People are worried about how they are perceived by other developers. It's the same reason a lot of people loudly pooh-pooh GameMaker (citing Godot, UR4, Unity, etc. as superior) even though it's a super powerful tool that, in the right hands, can be used to rapidly prototype very complicated and versatile games.
Game Maker deserves the criticism it gets. It is easy for beginners to learn, but it traps you in its proprietary ecosystem with subpar tools.
Moreover, it is designed around bad practices in the name of simplicity. Games cannot be framerate-independent, for example.
It may be a useful prototyping tool, but I feel sorry for the people stuck using it when those prototypes turn into full-size games and they can't easily port to something better. It's better to teach people something more flexible and similar to what's used in the real world.
PHP doesn't have these problems, it's just painful.
>It may be a useful prototyping tool, but I feel sorry for the people stuck using it when those prototypes turn into full-size games and they can't easily port to something better.
On the one hand, yes. But on the other hand, I doubt the people who made Undertale are complaining.
"Fox had little experience with game development; he and his three brothers often used RPG Maker 2000 to make role-playing games, though few were ever completed."
Fox still has all the assets for Undertale. All he has to do is port the battle system to Unity or something and then drop in the old assets. Someone already did it for the Sans battle: https://jcw87.github.io/c2-sans-fight/
The problem is, Fox is an unexperienced developer and doesn't know how to do that. He likely wants a one-click "convert my gamemaker game to nintendo" solution not an actual porting effort which would require rewriting parts of the game in a new language/engine.
> Fox still has all the assets for Undertale. All he has to do is port the battle system to Unity or something and then drop in the old assets.
Porting the whole thing over is a lot of work, speaking as someone who has actually worked on trying to port a game away from Game Maker.
> The problem is, Fox is an unexperienced developer and doesn't know how to do that. He likely wants a one-click "convert my gamemaker game to nintendo" solution not an actual porting effort which would require rewriting parts of the game in a new language/engine.
No, he just doesn't want to waste his time on reimplementing the entire game just to run on one more platform.
I would argue that other frameworks have too steep of a learning curve for beginning game devs, and as a result, prospective game devs skip GameMaker because of the criticism and then immediately get overwhelmed by UE4, then quit trying altogether.
GameMaker is a great tool for entry level developers. It's a stepping stone. I made dozens of games with it before "graduating" to more powerful frameworks.
GameMaker does not deserve the criticism it gets. It's way more powerful than your average gamedev assumes, and creative GameMaker devs can trounce mediocre Unity devs every day of the week.
That stigma alone had kept me from trying GameMaker for a long time. Personally, I'm glad I finally pulled the trigger late last year, because it's been a tremendous boost to my output, especially prototypes and cross-platform release. Just released a mobile game, in fact :)
