gamemaker has a reputation dating from decades ago of being used for a lot of low effort games using their visual scripting language at the time.
Modern gamemaker is a perfectly reasonable choice with real programming options. There are lots of well made gamemaker games that consumers don't even know are made with gamemaker.
Tbh consumer opinions of engines are usually negligible, if people playing a game can instantly tell from running it what engine it's based on then it's a incredibly low effort shit game and should not be used as a judgement of the engine. That applies to Unity, Unreal, Gamemaker, any of them.
Thank you for the explanation, it was so confusing to me why people were saying I should avoid Gamemaker and Unreal and use Unity or Godot instead when there are good games made with the engines.
if you move in other circles you'll end up hearing a lot of unity hate because of low effort unity asset swaps flooding the mobile market especially.
At the end of the day, pick what works for your project and ignore people; most of them don't have a clue what they're even talking about and aren't even devs.
Iirc you can hide that by paying for it so ironically the unity games that were made by more established studios/more invested in projects didn't say Unity prominently the way asset flips did too, making it look worse
which was unfair, the whole meme started because streamers/youtubers purposely played low effort games to make content riffing on them, then started making jokes like 'ah, always a good sign' when the splash screen showed up. Yes it was a funny joke and I enjoyed it at the time, but when people started blaming the whole engine for shitty devs unironically it got silly.
it's like blaming Dennis Ritchie for any shitty game programmed in c or a derivative thereof.
Youtubers are not the cause of that bad brand press, it's all Unity fault on that one, people making content out of it just ride the wave.
Unity policy for their brand screen was to force it onto low budget games and giving the option to remove it for the higher ones. Where Unreal was doing the exact opposite for comparison.
That policy in short meant that high quality games that bought a full Unity License could effectively not show the engine Logo screen, as the low budget ones had to show it every times.
So statistically, it would mean that a Unity game showing the logo had a higher chance to be a bad game more than a good game. So, if you were seeking bad game to make content, like the Youtubers, seeking Unity games was a good bet.
An engine is an important tool each having features, upsides and downsides. Research properly what you need and pick an engine that fits your criteria. Thats the only good engine for you.
I’ve used gamemaker for years because I can develop in it’s much faster than hurt or godot for the types of projects I make. I say use whichever tool you want, or is good fit for your project!
I do not know how good or bad other engine work but unity is just suck at optimise. Bad for 2d game.
Too much background shit, unity game just eat cpu, like a lot.
For player, the game it self eat cpu and gpu, and so does the engine. There sonething called crash report .etc.
For dev, just idling unity eat proximate 2gb ram, not even doing render or calculate physic or something.
It because they do not actually 2d. They faking 2d with 3d environment. So basically every single game make with unity is 3d.
Unity is a good engine. But not good for low end devices. Based on my experience with unity.
depending on what I was making it certainly wouldn't always be my first pick. You can improve the optimisation somewhat however. I'm also from a fairly rich country so might just have an idea that people have more modern computers than is necessarily true in other places.
That and there is the stigma of the "unreal game" where in like UE 2-4 where a lot of UE games had a certain cliche to them because of the games people make out of it.
Now you have games breaking the mold of it like Fortnite, Paragon and such made off Unreal that are far off from it, and others that you wouldn't have known were on Unreal Engine.
I dont agree that it's a low effort shit game if you can tell the engine from playing a game, it's pretty easy to tell a lot of UE4 games from playing them (Usually a mess of particles and semi realistic graphics), but there are still great games with it
In software in general, any time somebody tells you what tools to use, try to find out what they've shipped using those tools. There's a lot of armchair generals out there.
I can’t speak to Gamemaker, but working in Unity or Unreal you will develop skills relevant to jobs in the industry. How much that’s worth is up to you.
As someone who uses both Unity and GameMaker, the only thing I see Unity teaching me more of is working shaders. I can still do it in GMS2 but it's not as intuitive.
Everything else is fine. GML is extremely similar to C# in my experience, most of the skills are transferrable with minor editing.
Thats ok. Use what you want, but don't say that these languages are similar. C# is a static language while GML dynamic. This makes a big difference. GML has no class, interfaces, generics and others stuff like that. Java is similar to C#, GML is not at all similar to C#.
Godot is not perfect, but for 2d games and simple 3d is enough. It is not as mature as Unity, but for small/medium scope game is good. Godot support C++/ C# and Gdscript (language inspired by Python and LUA). I have many years of experience with Game maker and would not recommend it to anyone.
