This company changes their licensing terms every three years or so. This is the same deal that Game Maker Studio 1.4 was licensed under, then they brought out a subscription model for GMS 2 with no free tier. It's hard to take them at their word and have faith that there will really be a full-features free version "from now on."
I wonder if there's anything like a "rug-pull-proof" licensing/development model. Even AGPL is not a guarantee, if a single entity owns the copyright to the entire project (through CLAs), and decides to switch to BSL, and has enough influence to make forks irrelevant.
I think Linux's model is the strongest: individual contributors retain copyright, and there are enough individual copyright holders to make relicensing insanely difficult. Coupled with the project's pace (and the pace at which they change the internal APIs) it basically provides such a guarantee. Most projects however are less successful and the users/downstream developers can't count on momentum as the safeguard.
What does this have to do with the preceding argument? Yes, the company could abandon the project, but the concern here is about them taking all the previous work (including volunteer contributions) and proceeding with a more restrictive commercial license; that's what we want to prevent.
I haven't looked into GameMaker's license specifically, but many projects require a copyright assignment as part of their contributor license agreement.
The concern is not about free labor, the concern is that the product I'm building might get killed by vendor deciding to just fuck me over. Whether the software is free (as in beer or freedom) or not is a secondary concern - I'm merely noting that even a license as strong as AGPL is not a guarantee that I won't get fucked.
There is. It's called Pay The Author. If you don't have a bare license conditioned on someone's pinky promise, but rather you pay the author and thereby perfect that promise into an actual, enforceable contract, then when someone attempts a rug-pull you can actually file suit to enforce your legal rights. Simple as.
That's the nice thing about a one-time license fee: whether they maintain that license "from now on" is basically irrelevant. There is only "for the version you bought". They can change their license all they want in the future, that one-time fee license will forever be valid for the specific version you were willing to pay for.
It's why some folks are still using Photoshop CS6.
I actively use game maker and as much as I love it, I really got screwed over by this.
I bought game maker studio version 1 for mobile and paid a great deal of money for it, it was shortly before they released the new version of 2.0 with the new model and then android dropped support for 32 bit mobile applications. I was unable to build my android apps moving forward because 1.0 never supported 64bit while 2.0 did.
It took me a bit to finally come around to using the engine again (I currently pay the monthly fee as I develop my game)
Pixel images are stable enough that they remain usable forever. Windows is a relatively stable platform as well, so not updating your development tools mostly works there. But on mobile there are too many breaking changes and updated store requirements for that to work for long.
Last time I used Game Maker was just before they got acquired by YoYoGames, it actually inspired me to learn programming along with Roblox (early 2007).
Same! I created numerous games with early GameMaker as a pre-teen. I even managed to use it for making various useful little programs, like an interactive calculator to show my Dad’s company that the bandwidth required for multiple security cameras would eat up all the bandwidth available on the relatively slow internet connections. It definitely had an enormous positive effect on my career in software.
Yup, same here! Used GameMaker extensively before getting into Minecraft modding and Ludum Dare game jams with different engines (LWJGL and XNA/MonoGame). 16+ years later and I'm a Senior Gameplay Programmer
This is nice but they really need to fix their new UI, it's a mess. The sprite editor is lovely but the multi-window layout is needlessly confusing, it's extremely cumbersome to edit code in drag-and-drop compared to the old studio 1 UI, and it's extremely unstable, with regular "game maker has become unstable, please save your work and restart" messages.
I'd sooner pay 50 euros for Game Maker with a stable, simpler UI than 0 for the current one.
Like many others, I had (appropriately) written off gamemaker entirely as soon as they changed to a subscription model. It was always a solid choice for making games, so I'm glad to see that it might be worth using again.
I’ve wanted to make a game for a while now as a side project; but art styling matters immensely to me - more than the gameplay itself, honestly. I feel like I need to become a good artist first…
AI> Design me some game graphics that look similar to Mario Bros, except instead of the main character being a plumber, make him an electrician and instead of having a brother who is a plumber also, give him a sister who sells stuff on Etsy.
