
How I Make A Living Using GameMaker - amarsahinovic
http://gamemakerblog.com/2013/08/27/how-i-make-a-living-using-gamemaker-part-i/
======
mratzloff
So if I can sum up: the author made some games with Game Maker, made a small
profit, then started primarily making libraries for Game Maker. Now he buys
GameMakerBlog.com and posts an article about how much money you can make with
Game Maker and you should really use it.

~~~
dave_sullivan
I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically,
everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels
rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform.

The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can
make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make _a lot of money_ by
essentially selling services around doing that something for other people that
do that something already or might be interested in getting into it, and then
make that your business.

My question is: is this really all that bad in and of itself? Is someone
selling picks and shovels in a gold rush necessarily selling something people
shouldn't buy? Are they inherently less trustworthy because they get into the
picks and shovels business?

The argument is often made that you can get the same information for free
elsewhere. Well, that's what I always say about college and why I think it's a
horrible investment, but obviously people disagree with me there. But why is
college more legitimate? Because it's been around longer? As far as I can
tell, colleges are selling picks and shovels in a gold rush that ended 20
years ago. At least the Game Maker racket is just getting started :-)

The best argument of course is that the vendor has the incentive to hype the
prospects of their industry, often an industry in which success is faaaaar
from assured (like every industry). But I don't know, how does this rule apply
here any more than it applies to any other industry where someone is trying to
get people excited about the prospects of a future
technology/industry/event/whatever?

And for the record, I have no affiliation with the OP, I just don't think it's
particularly fair that just because you are offering information products
around some potentially dubious business opportunity that it's a valid
criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling picks and shovels, so he must
be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)

Other side anyone?

~~~
mratzloff
> _I just don 't think it's particularly fair that just because you are
> offering information products around some potentially dubious business
> opportunity that it's a valid criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling
> picks and shovels, so he must be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)_

No, I said nothing like that.

I often skim the top few comments of an article before I read the article
itself, to see if the article is worth my time. I appreciate seeing the kinds
of comments I made, because it saves me time when others do it. Judging by the
number of up votes I received, I'm not alone on this.

I suspect these articles are often up-voted based on the title alone, since
they generally have no real content worth discussing (sometimes interesting
discussion does arise despite this).

The long and short of it is that as long as there is no down vote button for
articles, you will continue to see skeptical comments from HN users.

------
speeder
I suggest people make a living with OTHER tools than GameMaker.

GameMaker although was a good tool, has a horrible company handling it, they
put some terrible DRM there (there are lots of horror stories on internet if
you look around), their support suck, and they are outright hostile to people
dare to try to contract them directly to complain about something.

Also I learned this the hard way (I was warned, but decided to try, and got
burned very hard...)

~~~
ukdm
I don't believe that to be the case, at least not any more. The lead devs are
quite active on Twitter, they have a bug reporting system all users can take
advantage of, the documentations is growing, and the DRM you speak of is no
longer in place and they admitted it was a bad decision (after the skulls
incident).

It's becoming a very solid toolset that can produce games for most platforms
and does not require a plug-in for web games. The recent roll out of v1.2 has
also made it much faster.

Mike Dailly, head of development at YoYo recently did an AMA on Reddit.
There's some good information in there on the state of GM and its future.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/gamemaker/comments/1lsz0o/im_mike_da...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamemaker/comments/1lsz0o/im_mike_dailly_head_of_development_at_yoyo_games/)

~~~
TrueValhalla
Heh, we actually broke the 'skull & crossbones' DRM story on Game Maker Blog,
and it was picked up by a variety of major sites (ie. Ars Technica:
[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/11/drm-error-causes-
probl...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/11/drm-error-causes-problems-for-
legitimate-game-maker-users/))

------
j_s
So many cross-platform game building tools available these days... hard to
know which one would be worth learning! Personally I see Unity as having the
most possibilities; I guess I'll add GameMaker to the list of things to check
out.

One general thought I have is how hard it would be to use these for business
apps... particularly the reporting/dashboard style where there isn't as much
need for standard CRUD input controls. It shouldn't be too hard to access REST
interfaces with modern game dev tools!

~~~
cygwin98
Html5 sounds a perfect fit for the use cases you talked about.

~~~
krapp
cough _Construct2_ cough

------
popopje
it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in games that are
particularly enjoyable to play.

Spelunky (the original - the newer, paid version is not made with game maker
though was made possible through the popularity of the original) and Gunpoint
were both made with game maker and have been very successful monetarily -
Gunpoint in particular was the first game the author made, and its success
means he is now a full time game developer.