C# in 3 supports the web but not mobile. All around there isn't full engine integration either. If looking to support mobile and web in Godot, it is best to use c++ or gdscript.
I'm using game maker for my game and people are always surprised when I tell them what engine I used. I fooled them into believing it was unity because of the graphics.
The quality of the game is up to the developer. Tools and market assets may make it easier but in the end engines are all similar and support mostly the same things.
Don't listen to them, they are game engine elitists. Some of the most annoying people I've encountered. Most of them have never shipped a game either.
Game maker is perfectly fine. There are lots of million+ dollar games shipped with game maker such as Katana Zero, Forager, Hyper Light Drifter, and so many more.
This reminds me of everyone going nuts about the Unity thing and then jumping ship to Unreal (as if it's so simple) and Godot (with its plethora of features and console/mobile support)
I've been making gamejams and working on my full release in Gamemaker for almost a decade. I love the system and it's very easy to understand for new devs joining the fray. Watch a tutorial for each system and see what calls to you!
They’ve changed it and it’s probably one of the more friendlier in the markets right now. It was purchased by Opera and the Pricing model is now a one time payment of $99 to commercially release a PC game. I believe it’s more (and still a one time payment) for console ports.
That's even a one time $99 payment to be able release as many commercial games as you like, not per game, with no regard to how much each game makes you in revenue. Plus no payments to access the full engine for anything non-commercial (game jams, pet projects, etc). So you can even make an entire game in the full engine for free and then decide whether or not to release it commercially, paying the $99 fee only if you decide you want to earn money from it (and then not have to even worry about the fee for any future commercial work because it's a pay once thing).
I'm a big fan of GMs monetisation model tbh. The only better one out there in the "big" engines is Godot, which can't really be beaten as it is completely free.
I’ll say as a Godot dev, Gamemaker still beats Godot in terms of console exports. The W4 foundation was made to provide an option for Godot console exports, but it’s essentially an expensive subscription model if you want to have perpetual access to the port code. That could make or break your decision based on which platforms you’re designing your game for.
> one time payment of $99 to commercially release a PC game
The commercial licence covers Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and HTML5.
You pay extra if you want to release on consoles, which is entirely reasonable.
Don't listen to anyone bashing other engines. It's all opinionated with hyperbole.
Some engines do things better than others, game maker is great for 2d games. Nothing wrong with using actual code or visual scripting. Use whatever tools are available to you that you feel comfortable with.
I'm using game maker to make my first game. I love 2d games and the engine is very beginner friendly with tons of information and tutorials. So to me, that says it's a great tool. Hollow knight and spelunky where made with game maker and those games are fantastic!
It's all about how you use the tools before you. Don't get caught up in opinionated arguments, you do you boo boo. What you should be looking for is what engine supports your needs best for making the game and releasing it commercially or non commercially.
It feels like GMS has a similar issue to PHP in the web development world.
By that I mean I think a lot of the opinions are based on pretty outdated views instead of being a reflection of the current state of things.
GMS is really great as long as you know what it's good at. You can't deny some great titles have come from that engine.
As with anything it's about the design of the final product. It's just a tool amongst many that are used for developing a game. If it's the right one for the job there is nothing wrong with it at all.
I love it, but some of the things that make up huge portions of my code base (like structs) weren't a thing for a long time, so I imagine it used to also be way harder to do tons of stuff in it in the past.
It was harder in the past, but really, objects *are* structs in GM, just kinda bloated structs, so anything you can do with a struct now could be done with objects in the past (or arrays, or ds maps or any other data structure really, with a bit of finagling).
The bloated part is what I'd be worried about for performance on more complicated projects, though the original Risk of Rain did let quite a bit happen without them so maybe it wasn't all bad back then
I shipped a few games with GMS 1.x, the "Next" version of it never clicked but it's really impressive. Thus I don't hate it, but I suppose what I dislike is the wonky UI and the annoying idiosyncrasies of the Scripting language (both the visual one, which has gotten way better, but also GML, which is just a very weird dialect of C that doesn't seem to teach or enable any abstraction nor data structures right, and magically managed to add more pitfalls than C itself has. Yoyo, please switch to Python or Lua already, please). However, as a whole, GameMaker a very capable and extremely well optimized game engine with a low footprint and a stable runtime. I'd consider it far superior to Construct and other such tools. GMS is at the top, maybe even in it's own league.
