.
Another attempt I've been seeing lately is changing
A.I. The artificial intelligence changes itself to match
you, always trying to keep a balanced level of
difficulty. This hasn't really proven itself to work
completely, at least not to me, but it's a step in the
right direction. The only problem with this form of
difficulty level-balancing is that you can never do well
and never do poorly. If the system works flawlessly,
you'll always do average. Once you start doing well,
the game increases difficulty to match and sets you
back down to a level line. If you start doing badly, it
lowers the difficulty to get you back up to the default
Written by Brandon
There is a never ending torrent of unfinished,
pointless, and frankly rubbish games that get
uploaded to YYG (YoYo Games). The 'Featured
Games' is a small museum of gaming gems and
delights, and sorting by 'Most Popular' filters more of
the best games into sight. However, the main sewage
pipe is the 'Most Recent' category where all games
start off. I can bet not many visit here as games of the
lowest possible quality are found living out their pitiful
and wretched existence. Fortunately many fantastic
games are rescued from the waist-deep piles of
steaming excrement and staff picked. But those are
the lucky ones. Some are never found again.
It can seem like an injustice of biblical proportions
when this happens to your game, your months of hard
work being flushed down the drain with perhaps one
comment of “it's ok.” and 3 1-star ratings with only 2
plays. If you don't get noticed in the 'Most Recent',
you have little chance of being found again, so I'm
here to help your game be seen and to prevent it
catching horrible diseases from the surrounding awful
games.
First of all, a question. If someone saw something
shiny in the gutter at the side of the road, would they
check it out? Social pressures not-with-standing, they
probably would. By the same reasoning, it pays to
have a neat looking game image. Make sure it's not
pixelated, unrelated, or a screenshot where it's
impossible to see what's going on. By making a
dedicated image you can design it to be readable at a
glance and to completely fill up the space allowed. A
useful tip is to make your image the same size as the
frame, not just in proportion, so that you can check it
doesn't become undetailed when shrunk. You only
have a couple of seconds to grab a potential players
attention, so make the most of it.
Now that they have decided to check out the shiny
object mentioned before, they take a closer look. Bad
news, it looks like it might just be a milk top. While
there's no social pressure (unless someone's
watching you while your on the PC), your time is
precious, do you want to risk wasting your time taking
the shiny object, it might be worth nothing after all.
First impressions are the most important, but second
impressions are also vital. Make sure all screenshots
adhere to the rules I stated in the previous paragraph,
having as many as you're allowed isn't any harm
either.
Why would the person even be walking down the
street? Because they're going to work of course. YYG
start on Mondays and finish on Friday evenings, so
never post on weekends. The optimum time will be
8:30am GMT on a Monday. There's time for it to be
virus scanned and converted to Instant Play, so when
the YYG staff come in to see what's been posted over
the weekend, they'll see your game first.
The person sees a copy of Vogue in a shop window
with the same shiny object on the front cover, the
shiny object the person is holding is clearly
prestigious and valuable. Submit your game to be
reviewed to a magazine, encourage others to review
it, find any sites where you can link to it. Post on
forums with a link to the YYG page, blog about it,
embed it in all the social networking sites you're on
and send a message to all your social network friends
with a link to the game. Get your family to play it, get
your friends to play it, tell them to spread the word to
everyone they know. Put an image advertising it in
your signature as large as is allowed, implant a virus
that when opened will send a message to everyone in
the recipients contacts list which advertises your
game. Do that, and the plays will come flooding in.
Apart from the last one, that was a joke, we don't
support filthy criminals here at GMTech or even ones
that have had a good wash.
After much thinking, the person washes all the muck
off, and brings it close to inspect it. Congratulations,
they're loading and looking at your game! It's now
your responsibility to have made sure the game is
polished and enjoyable to play. There's hundreds of
places where you can get advice, help, and feedback,
so use all the resources available to you to make your
game a success.
Written by Timoi
When it comes to file hosting, we all usually have our
little site that we trust completely. I know I do. At the
same time, though, that doesn’t mean we should
ignore the others. There are a vast number of file-
hosting sites out there, for every kind of file. Some
are good, useful, and honest – others are sly,
deceptive, and not actually that useful at all. So how
do you know which are valuable and which just
waste your time? Well, you could go through and ask
all of your contacts what they use, why they like it,
what they don’t like about it, and so on, and have
them never talk to you again because you’re just
using them for information, or just read this.
Now, I want to make a few notes first – I only had
one Firefox window up at the time, with just a few
tabs (related to what I was working on). I have a
T1/Lan connection. I didn’t have any torrenting or
instant messaging programs open, and I wasn’t
downloading anything. So, in essence, my
connection should be as fast as can be. I uploaded
the same 9.3MB .zip file for every site, and when I
could, I uploaded a ~150kb screenshot file. Finally, I
did all of these one after the other, so they should all
be close to the same in terms of my connection’s
speed (nothing should’ve changed).
I’m going to look at a short list of five file-hosting
sites, all based around indie game hosting, and I’m
going to grade them on a simple rubric. Speed, for
both upload speed and navigation speed (have you
ever had to upload a ton of files, and spent more
time navigating the menus and waiting for the pages
to load than actually uploading the files?). Reliability,
both for how often the servers are up and if your files
are deleted. Maximum file size for how much you can
upload at once and how much your account can
hold, ease of use for both the layout of the site and
the file manager system they have, design for the
design of the website (which shouldn’t really matter
too much, but no one wants to look at an ugly page,
right?). Features, because everyone likes nifty
features, and whether or not you have to register
(which can be a pro or con in your opinion). So,
without further ado, here we go:
Sandy Duncan: YYG goes back to the time when I
first left Microsoft in 2003. James North-Hearn (who
had just quit as VP Publishing at Infogrames) and I
were discussing how we could create a publishing
business that was more “streamlined” than the
existing games publishers. We came up with
something called “Thin Publishing”, which is
essentially a business that outsources as much as it
can. We looked at buying one of the UK based
publishers, but I got offered a lucrative job outside of
video games in the middle of these negotiations and
couldn’t resist taking the big salary on offer....
The first site I visited was Gamecake.net. It’s a nice
little site with a lot of useful features I found
interesting. The pages loaded quickly and the file
uploads were extremely fast. Of course, I haven’t
had a file uploaded for too long, so I can’t say if files
last, but the site seems solid and reliable – I would
trust important files to be kept there. The file size
limit is 35MB, but you can upload as many 35MB
files as you’d like. The site was easy to use, and
when uploading, all the information you needed was
right there (title, file, screenshot, info, etc.). You have
to register but what I found neat was the register
boxes (username, password, and e-mail) were all
right there when you went to upload, just in case you
missed the registration link on the main page. The
thing that separates Gamecake.net from the rest is
the information features available. You can add a
message that describes what you’re doing now (if the
game is in demo stages) and what your plans are, it
gives a list of updates on the game (like when you
upload a screenshot, etc.) for everyone to keep track
of what you’re doing, and it even has an up/down
button to rate games (which is a nice change from
the usual star average rating). All in all, after my
short time with it. I plan on using it in the future. It’s
more than just an upload and link to kind of site; it’s a
full-on page dedicated to your game. I would go as
far as to say that you don’t even need to create your
own webpage for your given game, as this gives
pretty much any information you’d want people to
know.
Second on the list is host-a.net. Now, unlike some of
the others, I’ve been using this for years. I remember
finding it a long time ago, and using it for personal
file uploads ever since. The speed is quick – not
blindingly fast but it gets the job done without any
complaints. The most exciting thing about it is the
reliability. In the years I’ve been using host-a.net, I’ve
never had a file deleted. This is especially nice,
considering some of the files may not be work-safe!
I’ve always felt safe with my files there, and I always
will. Now, the only thing that disappoints is the file
limit. Not per size (you can actually upload 1GB
files), but you only have 30MB total space. You may
ask why you’d upload a 1GB file with only 30MB
available space overall. I have an answer. After a bit
of research, the site explains that, with paid
upgrades, the account with the largest amount of
spaces is 1GB. It goes on to say that if that changes,
the file upload size limit will change accordingly.
Now, I would never pay for more storage spaces, but
host-a.net does allow you to purchase more space.
The prices are a bit steep (for me, anyway), ranging
from 125MB extra space for $5USD to 1GB to
$25USD. You can also add bandwidth. The site is
very plain and ugly (plain isn’t always a bad thing,
but it’s a black background with gray and white Arial
text), and the layout is just as plain (navigation bar to
the left, info in the middle/right). It’s easy to use and
that’s what counts. You do need an account to
upload files which may turn some away, but with the
reliability and insurance of file safety I don’t mind at
all. There really are no extra features that make it
stand out. You can upload almost any kind of file
which may count for something if you’re doing things
other than game-making, and it does generate a nice
pie chart that illustrates your available space, but
past that – nothing. I like it, but I may be biased
because of how long I’ve been using it, I would
recommend it to anyone, even with the ugly layout.
