FrostyCat
Redemption Seeker
Personally, I think now is a good time to start rebooting the onboarding process for GMS 2.3, given how much of the tutorial ecosystem has fallen apart.There are a couple issues with the learn page. For example the videos shown when looking at the video section before and after expanding are different and Gloomy Toad unfortunately deactivated his entire YouTube channel so those are dead links. Some of the other resources are also significantly outdated. I don't think there's been a change to it in nearly a year. Personally, I wish this was a section of their website that YoYo kept up on, mostly for selfish reasons (it'd be nice if my videos had a chance of making it up there) but also because I think there is a lot of interesting stuff out there, that I would find interesting, that just doesn't show up. In a lot of ways, I think this forum serves that purpose instead (the tutorials section here is much better, the marketplace section is much better for learning about new resources, and so on).
The 2.3 question is a little harder though. Right now, there isn't enough quality content out there to actually make this doable in my opinion. Certainly there are no game tutorials out there on it yet which is one of the key selling points for GameMaker. Not even YoYo's own official tutorials are for 2.3 yet. Also, and I'm sure YoYo has a better understanding of this, but I'd be willing to be a lot of people aren't updating. So for many people, the older tutorials are going to be good for a long time. Not to mention that many things are valid across multiple versions of GM (even back to 1.4).
And quite frankly I think it's broken long before GMS 2.3. 95%+ of the existing tutorials and books in GML suffer from the same issues:
- Too much "how to make X" content that encourages blind copying
- Novices are unable to derive basic skills off "how to make X" tutorials and remain skiddies forever
- Most tutorial series either contain material that is too specific to a project, or so much diverse content that it becomes hard to grasp
- Tutorials generally come with a working product but no follow-up exercises that depend on the viewer/reader's own skills, giving a false sense of competency
- Lack of clear coverage for basic GML and abstract logic
- Lack of general direction for study, most novices just bounce around random videos wasting their time
- Most GML books are written by designers instead of genuine programmers, and are also obsolete given the GMS 2.3 updates