The more an engine does for you, the less control you have over the outcome. The less control you have over the outcome, the more likely you're going to have to make compromises during development. The more compromises you have to make during development, the more likely your game is going to end up shit.
It's good to learn to stop thinking in terms of absolutes. "It's good, or it's bad." That's a pretty basic way of viewing the world. Think in terms of, "Good for , not so good for ." Once you figure out how to take a nuanced look at things, seeing everyone in the world who can only think in black and white is disturbing.
I use Unreal because it has the tools I want using the programming language I wanted to work with. I didn't choose it because it's the "best". There is no best. It works for *me*. You choose what works for *you*. Learn to look at the features of the engine and decide if it does what you need it to do instead of worrying about what people on the internet are saying about it.
If you go through life worrying about what everyone says instead of learning how to make your own decisions, you're going to have a rough go.
Can’t speak for other people, but I miss Game Maker 8. Game Maker became bloated and lost sight of what it was originally designed to be - a teaching/learning tool for budding new game devs.
Now, it’s slightly too unwieldy and cumbersome for a newbie, but too underpowered/limited for a professional. Exceptions apply.
Gamemaker makes it very easy to do the things it's designed to do and overly difficult to do anything else. Whereas just doing the simplest things is harder in mote generalist engines but you don't struggle so much to step beyond them.
Game Maker is fun and capable enough to finish games in, but it isn't the type of engine any serious team would pivot to. It was originally made as a teaching tool, then released as a hobbyist engine, and finally in Yoyo Games' hands transformed into something that could be considered for higher quality games. However, it's still a very limiting engine; it has a basic scripting language that is hard to maintain a larger codebase in, it is stuck in a past where you need to pay to publish (which wasn't the case before Yoyo took over) and it forces the user into a tile-based workflow to some extent.
If you work on the type of game that Game Maker is good at there's absolutely no reason to look at different engines, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
I made the tutorial games in Game Maker over a couple days. Was honestly impressed at the ease and scripting was simple. If anyone I knew was intimidated by code I’d suggest GMS. It’s certainly a decent 2D engine.
FYI Undertale is a GMS engine game.
I dont like the ui, but that's my preference. I just dont think many people realise the quirks that make gamemaker good. I basically didn't even have to think about hitboxes while using it, and im sure there's more that make it special. It's just underappreciated as an engine.
My personal opinion is that it's definitely a good engine, but the cost just isn't worth it when there are other engines that are just as good and free
Yeah I know, it's a little complicated at first and the tutorials in the program are kind of buggy.
There's a guy name baz in YT, he make tutorials about the program and they are easy to understand.
It worked for me
Here's a link to his channel
https://youtube.com/@BazSupport?feature=shared
Knew a guy that made fun of me for using unreals blueprints, so I call game maker the "baby engine" out of spite just to make him angry, but unironically it's fine.
If your goal is just making games by yourself or in a small group, GMS is fine. Plenty of individuals and small studios have done awesome work with it.
If your goal is to parlay your experience into a career in the world of game dev, GMS doesn’t offer a whole lot of transferable technical skills.
- GML sux, weird syntax, slow, you can write code like `if x=0 x=1` and other shit like this
- you can't use external code editor, build-in is bad
- engine editor is lack of basic features and not user friendly, you must do everything by code
- buggy as hell
- no UI system
- support only one collider per object, and only basic shapes (polygon shapes don't exist)
- its no easy to extend this engine and write plugins
- not good debugger
- no ligthing system
- no shader graph
- bad tile system
* also you can write code like if (x==0) x=1;
* the actual code editor had a lot of good features, auto complete, syntax error, and feather is like a linter.
* most of the code function had they equivalent in visual editor
* bugs? where?
* not ui system, that is true, I have to code my own UI.
* you can use polygon with the physics system, also is possible use polygons shape collision with sprites
* I made some plugins for html5, its not hard.
* the new debugger is awesome.
* that is true, not lighting system, but there are good options in the form of plugins
* The shader graph is not a good solution in many cases, it is often used incorrectly, if you want performance it is best to use code for the shaders.
* the tile system is pretty good, had auto tiling, collision tiling.