Next is Willhostforfood.com. Now, I’ve never been a
user here, but I know a lot of people that upload
there religiously. I gave it a look-over and was
thoroughly impressed. The uploads are fast and it
seems very reliable. You’re allowed 100MB uploads
if you’re registered but only 10MB if you’re a guest
(that means you don’t have to register here). It’s very
easy to use too – along with a simplistic look comes
a simplistic navigation bar. Very minimalistic, it has
only 8 links and a Paypal donate button. The look is
welcome for me, as I don’t need a ton of links for
everything – but this also means there are almost no
features past uploading, which may turn some away.
One nice thing was it gives you HTML and BBCode
links right after uploading, for quick copy-pasting for
others. I would use this, maybe as a last resort. It’s
very basic, which is nice for quick uploads, but it
doesn’t offer much past that – it’s just a very solid,
reliable host. If that’s what you’re looking for I
suggest you give it a try.
Next up is gmarcade.com. To be honest, I’d never
even heard of this site before being it being
suggested for this article. I must say – I can see why.
The first thing I noticed was the look. It was polished,
but not realy nice. I can tell someone put a lot of time
into it, but the colors (white and purple) didn’t mix at
all, and are just nasty. The navigation bar was
cluttered beyond belief, and it took me a while to find
the upload button (where I had to register before I
could upload). I didn’t think it’d be a big deal – I’m not
superficial, right? Oh boy, it got worse. The file took
forever to upload, and I sat around forever waiting for
something to happen. I don’t know if the server was
just slow at that moment, or if it’s always that slow, but
I’m thinking this site is prone to server problems,
therefore I wouldn’t consider it too reliable at all. The
maximum file size is 25MB, which is modest, but in all
honesty, when deciding between two file hosts, and
one offers 35MB, even though you know you’ll never
upload a file that big, you’re going to choose it
anyway. It wouldn’t be so bad if at least the files
uploaded quickly. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it,
even as a last resort. There are plenty of other faster,
more reliable hosts with more features to keep you
uploading. NOTE: It has a Java instant player sort of
feature, but it didn’t work for me – check it out, it might
be something worth looking at.
Finally is 64Digits.com. I’ve known about this for a
while as well, and I have an account, but I never really
liked it too much. I don’t know why, it just seemed like
it was fit for more hardcore game makers (I’m just
sore that one of my examples got rejected!). The look
is nice – very basic but polished, and the colors all
work together (it’s mostly white). It’s rather easy to
use if you can ignore the small text all grouped
together that makes some things hard to read. The
only weird thing is the difference between File
Manager and Submit Game/Example. You have to
upload the file in the File Manager first, and then
submit a game and choose the uploaded file from a
list. It’s a little odd at first, but probably smoother in
the long run. My only problem was that my file didn’t
upload. I’m not sure if it was a one-time glitch but I
wasn’t about to sit another five minutes waiting to see
– the upload speed was abysmal, and waiting for
pages to load took ages. Again, I’m not sure if the
server was just slow (because I don’t recall this
problem from before) or if it was just that moment, but
it was drudgingly awful. The limit is 100MB, and that’s
pretty good for a game host. It’s pretty reliable (I
found images from a year or two ago in my file
manager list), and I know a ton of people that upload
there and trust it, so I don’t see any reason why you’d
fear uploading important files. The biggest thing about
64Digits is the community – the forums are huge and
there are a ton of people behind it. Some hosts don’t
have any kind of forum or community and if you
experience a glitch, you’re screwed. Not to mention
64Digit’s categories – Games, Examples, and Works
In Progress make it easy to find what you’re looking
for. I’d recommend it, I just don’t use it because I’ve
always had random issues (file uploading, finding my
way around, etc.).
So, there you have it – a nice little list of file hosts
(primarily for Game Maker), and maybe now you can
make a more informed decision on what you’re going
to use to show the world your creations. I know there
are more out there, and probably a bunch that
deserve to be on a list, but I just chose the first five
that I could think of or that were recommended to me.
If needed, I could always write a second article with
more hosts. Please, feel free to contact me and alert
me of other hosts that deserve to be reviewed and I’ll
certainly give them a look and write about them here.
Written by Brandon
Humor is beauty. Some of my fondest memories of
gaming involve ridiculous situations and witty one-
liners. The most beautiful thing is that good comedy
will never get in the way of your game play, and rarely
requires pro-level programming. When making your
game a few guffaws in an otherwise serious
adventure can be all that’s needed to flesh out your
game and gain more enthusiasm from the players. At
the same time, it’s a great way to take away an
otherwise tedious development.
First off, I’ll be honest; video games rarely make me
laugh (with the exception of online multiplayer). It’s
possible, but when putting jokes into your game, you
shouldn’t be aiming for making players roll on the floor
laughing. Instead, humor should be injected in a way
that pulls color out of your world. It helps make your
game more compelling to play and allows you to
really frame your game’s atmosphere.
For example, let’s look at some average RPG that I’m
making up right now for the point of this example.
Let’s call it Zeppelin Wars: Triumph Under Bleeding
Roses, just cause it sounds awesome. Since the
player will be creating his own character, we already
have a base to begin creating some dimensions in an
otherwise average process. While the player can
make his own amusement by naming his/her
character FARTS McGEE, it would be smart to
compliment such a creative name by adding some
ridiculous customization options. Give the player the
option to let his/her character wear an Epic Beer
Drinking Hat, or maybe overly revealing/tight spandex
(you can still put more serious wardrobe options in the
game too, and of course, make all of this available
from the start, don’t force the player to unlock it). Just
by giving the player the ability to customize his
character, you are adding humor and accessibility into
the game right off the bat. You could even take it a
step further and provide some commentary on each
item. Regardless of how far you go, by injecting some
lighthearted options before the game even begins you
are going to make the player take notice of his
character and encourage him to press further into
your game.
Looks like FARTS, with two fresh beers tucked in his
cap and a sword that makes offensive gestures
during epic combat is ready to hit the town! So let’s
give this town some color. When making a game, you
probably already had a general idea of what the story
and setting is going to be like, so basing your humor
around the general atmosphere is a great way to
immerse the player. For example, if this town was
under attack by malevolent pterodactyls, the towns
people beg you for help. Well, you’ve already got a
quest right there, so as long as the gameplay is solid
(I won’t go into that, however, just keep the FESS
method in mind: Fun Effective Simple and Satisfying),
some lightheartedness in the wake of such
catastrophe can work like magic. The amount of
humor you inject into this quest is balanced with how
many issues the town has run into that you show.
Want this to be a more serious moment in your story?
Add more examples of hardship (for instance, this
would be a perfect time to kill off the player’s
parents!). However, a little black comedy shouldn’t
detract from the moment. For example, with all the
pterodactyls flying around, you could have a vendor
selling umbrellas due to all the you-know-what that
would be raining down from the sky. Just a simple
stand like that takes the quest up a few notches on
the believability ladder. You don’t even have to stop
there, after all, it’s your game, so you get to decide
what to do with it. All the graffiti and artwork, all the
villages, all the monsters, everything the characters
say is up to you, have fun with it, and even if it’s
cheesy, it could still keep players hooked in. All it
takes is a little brainstorming and you’ll be amazed at
how creative you can be!
Injecting humor does more than add substance to
your game. It’s a great way to stay productive during
development, and at the same time, your
brainstorming, could come up with more than a few
gags. A lot of the time you may find yourself adding
whole quests or features and not be aware of it! This
is especially true when working with teams, because it
eases off a lot of the stress associated with
development, and again, you could be building on
your ideas in a humorous way when one of you might
come up with a plot twist, or even just a better way of
working with a character that doesn’t have to do with
humor. It gets you thinking about how you want to
build your game and can be far more enjoyable too.
Okay, so you might consider yourself the funny type. It
doesn’t matter! Remember, you’re not aiming to make
people laugh, the wit you put in the game should, at
best, make the player admire how clever you can be.
If you truly feel that you don’t have a funny bone, then
just keep the jokes subtle, no matter how corny your
jokes are, the game is still gaining those crucial
Written by Evilspud
dimensions that make the game immersive. A lot of
developers (even some triple A console dev-teams)
put too much focus on only a few aspects of their
game and end up creating a half-empty experience
because they failed to develop the atmosphere in the
entire game.