Obviously this route requires a lot more risk for a lot more time, but game
maker is capable of a lot more interesting things.

[http://spelunkyworld.com/original.html](http://spelunkyworld.com/original.html)
[http://www.gunpointgame.com/](http://www.gunpointgame.com/)

~~~
Nekorosu
So Spelunky was made with GameMaker. It was extremely enjoyable to play which
led to the development of the XBox version.

It contradicts your statement "it's unfortunate that the process doesn't
result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play.", doesn't it?

Also I'm sure the dev tools don't play such a big part in the gameplay's
quality of the result as you think.

~~~
derefr
Game Maker is scriptable in a Turing-complete language, so of course you can
make anything in it--it's just a matter of blind determination. VBA is also
Turing-complete, which means you can write your game in Powerpoint. (It's a
lot like Flash, in fact.) But I don't see many people doing that, and for good
reason. :)

But I think another, more devious way to phrase "it's unfortunate that the
process doesn't result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play", is:

 _" It's unfortunate that the process doesn't_ prevent _more_ bad _games from
getting made. "_

This seems needlessly cruel at first, but seen another way, it's immediately
sensible: languages with strong typing prevent bad code from getting compiled.
We prefer compiler errors to something that runs, but buggily. Maybe we could
rely on tools, of sufficiently high level, to point out things like: "this
finite-state-machine representing a game mechanic has a very high
connectedness; this could indicate that your game mechanic requires the player
to make repeated choices with too many options, which will induce choice
fatigue, making them quickly bored of playing."

~~~
Nekorosu
I can see your point but I can also see a clash with reality because a lot of
successful mobile games are built with lua-based game engines. Maybe the clash
is due to the fact bad code has nothing to do with the quality of the gameplay
and rather simple game with a top-notch gameplay can be build with duct tape
and bubble gum.

From my experience the tools which enable makers to create better gameplay are
the tools which enable a very fast iterative development process (think live
assets reloading, parameters tweaking without recompilation and ultimately
code hotswapping).

Talking about strong typing it does help if you need to scale your simple game
into something more complex. It also helps a lot if you are going to build
something complex right from the start.

I think this link is absolutely relevant to both of our points: [http://elm-
lang.org/blog/Interactive-Programming.elm](http://elm-
lang.org/blog/Interactive-Programming.elm)

~~~
derefr
Note that I didn't say anything about the _programming_ quality of the
resultant games. Gameplay is a matter of _design_ quality. We can build tools
that help us make better games, but they have nothing to do with programming
tools (tools that help us make games, better.)

~~~
Nekorosu
My fault. I skipped the "Maybe we could rely on tools..."

Now I can see your real point.

I tried to read a book on game design which abstracted out the game mechanics
into formalized simulation but it was too technical that was taking out the
fun from the process so I stopped reading it. The name of the book is Game
Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.

But yes, maybe there'll be tools advanced enough to help not taking the fun
out.

------
phoyce
Interesting that people are trying to dissuade the OP from using GameMaker.
From reading his post it appears he is doing very well for himself and most
importantly he is happy. I don't see much incentive for him to learn a
completely new tool at this point.

Nice post OP. Keep up the good work.

~~~
astrodust
If he's doing this well with GameMaker, a tool like Unity would open up even
more possibilities.

It's like someone saying they're successful as a landscaper with merely a
shovel. Invest in a backhoe and you'll get a lot more done.

~~~
amarsahinovic
As with everything else in life, it depends. If you want to build 3D games,
then by all means, use Unity (or equivalent). But if you want to build 2D
games, I think that GameMaker does a good job (I know you can do 2D games with
Unity, but still).

~~~
astrodust
Unity offers a full C# or JavaScript(-esque) development environment, far more
flexible than GameMaker. It also supports 2D or 3D depending on your
preference, even allowing you to switch between them if you want. Keep in mind
a lot of "2D" games are really just 3D ones with no depth because OpenGL and
Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics.

Unity "free" is superior to GameMaker in virtually every regard, and the Unity
Pro version, which costs three times as much, is a significantly more capable
platform.

~~~
steveklabnik
> OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics.

I'm sorry, what?

~~~
astrodust
How else do you get pixels to the screen at reasonable frame rates? You load
it into a texture and place it on a 3D polygon that just happens to be sized
the same as the screen, making it in effect a 2D canvas with 1:1 texel to
pixel mappings. Doing old-school "bitblitting" isn't going to cut it today,
the overhead is too huge. GPU texture manipulation and layering is orders of
magnitude faster than what you can do in the CPU space.