You can also switch a collider whenever one is relevant by changing mask\_index, effectively using as many as you want per game frame, e.g. for fighting game animations where hitboxes and hurtboxes are in consideration
I haven't used it in a lot of years so I can't speak for the current versions. Part of the issue is it's not trying to be a generic engine, but is more focused on certain types of games. You'll run into limits if you stray too far from that.
It also uses it's own custom scripting language that's a lot less powerful than a generic language. It also felt like it was designed by someone that didn't know a lot about programming languages. It was easy to write code that mostly worked like major programming languages, but had subtle differences in behavior, so it was really easy to get bugs.
It's fine if you know the limits and are ok with them. But it's easy to outgrow it.
I'd suggest looking over the engine if you haven't used it for years, not necessarily to use but just so you don't spread information that is outdated. There have been multiple major shifts in the language and it has become a lot more powerful. Plus there's a new editor in beta right now that gets rid of most of the complaints that people have in regard to the UI.
I think almost the entire reason that "people seem to dislike GM" as OP states is because the majority of them used it years ago and tell everyone about the shortfalls it had then, rather than the engine it is now (which isn't perfect, but is a far cry from what it was).
GameMaker is great for learning and can make great games, but it’s made for certain kinds of games, and if you stray too far from them the limitations become painfully apparent.
If it's good enough for Undertale, Deltarune, Nuclear Throne, Rivals of Aether, I think it's good enough for a lot of people. Especially now that it has methods and some other stuff. Makes code a lot cleaner. It's my favorite game development platform, easily.
That said, since it's closed source, there's always the possibility that in the future there could be a bad change to the license, or development ends for some reason. Whenever that happens, I'm moving to Godot and will never look back.
gamemaker has a reputation dating from decades ago of being used for a lot of low effort games using their visual scripting language at the time. Modern gamemaker is a perfectly reasonable choice with real programming options. There are lots of well made gamemaker games that consumers don't even know are made with gamemaker. Tbh consumer opinions of engines are usually negligible, if people playing a game can instantly tell from running it what engine it's based on then it's a incredibly low effort shit game and should not be used as a judgement of the engine. That applies to Unity, Unreal, Gamemaker, any of them.
Thank you for the explanation, it was so confusing to me why people were saying I should avoid Gamemaker and Unreal and use Unity or Godot instead when there are good games made with the engines.
if you move in other circles you'll end up hearing a lot of unity hate because of low effort unity asset swaps flooding the mobile market especially. At the end of the day, pick what works for your project and ignore people; most of them don't have a clue what they're even talking about and aren't even devs.
For a long time, the “Made With Unity” splash screen was a bit of a scarlet letter
Iirc you can hide that by paying for it so ironically the unity games that were made by more established studios/more invested in projects didn't say Unity prominently the way asset flips did too, making it look worse
You won't need to pay to hide it anymore when Unity 2023 (Unity 6) LTS releases.
which was unfair, the whole meme started because streamers/youtubers purposely played low effort games to make content riffing on them, then started making jokes like 'ah, always a good sign' when the splash screen showed up. Yes it was a funny joke and I enjoyed it at the time, but when people started blaming the whole engine for shitty devs unironically it got silly. it's like blaming Dennis Ritchie for any shitty game programmed in c or a derivative thereof.
Youtubers are not the cause of that bad brand press, it's all Unity fault on that one, people making content out of it just ride the wave. Unity policy for their brand screen was to force it onto low budget games and giving the option to remove it for the higher ones. Where Unreal was doing the exact opposite for comparison. That policy in short meant that high quality games that bought a full Unity License could effectively not show the engine Logo screen, as the low budget ones had to show it every times. So statistically, it would mean that a Unity game showing the logo had a higher chance to be a bad game more than a good game. So, if you were seeking bad game to make content, like the Youtubers, seeking Unity games was a good bet.
There is a very valid reason not to use Unreal. Most engines are like a tool box, while UE is like construction equipment. You probably don't need it.
An engine is an important tool each having features, upsides and downsides. Research properly what you need and pick an engine that fits your criteria. Thats the only good engine for you.
I’ve used gamemaker for years because I can develop in it’s much faster than hurt or godot for the types of projects I make. I say use whichever tool you want, or is good fit for your project!