It’s important to always keep the setting interesting,
give a character a candy bar addiction, make an
airplane out of cardboard, or clog up a toilet as long
as it sticks to your universe, your just improving your
experience, and developing your own creative
muscle. If you're truly feeling uninspired, then play
games that are known to be funny, study how humor
got Portal it’s own cult following, pretty much
everything done by Tim Schafer confirms the
philosophies I’ve written about here. I’m repeating
myself a lot on this, but don’t be afraid of cheesy
jokes, everything you put into a character is going to
add to him/her. Humor is the easiest way to build a
foundation for the character and make him someone
players can relate too.
The best advice I can give anyone is if your
developing your game and it is becoming too boring,
then you’re going to end up with a boring experience.
Keep the ideas flowing even the dullest quests can
become something the player is going to look back
on. And who knows? You might end up making ME
roll on the floor laughing.
IsmAvatar - “The senior members have a lot of mixed
feelings, but I think the fact that we've been with the
project through so many changes as it is, speaks
volumes about how "resistant to change" we are. Now
granted, you have a few who have jumped ship, most
notably being GearGOD, and they were not without
reason, because there have been some
disappointments brought with YYG, most notably
being the amount of propriety that they have added to
GM, through DRM, encryption, blacklists, and the
likes. Most of which harmed normal/legitamite/well-
intentioned users of GM and only being a minor
hinderance to the black market users. I think the guys
could learn a little from Ben Franklin: "He who would
give up a little freedom for a little security, deserves
neither and will lose both." or perhaps, "Sell not virtue
to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
Of course, we're all also familiar with the infamous
delays at release date, well-excusable for a new
experiment that I think made it all worth while. I am
talking about, of course, Instant Play, a revolution in
game development and marketing, the ability to play
games from your browser. This amazing development
has redefined browser games; no longer the low
quality flash games you play on AddictingGames -
now we have real quality, and the price is right.
Written by ISMAvatar
TwilightPhantasm, branded by Ben Smith (its creator)
"The Darker Game Maker Community", is pretty much
as its slogan suggests - a Game Maker community
with a dark theme. However, the darkness is only
referring to the website colour scheme; members are
generally very friendly. So, how does this community
differentiate from all the others in a large pile of
substandard websites? All but the chatroom and
forum is coded from scratch. Might not seem like
there's much left after those two are out of the picture.
You'd be surprised though. These are some of the
features of the website at the moment:
If you want to do anything on the website, really you
need to register. Handily, the creator has made the
website connect with the forum (SMF), so you only
need to register once. Extremely convenient (some
other websites ought to master this).
The website allows you to submit your game(s),
provided you have the exe in a zip file, a thumbnail,
and a screenshot ready on your PC. You enter the
details in, and when uploaded a moderator or
administrator will approve or deny it. This is generally
quality control, although few games are considered
"too bad to accept". The whole archive system is
nothing new and generally essential, but at least
they've coded it all themselves, and it generally works
well. Once it's in the archive, other people can
comment on the game and rate it (both well-made
features).
Again, nothing new to Game Maker communities, but
it's coded from scratch, and works fine. Input your
title, your current mood and write a blog as you
please. Includes BBCode for text styling, links,
images and the like. If you know CSS, you can
customise its looks, which is a nice feature. People
can also comment on your blog entries (optional,
there's a tickbox allowing you to prevent it).
Each member has their own virtual "trophy cabinet"
which they can fill with awards won in games. On top
of many games having the ability to win trophies for
specific achievements, three (currently) allow you to
log into the website directly through the game EXE
and win the award - the three games are MooMoo by
Ben Smith (the creator of the website), Fireblast by
Ulrik04, and Zyousbox by myself. The inbuilt script
was created by Ben and is available if your game is
considered good enough.
These are one of the newest features of the website.
When you upload your game (and it's accepted), you
get a little image showing a cropped area of the
thumbnail, the game name and your username,
download count, and its current rating. If you're
advertising your game all over the place, this can
save you a bit of time writing out the details,
especially since the image is given to you in either
BBCode or HTML (copy the code, paste it, and you're
done). A brilliant little piece of work.
Currently a fairly new system with little use, although
they will soon become a fairly important part of
TwilightPhantasm. At the moment, you can earn
credits by uploading games and blogs. In the future
you will also be able to win them in specific games.
Spending them will be possible in designated games
on things like extras, minigames, cheats etc.
Usually pretty active as there's a period of time every
day when few people are on. When there are people
on the chatroom, it's a great place to hang out and
chat to fellow game makers. They are generally happy
to help you out with anything you might be stuck on,
or will hold competent conversation if you're doing fine.
The community of TwilightPhantasm is essentially its
heart. Well over 100 members, over 27,000 posts in
over 1200 topics, and a range of boards for anything
Written by NAL
you want - Introductions, Game Maker help, Software
advertisement (although frowned upon if you've not
made yourself known), WIP posting with in general a
lot of feedback given by the members, the ubiquitous
General Chat, and anything else. There's also a
suggestions section where you can post things you'd
like to see. It's great to find the website's creator has
replied to almost every topic made in the Suggestions
board, and acted upon many of them. The forum has
all the things you'd expect to see - PM inboxes (100
PM space limit), a page of statistics, Who's Online list
etc etc.
In my opinion (and not just because I'm a moderator
and active member there) it's a great website, which
most people can find a home in. You will always get
feedback, help or discussions when you want or need
them, and will be thanked when you help or give
feedback to others. I suggest that you try the wesite
out today at http://www.twilightphantasm.com/ -
membership and everything is completely free and
fast, and you'll get a warm welcome when you
introduce yourself.
TwilightPhantasm is the best alternative to YYG and
the GMC! I really love TwilightPhantasm. Is the most
friendly GM site in the world. You can relax by playing
games, posting in interesting topics at the forums,
write blogs about anything you want, uploading your
games and also chatting in the coolest chatroom! The
best site for having fun with the whole Game Maker
thing!
Also new features coming up every day, like the
awesome "DCards"!
Anybody who is involved with this site feels lucky now
and some members wonder how they didn't notice
this site before!
TwilightPhantasm as quite a large variety of people in
comparison to other forums I've been on. It doesn't
have 20 boards, yet has a place for everything. It's
pretty much an all-around good site with the cool
aspect of encouraging Game Making.
TwilightPhantasm is basically the best forum related
to the Game Maker program. Each individual member
has something productive and encouraging to offer,
which makes it such a great community. Having the
freedom to suggest what to change on Twilight to
make it a better place and have it heard and taken
action is incredible.
I joined the TwilightPhantasm community shortly after
it was created, and I've seen it grow from a small
place where a handful of people talked about making
games, to a large site where new members arrive
every day, uploading their games, getting feedback,
chatting, and enjoying themselves while being part of
one of the largest unofficial GM communities.
TwilightPhantasm is a place where people from all
over the world come to talk about Game Making.
Needless to say, the community is very cordial in all
respects.
TP is the friendliest gaming website. You can get help
with your games yet have tons of fun chatting and
getting to know some of us.
BEN: TwilightPhantasm was derived from one of my
favourite words back when I first thought of it,
"Twilight". Then I thought that it would be a bit bland
on its own. It needed something to make it stand out,
something to make it more unique, thus I came up
with Phantasm. Just recently I was told it sounded
rather rude, I assure you it isn't though.
BEN: My initial motivation was to make and produce a
personal site for me and my games. When I first made
TP I had no experience in HTML and I never had any
intention for it to grow into what it is. I have
considered a name change since the name
TwilightPhantasm hardly fitted a community but I
couldn't change it, the name just kinda stuck.
TwilightPhantasm was a personal website up until the
Yoyogames forums in my opinion and a few others
had fallen into such a bad state that we created our
own forum on TwilightPhantasm. From there the site
just kept on growing into what it is today.
BEN: Well, it was just my style. I liked it, the website
has gone through so many graphical renovations
though as I am never satisfied with how it looks. At
first many people are very skeptical about TP from its
design but most of the members on TwilightPhantasm
either like it or have grown to like it. The design and
style does not represent the people though. We aren't
a load of crying complaining stereotypical "emo kids".
Most of us are nice, pleasant and generally normal
people. I personally think the style of TP is a bit like
marmite, you either love it or hate it.
BEN: My personal latest favourite features would be
the Download Cards. I am very happy with the way
they turned out. Overall, I can't really pick a favourite
feature, I am proud at what I have accomplished with
TP.
BEN: I have so many to add, but I guess I'll just talk
about a few. My next big aims are to get this credit
system fully operational, add game sorting and
searching (since we are getting a much bigger, than
I'd thought originally, game archive), rewrite the login
script, more graphical enhancements and new
themes for people not too keen on the style of the
website. Then it's just a case of listening to what the
members want and seeing what can be done.
BEN: I am very pleased. Considering that I never
thought it would become such a large website. Okay it
can't compare to 64Digits, Snowmoons, GMArcade
and the countless other ones out there, but I am so
proud of what I have accomplished. I have made
something that people like and use and I hope it won't
stop growing anytime soon.