Windows uses Direct3D for the native UI, and OS X uses OpenGL for the same
thing.

~~~
aryastark
Your definition of "reasonable" really needs a qualifier here.

If you're doing AAA games in 2D, yeah you will use the GPU. But an indie game?
You probably don't need it. Especially if you're writing the game without
Unity (i.e. straight C++). The costs of setting up and working with 2D in
OpenGL is high. I've done it. It's not fun, it's not pretty. It's a bitch,
plain and simple. Texture atlases, font rendering, UV coords, texture
uploading, vertex buffers, shaders. That's a ton of crap you have to worry
with. Just to render simple 2D sprites to a screen. Many people can and do
skip it and go straight to SDL or somesuch. It works, and modern CPUs are more
than adequate.

~~~
astrodust
Most of the popular 2D engines use OpenGL or Direct3D in the back-end, it
allows them to do compositing much more easily, and at near zero cost. You
don't have to worry about a thing if you're using the right library, it's no
harder than the usual canvas calls.

This isn't just about performance. On a phone it's about not burning the
battery down by loading down the CPU with expensive tasks that the GPU can do
more easily.

Don't forget you can do your font rendering in the classic environment, then
ship that texture image over for placement. It's not all that difficult with
the right tools, many of which get packaged up for you transparently. You're
not stuck in OpenGL by any means.

Most "2D" games are just 3D games rendered in isometric mode, top-down, with
the depth information being used for layering.

~~~
aryastark
> This isn't just about performance.

Yes, but let's not forget _you_ made it about performance.

There are plenty of reasons to choose to use OpenGL. Lots of freebies come
with it. But you can still do 2D games without the GPU. That's the point. You
can't just keep moving the goal posts however you want.

------
Kiro
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OZjBF1K...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OZjBF1K7gAIJ:gamemakerblog.com/2013/08/27/how-
i-make-a-living-using-gamemaker-part-i/+&cd=1&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se)

~~~
rorrr2
If it doesn't work, here's another one:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20130828175356/http://gamemakerbl...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130828175356/http://gamemakerblog.com/2013/08/27/how-
i-make-a-living-using-gamemaker-part-i/)

------
TrueValhalla
Hi all; original content creator here. Both of my websites (gamemakerblog.com
and truevalhalla.com) seem to have had a large influx of traffic, and have
gone down.

I'm working on it! :)

------
pearjuice
No matter how good the story; GameMaker will always be remembered as the
Microsoft Frontpage of game development due its drag-and-drop functionality
and (mostly) imature userbase. Sure, you can do cool things with and use all
sorts of advanced features but some impressions just stick.

------
Kiro
So how is he actually making money on HTML5 games? By selling the games for a
one-time fee to companies that wish to use them on their website?

~~~
TrueValhalla
Yes, that makes up the majority of my income. The companies pay for the legal
rights to use/distribute the games, or to "sponsor" them as it's known.
Sometimes they want some branding or an API integrated, too.

------
X4
I would suggest using Maratis instead, because GameMaker is inferior and
Maratis can be coded using Lua instead of that the GameMaker language + you
can combine efforts with Blender etc.

Follow the discussion if interested:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096808)

~~~
amarsahinovic
GameMaker is focued on 2D games[0], where Maratis is focused on 3D games (from
what I can see). It would be better to compare Maratis to Unity3D.

[0]
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177983/](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177983/)

~~~
krapp
You can make 3d games in GameMaker as well though i've always though it was
really probably not the best use of it. I haven't seen any 3d GM games which
blew me away in any case ... and i've never made any.

~~~
amarsahinovic
I know you can, but as you said, it's not the best way to go. If you need 3D
games, there are better tools for that than GameMaker.

------
thenomad
Interesting stuff!

I'm curious - have you tried other more full-featured tools like Unity, and if
so, what makes you stick with GameMaker?

------
ddorian43
I remember using GameMaker 5/6/7 and it was very slow. Is that still the case?

~~~
amarsahinovic
I found this
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeGbMvpz4M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeGbMvpz4M)
while researching GameMaker. It seems to perform very well.

For the interested, this is how the examples were made
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWeRh81AXc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWeRh81AXc)

Also, they seem to have a compiler which should speed things up
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPJ4hCfTZEM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPJ4hCfTZEM)

------
Kiro
Are the games for web only? Are they working on mobile browsers?

~~~
TrueValhalla
Both! HTML5 games are not bought on the App Store, they are played directly in
your browser. So you can, for example, open up Safari on your iPhone and play
a HTML5 game for free, right in your browser.

You can also play that same game on your desktop PC, by visiting the same web
address. Though all of my HTML5 games are specifically optimized for mobile.