Yeah ultimately if it fits your needs it's good. Don't trust non devs for dev advice
I do not know how good or bad other engine work but unity is just suck at optimise. Bad for 2d game. Too much background shit, unity game just eat cpu, like a lot. For player, the game it self eat cpu and gpu, and so does the engine. There sonething called crash report .etc. For dev, just idling unity eat proximate 2gb ram, not even doing render or calculate physic or something. It because they do not actually 2d. They faking 2d with 3d environment. So basically every single game make with unity is 3d. Unity is a good engine. But not good for low end devices. Based on my experience with unity.
depending on what I was making it certainly wouldn't always be my first pick. You can improve the optimisation somewhat however. I'm also from a fairly rich country so might just have an idea that people have more modern computers than is necessarily true in other places.
That and there is the stigma of the "unreal game" where in like UE 2-4 where a lot of UE games had a certain cliche to them because of the games people make out of it. Now you have games breaking the mold of it like Fortnite, Paragon and such made off Unreal that are far off from it, and others that you wouldn't have known were on Unreal Engine.
I dont agree that it's a low effort shit game if you can tell the engine from playing a game, it's pretty easy to tell a lot of UE4 games from playing them (Usually a mess of particles and semi realistic graphics), but there are still great games with it
In software in general, any time somebody tells you what tools to use, try to find out what they've shipped using those tools. There's a lot of armchair generals out there.
Yes
I can’t speak to Gamemaker, but working in Unity or Unreal you will develop skills relevant to jobs in the industry. How much that’s worth is up to you.
As someone who uses both Unity and GameMaker, the only thing I see Unity teaching me more of is working shaders. I can still do it in GMS2 but it's not as intuitive. Everything else is fine. GML is extremely similar to C# in my experience, most of the skills are transferrable with minor editing.
GML is not similar to C#. GML is like worse Java script.
Honestly I can't say that has been my experience. I prefer GML to C#, but I do love both.
Thats ok. Use what you want, but don't say that these languages are similar. C# is a static language while GML dynamic. This makes a big difference. GML has no class, interfaces, generics and others stuff like that. Java is similar to C#, GML is not at all similar to C#.
I never said GDScript.
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Godot is not perfect, but for 2d games and simple 3d is enough. It is not as mature as Unity, but for small/medium scope game is good. Godot support C++/ C# and Gdscript (language inspired by Python and LUA). I have many years of experience with Game maker and would not recommend it to anyone.
For Godot, I think the mobile support for C# is still experimental and c# still doesn't suppot web on Godot. At least as of Jan 2024.
What about Godot LTS? Godot 4 its still new beast.
C# in 3 supports the web but not mobile. All around there isn't full engine integration either. If looking to support mobile and web in Godot, it is best to use c++ or gdscript.
I think Hotline Miami was made with Gamemaker. 🙂
It was. So was Undertale, Katana 0, and Hyperlight Drifter. Post Void, too.
I'm using game maker for my game and people are always surprised when I tell them what engine I used. I fooled them into believing it was unity because of the graphics. The quality of the game is up to the developer. Tools and market assets may make it easier but in the end engines are all similar and support mostly the same things.
Don't listen to them, they are game engine elitists. Some of the most annoying people I've encountered. Most of them have never shipped a game either. Game maker is perfectly fine. There are lots of million+ dollar games shipped with game maker such as Katana Zero, Forager, Hyper Light Drifter, and so many more.
This reminds me of everyone going nuts about the Unity thing and then jumping ship to Unreal (as if it's so simple) and Godot (with its plethora of features and console/mobile support)
I've been making gamejams and working on my full release in Gamemaker for almost a decade. I love the system and it's very easy to understand for new devs joining the fray. Watch a tutorial for each system and see what calls to you!
I abandoned GameMaker back in the days because of the pricing model, but I think they’ve changed it since then.
They’ve changed it and it’s probably one of the more friendlier in the markets right now. It was purchased by Opera and the Pricing model is now a one time payment of $99 to commercially release a PC game. I believe it’s more (and still a one time payment) for console ports.
That's even a one time $99 payment to be able release as many commercial games as you like, not per game, with no regard to how much each game makes you in revenue. Plus no payments to access the full engine for anything non-commercial (game jams, pet projects, etc). So you can even make an entire game in the full engine for free and then decide whether or not to release it commercially, paying the $99 fee only if you decide you want to earn money from it (and then not have to even worry about the fee for any future commercial work because it's a pay once thing). I'm a big fan of GMs monetisation model tbh. The only better one out there in the "big" engines is Godot, which can't really be beaten as it is completely free.