So, I was playing Puyo Puyo the other day (or, to be
more precise, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine)
and I was struck by how well it illustrates an important
principle of game design-- the necessity of creating a
dynamic tension and interplay between two seemingly
mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed desires.
Keeping the height down helps stop your screen from
filling up, but it also hinders your ability to set up the
chain-reaction combos that'll bombard your opponent
with garbage blocks; building high towers of blocks
increases your chance of pulling off one of those
devastating combos, but it also greatly increases the
danger of losing the game. And, of course, your
opponent, whether computer-controlled or another
human player, is trying to do the same to you.
Though a similar dynamic exists in Tetris and other
falling-block puzzle games, ultimately the competitive
nature of Puyo Puyo and those garbage blocks
change everything. In Tetris, a player can choose to
play it safe or to go after high-scoring multiple-line
clearances; in Puyo Puyo, however, choosing one
strategy or the other is a recipe for disaster. The
player must act and think competitively, striking and
maintaining a balance between the two impulses of
attack and defense.
In some ways this sort of dynamic game play is part
and parcel of any competitive video game-- that is,
any game, regardless of the number of players, that
pits one intelligence against another-- it comes with
the territory. In a strategy game, such as Battle of
Wesnoth, you can only deal damage by putting
yourself in the line of fire and you only remove
yourself from danger by removing your ability to
attack. Limit break attacks in fighting games and
RPGs can only be accessed by sustaining massive
damage; sustain too much damage, of course, and
that's the end of the game. Tower defense games
create a tension between the desire to hold onto your
money, thus allowing you to buy better units later in
the game, and the need to buy enough units to allow
you to survive that long.
Such tension might be natural, but a good game
designer will always be acutely aware of that tension
and find ways to emphasize, encourage, and
strengthen it through deliberate and intelligent design
decisions. The classic shmup Galaga, like its
predecessor Galaxian and many other shmups before
and after it, tasks the player with attacking enemies
and evading them. But the tension is dramatically
increased, and the ultimate quality of the game along
with it, with the inclusion of the two-ship mechanic
that doubles the player's fire power along with the
size of the target the baddies are shooting and
swooping at.
Another example would be the classic arcade game
Robotron: 2084. In an interview with John Sellers,
the game's creator Eugene Jarvis described the
concept at the heart of the game:
"The game mechanic was based on the psychology
of having conflicting goals. You want to a) stay alive
with all this shit coming at you, b) kill the robots, and
c) rescue the humans. So there's this big conflict.
You know, here's 20,000 points but there's forty
bullets coming at me. Do I go for it?" (Arcade Fever:
The Fan's Guide to the Golden Age of Video Games,
Running Press Book Publishers, p. 53.)
It's that same principle of dynamic tension, so much
so that we might call it the Jarvis Principle. Good
game design will not only bolster the presence and
importance of the Jarvis Principle, but will make it
central to the game play. Again a kind of tension
exists, for example in Tetris-- the desire to clear more
lines versus the desire to play it safe-- or in most
platformers-- gaining a valuable power-up versus
going about your way. But, again, this tension is
mostly optional; you might desire that 'one-up' on the
other side of that large bed of death-spikes, but
choosing to go after it or ignore it is largely a matter of
player choice.
And there's nothing wrong with that-- believe me, one
thing we need more of, especially at the amateur
level, is player choice and autonomy!-- but there's no
real tension if it can be resolved by choosing one
option or the other. Perhaps that's why such dynamic
tension is more at home in games that, whether their
player interface is action-focused or more deliberate,
turn around strategy to one degree or another.
So how do we, as game designers, ensure a central
and compelling dynamic tension in our games,
especially those that exist in more action-oriented
genres? As always with art there's no easy or pat
answer for that-- no formula for inspiration, no paint-
by-numbers for an act of genius. But by keeping this
in mind when setting about designing a game and by
studying great games that do it well, there's a better
chance that we'll pull it off-- and thus, a better chance
that we'll make a better game.
Written by Tom Russell
Sandy Duncan: YYG goes back to the time when I
first left Microsoft in 2003. James North-Hearn (who
had just quit as VP Publishing at Infogrames) and I
were discussing how we could create a publishing
business that was more “streamlined” than the
existing games publishers. We came up with
something called “Thin Publishing”, which is
essentially a business that outsources as much as it
can. We looked at buying one of the UK based
publishers, but I got offered a lucrative job outside of
video games in the middle of these negotiations and
couldn’t resist taking the big salary on offer. We didn’t
give up on the idea completely, and over the next 2
years we met up with Spencer Hyman (who we
already knew) and he persuaded us to adapt the
business model to fit a web based business. So that’s
how we ended up pretty much with the idea for YoYo
Games that you know and love today. Our “end
game” is to create a publishing business helping the
best developers to sell their games and share in that
success. To do all of that we probably need to get
YoYo Games to be about 10 * as big as it is today, so
that means we need to continue to develop Game
Maker as well as the website.
SD: We felt terrible. The old Glog
www.playsnack.com is still around somewhere, I keep
it on our servers as a reminder of how difficult we
made it for ourselves at times. If you look at the
growth in the site and the community, then we must
have gotten more right than wrong. It was a great
feeling to see the feedback when we upgraded the
GMC server and forum software, I think this certainly
helped us win over a few of the doubters. We can’t
make everyone happy, but with what we’ve done so
far I think the “unhappy” folks are a small, but less
than silent minority.
SD: Absolutely. We still have our critics and I hope
they never go away because it helps to keep us alert.
Building YoYo Games is a slow process, but almost
everyone in the Game Maker community has been
able to get some benefit from our efforts. The GMC is
more reliable than it used to be for example !!!! 18
months ago there weren’t many places you could put
a game on a server and have it downloaded or played
an unlimited number of times all for free. This seems
to have made some people pretty happy. We’ll keep
these competitions running pretty much quarterly, but
look out for many more ways to earn some money
from the YoYo Games site in the next year.
SD: Hard to put a number on it, but my focus is on
taking the best games and turning them into
“products” that we can sell. We’ve already quietly
started work on putting the infrastructure together for
this. We will share the revenues equally with the
game developers. I can’t say much more, but will
make sure you' re among the first to know when we’re
ready to make a proper announcement !
SD: I think we’ve given the GMC a brilliant destination
to show the world what you can achieve with Game
Maker. The “GMC” in the shape of the YoYo Games
website has more than 10 times the traffic that
gamemaker.nl had less than 18 months ago so
something good must have happened. We serve
more than 10TB of data every month and it’s growing
every week. We’re far from sitting still congratulating
ourselves…we’re only one third of the way into a five
year plan.
SD: No plans. Less than 2% of our visitors are using
any browser other than IE/FF we just don’t have time
to test and support another add on.
SD: There are over 500,000 unique visitors to the site
every month…so if I said we listened to EVERY piece
of feedback, then I wouldn’t be telling the truth. BUT
we do keep a record of the main issues and try to
address them if we can. So don’t stop telling us
where there are issues or new features you would like
to see.
SD: Yes. Most of the work is in the website NOT in
Game Maker. If we decide to release this, then it will
be in the second of the two releases of the website
we plan for this year.
SD: Our ultimate goal is to publish the best of the
games that get uploaded to the site. We will of course
only do that with the permission of the developer of
the game. If we achieve our goals, then the most
successful developers could earn hundreds of
thousands of dollars…maybe even more. We’re
working hard behind the scenes on making this a
reality, but it takes time and money to make this
happen and we don’t (sadly) have unlimited
resources. The first people to earn money (we’ll
share our revenues with the developers of course) will
be doing so before the end of 2009, maybe sooner.
Raising funding (this has become a LONG and
difficult process. I also spend a LOT of time seeking
out and developing business partnerships that you
haven’t seen anything of yet.
SD: Yes, we will move to a new helpdesk system in
January and I have hired some new customer support
resource that will start at the same time. I expect big
improvements in the New Year
SD: Yes, pretty much. The first priority has been to
get the runner into C++. The dev work for this is
feature complete and we are in early testing.
Separately we will start work on the Maker part later
this year, though we haven’t as yet decided if this will
be done in C++ or some other platform. (We could
for example keep it in Delphi or maybe use C#).
SD: It takes a LOT of effort to do any of these things
properly and I haven’t seen one that is adequately
staffed or funded to really pull this off. We don’t rule
out making Game Maker an open source product
some day, but for now our focus is more on the
games and making Game Maker better as a
development environment, based mainly on Windows
as the key development platform. Worth noting that
every console game is developed on PCs, mainly
Windows machines.
SD: For now, yes. The good thing about Softwrap is
it’s cheap…unfortunately we get what we pay for.