Even if that gives me a baseline, then what? If I want more I find I get something out of left field. The non-deterministic nature of AI makes it kinda hard to iterate all assets right?
Generative AI is not non-deterministic, it is just chaotic. (That is, small changes to input may have large and hard to predict changes in output.)
OTOH, there are lots and lots of tools to improve controllability. Still, though, tricky for most game assets (though inprovements are being made by leaps and bounds) beyond static illustrations/icons.
Well it takes some work to get something you like...
But prompting with things like, "Return all future images for this chat in the style of x" help.
You're not just going to be able to say, "Create all my artwork for my game" but prompting and honing in on something is easier, imo, than learning how to create that artwork yourself.
If you do something like pixel art, you can also get a rough draft from dalle then do some editing yourself. Again, it isnt doing everything for you but its significantly easier and faster than learning how to be an artist yourself.
Just going to comment this exact thing. You can achieve the same as any of these glorified SD wrappers with custom loras from civitai and controlnet, but animation which is crucial to any 2d based game (outside of a few genres like puzzle / card games) is non-existent.
That only really works if there is a way to keep all the generated art in the same "genre" (aka looking similar). Most tools I've used create completely different outputs on each run and trying to subtly tweak something is difficult.
If you have the money for it, you should really consider hiring a contract artist to supplement your gaps.
A concept artist and a 3D modeling artist altogether will cost like $3000 for 1 fully complete character that fits your vision. For 2D probably a lot cheaper.
For me, $3000 is worth the months/yrs of saved time.
Of course if you are having fun learning the art side and don't care about the destination as much then ignore this and have fun with it! If you practice every day for a year you'll probably start getting close to what you invision.
EDIT:
I'll also add that it's possible most of the aesthetic you're looking for can be achieved via shaders (for both 3D and 2D games). A lot of art looks very different in-game because of shaders doing all kinds of manipulations.
They could start with stick figures and placeholder graphics to communicate the idea, then level up; a great example of this iterative approach is Factorio, which redid some of its graphics and graphics pipelines over the years, starting off with basically MS Paint style graphics, then moving to a detailed 3D model transformed to 2D sprites pipeline.
Then there's the Kingdom of Loathing games that never moved on from shitty Paint drawings, lol.
Of $100. This is quite steep compared to when the pro version only costed $20. I don't think the lite version prohibited commercial use either, it was just limited in what it could do.
Same. I was so active in the legacy forums before YoYo games deleted it all. I found an archive of the old forums on archive.org and I'm extracting the folder as I write this (process has been taking over an hour so far and it's only halfway). So far it seems to be almost 60GB of information. I thought it would just be text, but I guess it's that plus all the images. I can't wait to see what 10 year old me was up to back then. It's been 20 years.
I would be curious if someone with Game Maker experience could try Adventure Game Studio and report what did they think of it what is to like and what isn't, what is good and what is bad.
Have toyed with both. GM is far more flexible and powerful. Yet if you want a point and click adventure game then AGS will get you quite far without much programming knowledge. Getting AGS games on mobile will probably require a publisher deal with one of the few who work with AGS, like Wadget Eye.
Who needs Vue when we have React?
Who needs Javascript when we have Typescript?
Who needs MariaDB when we have MySQL?
Who needs Docker when we have Podman?
Who needs Burger King when we have McDonalds?
Who needs Wish.com when we have Amazon?
The point is that this is still proprietary, but we already have FOSS that does the same thing. Who needs AIX and HP-UX when we have Linux and BSD? Who needs leaded gas when we have unleaded gas?
There are some versions issues, and you need ask somebody to configure pipeline for you (install Android Studio, Xcode, VSC, etc, figure out how to work with it, etc), but overall answer - yes, you could choose version of Godot, which will easily export to mobile/console, after ONCE spent time to configure pipeline.
Sure, once will appear new release, too different, so will need again do pipeline configuration.