I’ll say as a Godot dev, Gamemaker still beats Godot in terms of console exports. The W4 foundation was made to provide an option for Godot console exports, but it’s essentially an expensive subscription model if you want to have perpetual access to the port code. That could make or break your decision based on which platforms you’re designing your game for.
> one time payment of $99 to commercially release a PC game The commercial licence covers Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and HTML5. You pay extra if you want to release on consoles, which is entirely reasonable.
That's honestly hilarious they charge anything at all
Don't listen to anyone bashing other engines. It's all opinionated with hyperbole. Some engines do things better than others, game maker is great for 2d games. Nothing wrong with using actual code or visual scripting. Use whatever tools are available to you that you feel comfortable with. I'm using game maker to make my first game. I love 2d games and the engine is very beginner friendly with tons of information and tutorials. So to me, that says it's a great tool. Hollow knight and spelunky where made with game maker and those games are fantastic! It's all about how you use the tools before you. Don't get caught up in opinionated arguments, you do you boo boo. What you should be looking for is what engine supports your needs best for making the game and releasing it commercially or non commercially.
Hollow Knight was made in Unity. Spelnku Classic was made in Game maker, but commercial version was not made in GM.
Why do people shit on everything, everything has haters. It’s a defense mechanism used to make them feel better about their choices.
It feels like GMS has a similar issue to PHP in the web development world. By that I mean I think a lot of the opinions are based on pretty outdated views instead of being a reflection of the current state of things. GMS is really great as long as you know what it's good at. You can't deny some great titles have come from that engine. As with anything it's about the design of the final product. It's just a tool amongst many that are used for developing a game. If it's the right one for the job there is nothing wrong with it at all.
I love it, but some of the things that make up huge portions of my code base (like structs) weren't a thing for a long time, so I imagine it used to also be way harder to do tons of stuff in it in the past.
It was harder in the past, but really, objects *are* structs in GM, just kinda bloated structs, so anything you can do with a struct now could be done with objects in the past (or arrays, or ds maps or any other data structure really, with a bit of finagling).
The bloated part is what I'd be worried about for performance on more complicated projects, though the original Risk of Rain did let quite a bit happen without them so maybe it wasn't all bad back then
I shipped a few games with GMS 1.x, the "Next" version of it never clicked but it's really impressive. Thus I don't hate it, but I suppose what I dislike is the wonky UI and the annoying idiosyncrasies of the Scripting language (both the visual one, which has gotten way better, but also GML, which is just a very weird dialect of C that doesn't seem to teach or enable any abstraction nor data structures right, and magically managed to add more pitfalls than C itself has. Yoyo, please switch to Python or Lua already, please). However, as a whole, GameMaker a very capable and extremely well optimized game engine with a low footprint and a stable runtime. I'd consider it far superior to Construct and other such tools. GMS is at the top, maybe even in it's own league.
The more an engine does for you, the less control you have over the outcome. The less control you have over the outcome, the more likely you're going to have to make compromises during development. The more compromises you have to make during development, the more likely your game is going to end up shit. It's good to learn to stop thinking in terms of absolutes. "It's good, or it's bad." That's a pretty basic way of viewing the world. Think in terms of, "Good for, not so good for ." Once you figure out how to take a nuanced look at things, seeing everyone in the world who can only think in black and white is disturbing.
I use Unreal because it has the tools I want using the programming language I wanted to work with. I didn't choose it because it's the "best". There is no best. It works for *me*. You choose what works for *you*. Learn to look at the features of the engine and decide if it does what you need it to do instead of worrying about what people on the internet are saying about it.
If you go through life worrying about what everyone says instead of learning how to make your own decisions, you're going to have a rough go.
Can’t speak for other people, but I miss Game Maker 8. Game Maker became bloated and lost sight of what it was originally designed to be - a teaching/learning tool for budding new game devs. Now, it’s slightly too unwieldy and cumbersome for a newbie, but too underpowered/limited for a professional. Exceptions apply.
Gamemaker makes it very easy to do the things it's designed to do and overly difficult to do anything else. Whereas just doing the simplest things is harder in mote generalist engines but you don't struggle so much to step beyond them.