Using another DRM is just a difficult thing to do right
now and we need the money from Game Maker sales
to help pay some of the bills, so changing to another,
more expensive DRM would mean we would
seriously have to consider charging more for Game
Maker. I think I can say that we almost certainly won’t
use Softwrap for GM8 unless they make a lot of
changes to their product. In fact I believe we may not
use a DRM at all, but that decision is a long way off.
SD:Not really, though the work we’ve done for Apple
Mac version is obviously pretty portable as OS/X is
based on BSD. The pity is we’ve run into real
problems with the tools we’re using on the Mac and
this might all get delayed until the C++ Runner is
debugged…that will at least let some of the games
run on a Mac…so Linux would be easy in a similar
sense, but we have no plans for this.
SD: Mark Overmars has done a few of course….and
Michel (Cassius) son Leo (he’s 11) is a big fan.
Otherwise sadly not.
SD: We al spend a lot of time reading all of the stuff
that gets posted on the site…whether that’s to the
YYG bits or the GMC…so anything that gets
published gets read by some or all of us, including the
magazines.
SD: I like 64 digits. I realise it’s more than a blog, but
it’s a way of seeing some things that are of interest to
the community that don’t always show up at the
GMC/YoYo.
SD: This is really the core of what YoYo Games is all
about. I don’t expect to see development on much
more than Windows and Mac (note the Mac version is
ready for a private Beta in the next few days. It’s
technically possible to have a Linux version (based on
the Mac version with Open GL), but I’m not
committing to it yet. The exciting area is having a
runner (and maker) that allows the developer to
“target” different platforms. If I could do this today,
then iPhone would be top of my list.
SD: Yes. There’s a possibility that we’ll do more
competitions in 09 than 08. We’re currently looking
for sponsors for some additional competitions, but the
quarterly $1,000 prize is pretty much a fixture.
SD: Not at all. We LOVE the accessibility that we get
for new GM enthusiasts as well as the fact that GM
also facilitates serious development. I would love to
have a debugger for the more serious developers as
well as the best extensions built in as standard
SD: Yes, there are lots of things I would like to see
done differently. In some ways I wish we had never
used a DRM….the main reason it’s still there is it
makes it really easy for us to get paid since we don’t
have any payment infrastructure built into the site.
…but that’s only one thing on a long list of “wishes”. I
start to get excited about GM 8, even though work
won’t start on it until early next year.
SD: Have patience, Rome wasn’t built in a day…we
have some very clear plans for what we’re doing.
Keep giving us your feedback…we really do try to
listen and take action. We’ve spent more than a
Million $$ so far and we will spend much more in the
next 2 years, so these are exciting days for the Game
Maker Community. You can help US by promoting
the site and especially getting people you meet/know
to play your games on YoYo.
Russell Carroll:I am involved in quite a few different
things at Reflexive. I work as a Game
Producer/designer creating games and working with
them through to completion. Typically I work with
developers outside of Reflexive to complete these
games and I usually have several projects in the fire
at the same time. I'm also part of our Publishing
group, so I play a lot of games to determine if we
might publish them and talk to the developers about
that. If we do publish a game, I might step in and be
the producer on our side of that project. As well I'm
the producer on the Mac Arcade. So I look at Mac
games, test them, wrap them with our DRM and keep
our Mac Arcade running. Lastly (long list!) I do press
and marketing for the games we release. I enjoy that
as I love to write and dealing with the press often
creates additional opportunities to write, and I've
enjoyed those as well. I wrote several articles for
Gamasutra this year and really enjoy the chance to
talk about our little niche of the games industry. Of
course that is just me. Reflexive is split between
doing game distribution and game development. The
distribution side recently became more fixed in
people's eyes as Reflexive was acquired by Amazon,
but traditionally I think more people think of us as
game creators.
Russell Carroll: There are certainly many ways to
judge success. Our Big Kahuna and Ricochet series
have certainly been very well-received by the public
and have sold really well. However, another way to
look at success is just achieving a dream. In that
respect, Swarm, our first game was a great success,
as have been all the titles that we've released. Wik:
Fable of Souls was another game that quickly comes
to mind as a key success as it was a game of the
year on both the PC and for XBLA.
Russell Carroll: Making games is difficult. If you've
been watching the financials you've seen just about
every major game company announcing layoffs and
division closures. In that world it is hard to be
successful regardless of your size. However, despite
the difficulty, there is a lot of joy that comes out of
working for a smaller development company. We are
somewhat forced to work on smaller projects, but that
really isn't a bad thing. Smaller projects mean that
each person is closer to the heart of the game. You
don't end up with an employee whose entire job is to
make the water look realistic. Each team member
has a lot of involvement in the game and can feel like
it is really their game. We are restrained in budget as
well, but that really helps to reign in the scope of
games and to focus on games that are smaller. In so
doing, you've got a great opportunity to focus on
game play and to make the game as perfect as
possible. So sure, there are challenges, but a lot of
those challenges turn out to be blessings in disguise
so to speak.
Russell Carroll: Making games for fun and for profit
are often very different things. To sell your game you
have to be aware of the market. What is selling?
How much of it is selling? Who is buying? Why are
they buying? As a company that also sells games we
get a lot of good information about what sells and
what doesn't, but just about anyone can get a good
feel for the downloadable games market by checking
out casualcharts.com (which happens to be run by a
Reflexive employee, the creator of both Big Kahuna
and Ricochet - James C Smith). The key thing to
remember is that if you want to sell your game, you
have to make a game that people will buy.
Sometimes, and I stress it's only sometimes, that
means you can't make the game(s) that you want. If
you just want to do your own thing, you can try to sell
that too, but in my experience, I'd say you are much
less likely to earn a livable income if you make your
game without considering what people are currently
buying.
Russell Carroll: Mostly we stick to casual game rules.
We use the mouse for player input and though we
may use the right mouse button, the game should be
playable with only the left mouse button. We spend a
lot of time working on difficulty ramps, trying to ensure
that the game is easy in the beginning and ramps up
slowly. It's also very important that everything be as
intuitive as possible and that there is a lot of visual
feedback for players, so that they get an immediate
response when they do something.
Russell Carroll: For me the answer is yes, but I've
only been making games with Reflexive for a short
time. In fact I only have one game that I've completed
with Reflexive, Airport Mania, though I'm currently
working on several more projects and previous to
working on games at Reflexive I did some game
development in my spare time with my brother (BC
Soft Games). So perhaps I'm still looking at game
development with child-like eyes, but I have to say
that I very much enjoy it. There are absolutely
moments when I look at a game and think that it just
isn't possible or when I get stuck in a design and can't
seem to see any solution, but after time, sometimes a
fair amount of time, ideas come and that, for me, is
the greatest part of game development. Ideas that
break down the walls that stopped your progress. I
really enjoy the creative side of making games, but I
also very much enjoy the producing side and ensuring
that the game is approachable by players and has the
extra touches that will make it a fun and unique
experience.
Russell Carroll: If I had to pick one part of making
games I didn't like, it would have to be level
balancing. It requires a lot of testers playing and a
ton of spreadsheets to determine where there are
problems in the levels, and there is a lot of second-
guessing difficulty curves as you try to make a best fit
for the majority of players while realizing that
regardless of what you do some people will think your
game is too easy and other will think it is too hard.
Russell Carroll: Just one last thought on making
games to sell. The way I've always thought of it is
that I have a long list of ideas for games. However,
on that list there are frankly a lot of ideas that I can't
do currently. They may be decent ideas for short
flash games, or great ideas for huge retail games, but
they aren't the right games for me right now. After
you take those ideas off your list, you're left with a list
of ideas you could do, but obviously, you're not going
to do all of them at the same time. You have to
narrow it down to one idea. For me, a part of that
process is thinking about how well the game might
sell. The public has different likes at different times,
so different ideas might be more commercially viable
at one time or another. In the end, I try to pick the
game that feels like it is right for the moment. That
does mean I probably don't pick an idea that sounds
cool, but doesn't seem like it will sell. However, that
doesn't mean I'm making a game that I don't want to
make. If you ever cross that line and do a project you
aren't interested in b/c you think it will sell, you'll find
yourself making a bad game. I think it's an important
distinction. It all starts with a long list, and if your list
is only one idea long, I'd recommend you spend some
more time thinking about game making. You'll find
that there are lots of ideas and interesting things you
can do if you take the time to consider, and when you
do, I'm certain you'll find that one of the ideas is both
interesting to you and seems like it would sell well.
One of the game's highest points is its integration with
the creator's community website, TwilightPhantasm.
Before you start playing, you are given the option to
enter your TP login details (or register there to get
some). Once you have, you can upload your scores to
the online highscore list there, and also win up to
three awards for achievements within the game.
Awards are collectible for members of
TwilightPhantasm, marking their achievements in
compatible games and for other achievements (eg.
winning a competition on the website).
Overall, despite a few flaws which drag it down a little,
MooMoo is still a fun arcade game. It sucks you in
fairly successfully and will have you playing a few
times to try and unlock the extra modes and the
awards. It's free - give it a go.
MooMoo is a minigame inspired by the Legend of
Zelda: Magora's Mask. In it, you play a farmer
defending his cows from attacking aliens. Unlike the
traditional farmer who usually would carry a shotgun
at all times, this little guy has a bow and a set of
arrows.
For every enemy you beat you get a little bit of money.
After the first (and each subsequent) wave of enemies
has been successfully beaten, you get to visit a shop
where other types of arrow exist, including bomb
arrows, arrows that shoot three at a time, and arrows
that burrow into the ground and dive up if they miss.
The mechanic works very well and is made better by
little features, such as a motion-planning mechanism
that destroys fired arrows on contact with the floor if
they won't hit an enemy. Particle effects are also put
to good use for bomb arrow explosions, etc.
There's also a varied set of enemies, that respond
differently to different arrows. Plain old black ghosts
are the basic enemy - one-shot kills, slow, and
frequently in large groups. There's also UFOs that
stay put in the air and try to beam your cows up,
enemies that can only be exploded, and several
others. As you progress, of course you'll need to buy
more expensive arrows as eventually the standard
ones just won't do.
The problem with the mechanism is that it's pretty
much all the same thing. If you're going for a
highscore expect to fire several hundred arrows.
Enemies are generally slow, very frequent, and easy
to miss with arrows (gravity takes its toll, making
shooting more than just point and click).
Graphically, the game has some high points, and
some low ones. Most of the graphics in the game are
made well - that's a high point. The low point is the
constant use of Arial as a font. Things like the
TwilightPhantasm login page and the HUD look really
bland as a result. As an add-on, the cows
unfortunately do not look much like cows.
Sound is adequate. Music is in MIDI format but fits the
game, which is rare for MIDIs. I couldn't hear many
sound effects at all, which was a let-down - it could've
done with some dying enemy sounds and the ping as
the bow fires an arrow.
+ Well-executed idea
+ Addictive
+ Inbuilt compatibility with TwilightPhantasm
- Prominent use of default fonts
- Some design flaws
- Can get a little repetitive
Written by NAL
Grappler (inventive name) is a game where you
control a ball on elastic by sticking the end of the
elastic wherever you like. Levels are simply an HUD,
the ball and elastic, and a load of differently coloured
blocks. It’s part puzzle, part platformer, part confusing.
Here’s why.
Firstly, it seems that there are about ten different
blocks that all do the same thing. I’m sure I got hurt by
at least five, and killed by at least two. Admittedly,
some were stationary and some were moving, but
trying to remember which blocks do what when you
have a ball swinging around isn’t too easy, especially
as there’s little indication by the block’s decoration
(bar one of the death blocks, that has a skull printed
on its side). Also, there are blocks that you can pass
through. the problem is that they look EXACTLY like
the blocks you CAN’T pass through. They’re usually
placed so it’s fairly obvious that they’re the way
forward, but occasionally you get to a dead end with
no idea where to go.
Another confusing aspect is starting the game. You’ve
read that you use the mouse to place the end of the
elastic wherever you like, so you get ready, you click
the Easy difficulty level and… oh no! You have to do
the tutorial first. You return to the main menu to find
there is no tutorial button (you find the tutorial by
going into Help then passing each help page). The
tutorial itself is well-made, with indicator blocks telling
you where to place your elastic and when to let go of
it.
Still, once you’ve got over the confusion aspect of
Grappler, you’re ready to play. It’s hard. Very hard.
You’ll undoubtedly “over-swing” and crash into a line
of death blocks many times. To avoid doing this, you’ll
use the elastic more often… only there’s a limit as to
the number of times you can do this. If you reach the
limit, you’re dead. You’re greeted with a random word
meaning “LOSER” and you’re at the start of the level
again.
Once you’re used to the painful difficulty and you
know what all the blocks do, the game is actually
pretty fun. It requires a lot of quick thinking, and a little
bit of remembering the level so you know when to use
the elastic effectively.
Graphically, the game is alright, nothing special.
Menus look alright, but the buttons don’t animate or
anything when they have a cursor sitting on them.
They do click, though. Many of the backgrounds are
taken from the Game Maker resource packs, which is
a bit of downer, but some are not.
Music and sounds are resource too, hence the low
rating I’ve given in this area. I hate the resource
sounds, as do many players, so be prepared to turn
your speakers off if you’re of the same opinion as me.
So, what’ve we learnt today? Grappler is undoubtedly
fun, but only if you’re willing to devote a little time to
get to know it better. It could do with some touching
up in every area, and if it got that, it could be a great
game. Until then, the potential’s there, but it lets itself
down.
+ Well-executed idea
+ Addictive
+ Inbuilt compatibility with TwilightPhantasm
- Prominent use of default fonts
- Some design flaws
- Can get a little repetitive
Written by NAL
The title can be pronounced either as "score" or as
"es-core", the latter a pun on the word "escort", which
also serves as the game's central mechanic: you are
charged with shepherding an otherwise defenseless
President through pirate- and rebel-infested outer
space to a colony that's in some kind of turmoil. What
this means, game-play wise, is that you
control two ships, one of which is charged
with protecting the other.
I decided to make this game a scrolling
shooter for four primary reasons. First, it
gave the player greater mobility, making it
easier to dodge enemies, bullets, and
asteroids while attempting to nab power-
ups. Secondly, it made it harder to defend
the second ship, which is constrained to
following the first ship's movements along a
vertical axis. If the first ship had been
likewise constrained, ala Galaga or
Galaxian, he would always be between the enemy
and the second ship; the second ship would never
have been in any danger that wasn't already posed to
the first. Thirdly, the power-ups-- and especially the
Tower power-up-- were created to make greater use
of the entire playing field. The fourth and final reason
is largely an aesthetic one, as I became enamoured
early on with the idea of a "widescreen" game, in
which there is a pronounced difference between the
long horizontal playing field and the short vertical one.
The primary offensive capability possessed by the
Molly II is a horizontally-scrolling bullet-- the standard,
of course, for the genre. The bullet initially causes
one point of damage, sufficient for destroying most
low-level enemies. At the end of each stage, the
bullet's strength is increased by one or two points
depending on how many enemies you've destroyed.
But a shooter can quickly grow stale without power-
ups. (cf. my article on power-ups in the first issue of
Russell's Quarterly.) In this game, I provided four
additional offensive abilities:
The double shot fires two lasers. It also yields one-
and-a-half times as many points as the regular shot.
While the normal bullet sprite is four pixels high by
four pixels wide, each laser is four pixels high by ten
wide, with a space of eighteen pixels between them.
The smallest enemy is sixteen pixels high, meaning
that there is a higher probability of a hit with the
double shot.
The tower weapon is the most unusual. This allows
the player to create up to five automatically-firing
towers. Once created, they begin to slowly ebb their
way to the left and off the screen. Planting them
further to the right maximizes their potential, but also
the vulnerability of the president's ship. This push-
and-pull between offensive and defensive needs, as
well as the transitory nature of the towers themselves,
is emblematic of the game's central strategic
elements.
A bit of nerfing was required when I introduced the
homing missile. They immediately seemed to work
far too well, immediately destroying just about
everything in sight. I briefly tried making them slower
or less numerous, but I found that in doing so I greatly
decreased the fun factor. Instead, I reduced their
damage capabilities to 1/4 of a hit point, meaning that
four homing shots would be required to do the work of
one normal bullet. And though both the tower and
double shot bullets are upgraded along with the
normal bullet, the homing missile remains at 1/4 of a
point through out the game.
Insight Into: S*Corps
The fourth and final power-up, the bomb, creates a
large circular explosion-- roughly 240 pixels in
diameter-- causing 1/10 of a point of damage per
frame of collision for up to eleven frames. This also
prevents it from being abused, but being that it can be
deployed up to about six times in a single second, it
should take care of most enemies. Just in case I
nerfed too much in this case, I gave it the added
capacity of destroying asteroids-- the only one of your
weapons able to do so.
The first thing I noticed after deploying my towers is
that it drove my accuracy rate to pot, thus preventing
me from achieving an end-of-the-stage accuracy
bonus. I should have seen that coming; with eight
bullets fired in eight directions, there's a strong
chance only a few will connect. And so, of course, I
changed the creation event for my tower bullets so
that they would not increase my global variable
"global.bulletcount" and thus not negatively impact the
player's accuracy rating, which was determined by
dividing the number of hits by that variable.