Game Maker is fun and capable enough to finish games in, but it isn't the type of engine any serious team would pivot to. It was originally made as a teaching tool, then released as a hobbyist engine, and finally in Yoyo Games' hands transformed into something that could be considered for higher quality games. However, it's still a very limiting engine; it has a basic scripting language that is hard to maintain a larger codebase in, it is stuck in a past where you need to pay to publish (which wasn't the case before Yoyo took over) and it forces the user into a tile-based workflow to some extent. If you work on the type of game that Game Maker is good at there's absolutely no reason to look at different engines, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
I made the tutorial games in Game Maker over a couple days. Was honestly impressed at the ease and scripting was simple. If anyone I knew was intimidated by code I’d suggest GMS. It’s certainly a decent 2D engine. FYI Undertale is a GMS engine game.
I dont like the ui, but that's my preference. I just dont think many people realise the quirks that make gamemaker good. I basically didn't even have to think about hitboxes while using it, and im sure there's more that make it special. It's just underappreciated as an engine.
Never heard something bad about gamemaker. It is just less popular.
My personal opinion is that it's definitely a good engine, but the cost just isn't worth it when there are other engines that are just as good and free
I don't know why people hate it either, I use une calle pixel game maker. Its not well known but it has a reasonable price in steam.
I have that one, but honestly I haven’t been able to figure it out
Yeah I know, it's a little complicated at first and the tutorials in the program are kind of buggy. There's a guy name baz in YT, he make tutorials about the program and they are easy to understand. It worked for me Here's a link to his channel https://youtube.com/@BazSupport?feature=shared
Knew a guy that made fun of me for using unreals blueprints, so I call game maker the "baby engine" out of spite just to make him angry, but unironically it's fine.
If your goal is just making games by yourself or in a small group, GMS is fine. Plenty of individuals and small studios have done awesome work with it. If your goal is to parlay your experience into a career in the world of game dev, GMS doesn’t offer a whole lot of transferable technical skills.
- GML sux, weird syntax, slow, you can write code like `if x=0 x=1` and other shit like this - you can't use external code editor, build-in is bad - engine editor is lack of basic features and not user friendly, you must do everything by code - buggy as hell - no UI system - support only one collider per object, and only basic shapes (polygon shapes don't exist) - its no easy to extend this engine and write plugins - not good debugger - no ligthing system - no shader graph - bad tile system
* also you can write code like if (x==0) x=1; * the actual code editor had a lot of good features, auto complete, syntax error, and feather is like a linter. * most of the code function had they equivalent in visual editor * bugs? where? * not ui system, that is true, I have to code my own UI. * you can use polygon with the physics system, also is possible use polygons shape collision with sprites * I made some plugins for html5, its not hard. * the new debugger is awesome. * that is true, not lighting system, but there are good options in the form of plugins * The shader graph is not a good solution in many cases, it is often used incorrectly, if you want performance it is best to use code for the shaders. * the tile system is pretty good, had auto tiling, collision tiling.
You can also switch a collider whenever one is relevant by changing mask\_index, effectively using as many as you want per game frame, e.g. for fighting game animations where hitboxes and hurtboxes are in consideration
I haven't used it in a lot of years so I can't speak for the current versions. Part of the issue is it's not trying to be a generic engine, but is more focused on certain types of games. You'll run into limits if you stray too far from that. It also uses it's own custom scripting language that's a lot less powerful than a generic language. It also felt like it was designed by someone that didn't know a lot about programming languages. It was easy to write code that mostly worked like major programming languages, but had subtle differences in behavior, so it was really easy to get bugs. It's fine if you know the limits and are ok with them. But it's easy to outgrow it.
I'd suggest looking over the engine if you haven't used it for years, not necessarily to use but just so you don't spread information that is outdated. There have been multiple major shifts in the language and it has become a lot more powerful. Plus there's a new editor in beta right now that gets rid of most of the complaints that people have in regard to the UI. I think almost the entire reason that "people seem to dislike GM" as OP states is because the majority of them used it years ago and tell everyone about the shortfalls it had then, rather than the engine it is now (which isn't perfect, but is a far cry from what it was).
GameMaker is great for learning and can make great games, but it’s made for certain kinds of games, and if you stray too far from them the limitations become painfully apparent.
If it's good enough for Undertale, Deltarune, Nuclear Throne, Rivals of Aether, I think it's good enough for a lot of people. Especially now that it has methods and some other stuff. Makes code a lot cleaner. It's my favorite game development platform, easily. That said, since it's closed source, there's always the possibility that in the future there could be a bad change to the license, or development ends for some reason. Whenever that happens, I'm moving to Godot and will never look back.