I found a similar problem with my homing missile.
The step event directs the missile to step towards the
x and y coordinates of my enemy parent object, pirate
1. Unfortunately, the missiles went towards that
particular enemy at the expense of all others, and
when that single enemy type was destroyed, it did not
go after the child objects, instead relaying an error
message.
And so, I created a new object-- called "enemy
parent", which I set as the parent for pirate 1, which
was still the parent of the other enemy objects. That
seemed to work; the bullets now went after all nearby
enemies, moving from one to the other when their
work was done. Unfortunately, when the missiles did
their job and cleared the screen of enemies, there
were no more objects for them to move towards:
another error message. I tried the quick fix of "If
object enemy parent exists," step towards it, "else,
destroy self", but for some reason it still prompted an
error message.
The answer was obvious; I put an instance of the
enemy parent object in the first level of the game and
made that object invisible and persistent. Because
"enemy parent" had no events (remember, the
various collision events were still in the object "pirate
1", which was still parent to the other objects, making
"enemy parent" their grandparent, so to speak), it
could not be destroyed by the homing missiles that,
having cleared the screen of other enemies, shot
themselves off screen towards it.
But all that gave rise to the problem I hinted at earlier.
Having cleared the screen of enemies, I found myself
shooting dozens of homing missiles off-screen in
between waves, which-- like the tower bullets, only
more-so-- destroyed my accuracy rate. And so I took
that same solution-- not counting tower bullets
towards the bullet count-- and applied it here. Having
done so, and feeling that the double shot was out of
place as the only special weapon to count towards
the bullet count, I decided to be consistent: all special
weapons would have only
a positive effect on the
accuracy rating, thus
making them more
desirable.
I did not realize at the time
just how desirable I had
made them, and the
double shot in particular...
The game has a
moderately high difficulty
level in its normal mode, and so to ease it up a little I
upped the starting number of lives from three to six.
Of course, these lives are really irrelevant if anything
happens to the second ship-- one hit and it's game
over.
To give these lives some value in view of the game's
central mechanic-- defending the other ship-- I
enabled the player to commit a strategic self-
sacrafice. When the player collides with an enemy, all
other enemies currently on the field and cleared from
it. So, when an enemy is getting too close to the
President's ship, a player with an extra life can
choose to ram himself into something, thus making
the save.
I felt such a useful possibility would strengthen a
player's desire to garner extra lives in case he needed
to use them later. Initially, I decided that the first new
life would be earned at 10,000 points, the second at
20,000, the third at 40,000, and so on, doubling like
an experience table in an old RPG. But the flaws in
this plan were two-fold; first of all, once I had settled
on an extremely finite number of stages, it became
apparent that the possibilities for extra lives were very
limited. Secondly, it would make for very long dry
stretches of time between 40 and 80 and 160,000.
Taking the advice of my wife on the subject, I gave
the player an extra life at every 10,000 points. This
made the difficulty curve significantly less steep
without changing the other aspects of the game play.
This decision, coupled with the others, resulted in a
very happy accident. Recall that there is an accuracy
bonus (10,000 for 100%), that special weapons do not
affect the bullet count, and that the double shot scores
1.5 more points. Can you see where this is going?
Let's say, for example, that you kill ten enemies with
ten normal bullets-- that's 10 (hits) divided by 10
(bullets) for an accuracy rate of 1-- that's 10,000
points. Now let's say that you killed ten more
enemies with your double shot. That's 20 (hits)
divided by 10 (bullets)-- that's an accuracy rate of 2.
That's 20,000 bonus points and two extra lives. Now,
let's say you fire one normal bullet at one enemy, grab
a double shot, and hit twenty-nine other enemies
solely with that. That's an accuracy rate of 3000%.
That's thirty extra lives.
Wow, I thought. That's really cool. That could
potentially break the game. But my first impulse was,
let's keep it in. For one thing, I figured if I had that
reaction to it, other players might have the same. It
makes the double shot more valuable than it would be
otherwise, preventing it from looking like a "nothing"
power-up in comparison to the tower, bomb, or
especially the homing missile.
And, secondly, there was the nature of the game itself
to take into account. You could have a hundred extra
lives, and if one enemy hit the other ship just once, it
would still be game over. This "game breaking"
feature could certainly be an advantage to the player,
giving him more ships to sacrafice if need be, but he'd
still have to play the game.
And, coming back to that screen-clearing sacrafice
feature, its implementation resulted in another
unexpected surprise, one that nerfed the homing
missile further away from the realm of near-infallibility.
Playing through the first boss fight, I found that once I
came into contact with the boss's shots or missiles,
he-- like all the other enemies before him--
disappeared. Since this was more-or-less against the
entire idea of a boss fight, I disassociated the boss
objects from the other enemy object types-- not
linking them to "pirate 1" or "enemy parent".
Now, if you've been paying close attention, you know
that the homing missiles are set to move towards the
enemy parent object and its children, which means, of
course, that the homing missiles do not move directly
towards the boss. Instead, they move towards the
hidden enemy parent object situated in the HUD.
With the larger boss objects, the homing missiles will
of course make contact as the boss object would be
between them and their goal, but with the smaller
bosses-- those in levels two, four, and five-- the
homing missile isn't quite as perfect.
Written by Tom Russell
Senseless War is my latest game, a game I started on
March 8, 2007. It all started as I was playing the game
that inspired me to make Senseless War; a tower
defense game called Middle Earth by mikeb33. As
soon as I finished playing Middle Earth, I was full of
excitement and inspiration. I wanted to make a tower
defense game myself and the ideas were just flowing
through my head. So I opened Game Maker, created
a new sprite, and started the game Senseless War.
Then came the first problem, I had no idea how to
make a tower defense game. So I quickly went
straight to the GMC and started looking for examples
of TD games. I downloaded many examples and each
time I still had no idea what to do. Many of the
examples made no sense to me at the time and I
nearly lost interest. Then, after a while of searching, I
found one example that did help me understand
better, and after playing around with the example and
learning what does what, I then quickly started SW.
The first month of SW was full of development. I had
released a beta already and had already gotten some
inspiring compliments. The start of SW was so intense
that I had a new beta nearly every week for around
two months, constantly adding new things. Once I had
the engine completed, adding new units to the game
was nothing. I had found graphics that I liked, which
at the time were stickfigures, and I was proud already.
At this point, SW itself was a simple tower defense
game, with only a small fraction of things to buy
compared to now. I soon added more units, defenses
and even started to make what I called God Powers.
It was a grand start of a game. Soon after the 7th
beta, a player of my game PMed me, his name was
Mentos and he suggested at the time to add a
highscore table. He added it himself and we became
partners. After that, we had a highscore table and I
knew I was really going to make something special as
well.
The months passed by and I constantly added to SW.
Releasing a beta every 2-4 weeks, I was surprised by
the amount of responses I was getting. My original
thread had at the time over 40 pages of replies. By
beta 17, I was proud of what I had. Soon after that,
my game got placed on Game Hippo (R.I.P) and beta
17 was downloaded over 7000 times. Reviews and
articles about SW were written, and all was going well.
After that, I slowed down and started working on other
projects of mine. After accidentally releasing the
source of SW and after about a year of consistent, but
dithering work, I decided to postpone SW and it
stayed in the dark for a bit of time. Time went on, my
other works were finished or abandoned, and I was
again looking for some inspiration and ideas. As I
went through my abandoned games, looking for
perhaps the urge to finish them, I passed by
Senseless War, and decided to open it.
Soon after that, I was quickly changing things, adding
units, and taking some away. Changing the graphics
and making new ones. I was full of inspiration again.
The idea of online play had come and gone, never to
be made. Highscore tables had been made, hacked,
and replaced. Everything was being worked on and
polished, and I felt good about SW, I knew it was my
best game yet.
Towards the end, I found myself trying to find
something to do. It was either changing the graphics
or adding new options to the game. Finally, after fixing
every bug I could find, polishing every thing I could, I
realized it; I had finished Senseless War and I
couldn't have been any prouder.
Written by Michael Febus
If you’re planning on building more than one website
anytime soon, or you’re thinking about starting up a
web design business, you’ll realise that it’s relatively
difficult to get great resources to assist you for
nothing. That is unless you want to be dodgy and
download it all off BitTorrent.
However, over my years I’ve discovered plenty of
resources that are free and are a great addition to
your web designing. It’s especially useful for
businesses that need minimal costs and maximum
profits. So let’s go through the 10 essential free
resources for web design!
This is a wonderful application that will help you
format and organize all your website documents
properly. It is, as you may have a guessed, a basic
text editor like Notepad, but with many features that
centralise the organisation and layout of your markup
code. This includes colour-coding in plenty of
languages including HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript,
and many others. There is also tabbed support, so
you can open multiple files in one window, and switch
them via tabs. You can hide/show sections of code in
a tree-like structure (such as hiding all the content
inside the BODY container), neatly tab your code, and
do countless other things to convert and optimise all
your documents.
Notepad ++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
Unfortunately for us Internet Explorer sucks. Yet,
ethically we should still be designing websites that
work for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (at least), as well
as all our friends like Firefox and Opera. However it’s
irritating for most web designers when you have to
test your website on multiple browsers, and you can
only have one version of Internet Explorer installed on
your computer at once. Well, this program contains 5
old versions of Internet Explorer, custom-designed to
not interfere with your main installation. Considering
these 5 versions don’t include Internet Explorer 7, the
general idea is that you install Internet Explorer 7 and
then MultipleIE. It’s very simple to install and it
doesn’t add crap all over your computer.
MultipleIE: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
A very valuable resource, and used globally. This is a
site that generates made up words that appear like
actual text in a website. This is for
dummy/placeholder text in your website before it is
developed, when you are yet to process the content
but would like to see what it’s like with a certain
amount of text in it.
Lipsum.com: http://www.lipsum.com/
SwishMAX has always been my preferred editor for
flash animations and websites. They’ve been very
kind to offer discontinued products for free on their
website. SwishMAX 1 is still a very application. It
allows the use of actionscript, key framing, and so on.
It’s absolutely free and much easier to use than
Adobe’s range of products.
SwishMAX: http://www.swishzone.com/
Joomla! Is a free content management system that
you can integrate into any website. You just need a
server that supports MySQL, PHP, and Apache. It’s a
little complicated to install and use, but only someone
who is able to cope with relatively complicated
installations will want a powerful beast like Joomla!
Joomla!: http://www.joomla.org/
This is a blog website designed to be easily
implemented into any website. This is great if your
client wants to add news or blog entries. To be
honest, I am yet to use it but will need to in future and
am told that it is a very useful and easy resource.
Inblogit: http://www.inblogit.com
This website takes screenshots of a web-page under
various conditions, of which you can select yourself
on an easy, tick-box based menu. This is useful for
testing to see whether your website looks correct on
different browsers, resolutions, and java, flash, and
javascript settings (different installed versions, or
disabled entirely).
Browsershots.org: http://browsershots.org/
This is one of the most popular FTP clients around –
it is free, though it does have a nag window at the
start. Regardless, it has all the features you could
want and is very fast and smooth. The GUI is nice
too. If you’re looking for something a bit more simple
I’d suggest CoreFTP or just your basic Windows
Explorer FTP Client.
SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/download/
Colour Lovers is a cute little community website,
where you can browse through colours, palettes, and
patterns that people have come up with. It’s rather
strange that people are submitting solid colours and
giving them names… but hey, whatever floats their
boat. It’s still cool to use this website if you need to
find a nice colour theme for your own design.
Colour Lovers: http://www.colourlovers.com/
If you feel unethical downloading Adobe’s Master
Collection CS3 knowing you’re only using about 5%
of its features, SplashUp is a great free web-app that
takes the form of a simplified Adobe Photoshop.
Instead of downloading the program, you use a tool
embedded into the website to make your designs – it
includes blend modes, layers, and so on.
Splash Up: http://www.splashup.com/
Written by RhysAndrews
So many 3D effects have been made with Game
Maker, but there is no place where there's a list of all
those effects. That's what I thought when I created the
3D effects topic on the Game Maker Community. The
list of effects kept growing and growing and currently
it contains 69 different effects. As the list was so un-
browsable due to the big number of effects in it, I had
been thinking about actually creating a place that
would host all the effects, but I never got around to
getting the good idea about it. Luckily though, Edge
PM'ed me about it a month later.
When Edge PMed me about a website for the effects
topic, I was delighted. Finally there was somebody
who had a really great idea for a website for the
effects. The basic idea was simple: create a website
where people can post effects, download effects, and
also comment and rate effects, as well as creating a
nice community for all those effect creators from the
Game Maker community. So after discussing some
things we should have in it, we started building the
website. As we didn’t have a host, we used BlueBind
as the base of the database. After different designs,
adding new features and changing features, we finally
completed the main website as it now is.
We currently have 15 effects on the website, and
hope more and more people will upload their effects
to get the database to be even more useful to people.
And as the main idea of the website is about effects, I
had to write a piece actually about the effects. This is
that piece, in the form of some effect reviews.
Josh really did a great job on this effect. In the
example, the shadow script is used for a dynamic
environment, but I don’t think it’s suited for that. I think
it’s suited a lot better for a static environment.
Because when you look at the screenshots or just
stand still in the example, you see how the shadows
actually seem to warp around the level. But actually,
they don't. It just draws a wall from the wall edge in
the direction of the light, which will make it look rather
unrealistic when you move around. When you stay
still though, phew, this looks awesome. I think the 4/5
it has on the site is deserved for this effect.
What’s nicer than a desctructable environment in 2D?
Add another dimension and you know what I mean.
Even though graphically D3DHT doesn’t look very
good, it actually creates the great effect of blasting a
hole in the terrain, as well as blowing everything
around the explosion center away. At first glance, it
looks rather unappealing, but when you look further
into it, it really is very nice. Just I do think the creator
could’ve done a little bit more to make it look better.
e.g. Use a more realistic grass texture, alpha map the
smoke, center the tree’s origin. But other than those
things I think brett14 really did a great job on this
effect, and it could be great looking in games in
combination with proper graphics.
On the G3D website, you can also register for an
account. This gives you a lot of extra features for the
website, like commenting on news, effects, and user
pages, rating effects, posting in the forums, and more.
The main thing you can do when you are registered is
uploading your own effects. We encourage you to
upload your own effects so the database will keep
growing and growing and get more and more usefull
to other users. To upload your effect, first register.
After registering, you will be sent an e-mail containing
validation information. After you have validated your
account, you go to Submit Effect in the main menu. In
that screen, everything speaks for itself. After you're
done filling in all (required) fields, you click the
“Submit” button. And there you go, you submitted
your effect and can now find it on your own page, on
the front page, and in the effects database.
Now, this is probably something none of you have
heard about yet, but Edge and I are developing an
effects demo to promote the website and D3D in
Game Maker in general. It will include great new
effects, as well as some simple physics and
gameplay. Effects inside the demo will include barrel
explosions, barrels leaking oil, sparks, and much
much more. We aim for it to be a great improvement
on 3D graphics in Game Maker so far. It's a little bit
too early for screenshots, as we have only created
seperate effects, and haven't combined them yet. Be
sure to check the website soon though, because we
plan to release it in the following 2 weeks.
Written by
Homepage: gmc.yoyogames.com/?showtopic=373402
Having a custom icon for your game is just one of the
things you can do to add an extra layer of polish to
your game. For a free dedicated icon maker, you
really can't get much better than IcoFX. It's image
creating is so good it could easily be a standalone
general image editor, with a whopping 10,000x zoom
you can easily pick out the details you need. While
GM only supports 32x32 standard icons, this program
also includes support for many other types, including
Vista PNG graphics. It's as easy as microwavable pie
with a superb clean and clear interface allowing you
to make what you want. You'd be daft to make icons
with anything else. This program is extremely highly
recommended.
Written by Timoi
This isn't an application, but a website that gives away
a whole piece of software everyday. For just 24 hours
the site hosts a fully legal, no strings attached, full and
registered program that can be yours for ever. If you
miss the 24 hours which it is up for, then you'll never
have another chance. It's strictly for one day only! You
won't have to visit the site every day though to get the
best applications as which ones are going to be up for
grabs are listed at the beginning of the week, and you
can subscribe to it's RSS feed. It's a great project with
many pieces of software that can be beneficial to
making games.
I used to think that throwing a friends pile of research
papers collected from all over the world into a mess
was an example of decompiling. But not anymore.
Definitely not anymore. Everyone these days is
fretting about what might happen when their source
code is decompiled and looked at (answer: probably
nothing). You can feed your hunger for security by
using the GM Obfuscator. Essentially it renames all
variables, resources, and adds junk Naples style into
your code, this makes it impossible to understand to
anyone who decompiles your game. It supports all
GM formats, is simple to use, and is growing steadily
with many features added as users demand them.
GiveAwayOfTheDay
Homepage: giveawayoftheday.com
GM Obfuscator
IconFX
Homepage: icofx.ro
GMTech Magazine will be back with Issue 15 is the new year, it
will feature a large amount of changes in order to further
improve the magazine and make sure that you all continue to
enjoy it. Thanks again to all of you who have supported us over
the last couple of years and to those who have contributed to
the magazine, your amazing help will not forgotten. We will see
you in a few months.
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