OFFICIAL GXC is Here! For Creators and Gamers

Mr Magnus

Viking King
I've discovered the secret to doing well in this game. Just circle the same square endlessly, moving one or two squares over as needed when you're about to get blown up. Got to over a minute in a few tries, and after that it's just a matter of practice and not playing in the middle of the night.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
I've discovered the secret to doing well in this game. Just circle the same square endlessly, moving one or two squares over as needed when you're about to get blown up. Got to over a minute in a few tries, and after that it's just a matter of practice and not playing in the middle of the night.
Thats what i've been doing but the rng sucks or i have terrible luck
 

FoxyOfJungle

Kazan Games
Yeah, I did that too, the most I got was:



And the game has a bug, the score is saved with 2 seconds less.
I don't want to look at this game for a long time. 🤣
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
Yeah, I did that too, the most I got was:



And the game has a bug, the score is saved with 2 seconds less.
I don't want to look at this game for a long time. 🤣
Hey!

I haven't been able to reproduce this one, do you get this consistently or only sometimes? GXC is sometimes showing cached data, so maybe it's just old data? (if so try reloading page few times maybe)

I've discovered the secret to doing well in this game. Just circle the same square endlessly, moving one or two squares over as needed when you're about to get blown up. Got to over a minute in a few tries, and after that it's just a matter of practice and not playing in the middle of the night.
:D I think even with this tactic you'll struggle after few minutes since requires quite a lot of concentration to react to different obstacles, current top scores of around 7min is already really impressive!
 
I'm not sure whether I like that this circling on the spot is a strategy many people feel comfortable with. As the designer of the game, I think it's less fun, so I did something wrong ^^'.

And as a player for me, it always backfired: it's nice early on but as soon as the obstacles come faster and faster and you have to instantly be aware of which direction you are moving into I think it's very hard to use. I always want to change the spot and then end up crashing into another obstacle. I have much better results with just staying on the second-most outer line driving my rounds for as long as I can. That being said I also can't imagine how anyone can have a score of 7+ minutes. Must be insane RNG. Currently, obstacles are still completely random. My personal highscore is just 3:20 and I'm the developer...
 

FoxyOfJungle

Kazan Games
Hey!

I haven't been able to reproduce this one, do you get this consistently or only sometimes? GXC is sometimes showing cached data, so maybe it's just old data? (if so try reloading page few times maybe)



:D I think even with this tactic you'll struggle after few minutes since requires quite a lot of concentration to react to different obstacles, current top scores of around 7min is already really impressive!
Hi!
This has happened literally every time, even closing the game and restarting the Opera GX browser. Whenever I saw my score in the game, it appeared 2 seconds less than what it was showing in the game.
Example:
In-game:
02:06:00
In the browser:
02:04:00
mm:ss:ms
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
@FoxyOfJungle Thanks, that is indeed weird :D Last question, could you provide your platform (windows, mac) and version + version of your GX browser, and any other details you think might be relevant, and we'll try to reproduce it on our side.
 

FoxyOfJungle

Kazan Games
@FoxyOfJungle Thanks, that is indeed weird :D Last question, could you provide your platform (windows, mac) and version + version of your GX browser, and any other details you think might be relevant, and we'll try to reproduce it on our side.
Windows 10 Pro 20H2, 19042. 1288. 64-bit.
Updated to the latest version.

Opera GX LVL3 (core: 80.0.4170.91) - Updater Type: Early Access.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36 OPR/80.0.4170.91

Executable: C:\Users\foxyo\AppData\Local\Programs\Opera GX
Profile: C:\Users\foxyo\AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera GX Stable
Cache: C:\Users\foxyo\AppData\Local\Opera Software\Opera GX Stable
 

rIKmAN

Member
Windows 10 Pro 20H2, 19042. 1288. 64-bit.
Updated to the latest version.
I'm pretty sure the latest version of Win 10 Pro is 21H1 as I remember it from installing it recently after putting it off a few times.
I'd doubt that's the issue, but just in case you weren't aware that there's a more recent update.
 

FoxyOfJungle

Kazan Games
I'm pretty sure the latest version of Win 10 Pro is 21H1 as I remember it from installing it recently after putting it off a few times.
I'd doubt that's the issue, but just in case you weren't aware that there's a more recent update.
Interesting, Windows Update says that it's up to date, I may be talking nonsense! 🤣

Anyway, version 21H1 actually appears in it:
But using "winver" no.





Anyway, my fear is to update and I get a message forcing me to install the damn Windows 11 LOL
Anyway, I don't think it interferes with anything in the game 🤔
 

rIKmAN

Member
Anyway, my fear is to update and I get a message forcing me to install the damn Windows 11 LOL
Anyway, I don't think it interferes with anything in the game 🤔
I just checked and mine says Windows 10 Pro 21H1, 19043.1348.
I doubt it's that either though, I just mentioned it in case you had an update waiting that you didn't know about. :)
 

Mehdi

Member
hi @milleson
I've made a game in GMS 1.4 a couple years ago, and now I imported it into GMS 2.3.6 to try exporting it to Opera GX. However when uploading, it stops progressing any further at around %20. What could be the problem of my game?
(btw it works quite correctly when I play it offline in Opera GX mode)
 

peardox

Member
In the case of puzzle games (these being and obvious case) you can, sometimes, have pre-known solutions - one game I have in development falls into this class and solutions can be automated.

The main intended use for the automated "God Mode" is, of course, video / screen grabs, solution reveals (for players who want proof there is a solution) and testing.

If I then create a challenge for speed of completion (I actually intend to do this) then I can also have a secret control 'Switch' that uses the auto-solve to complete any level way faster than a player could (I'll write that anyway so I can test all levels properly). In general if an algorithm exists to solve then automation is desirable for QC anyway - this applies to any game, not just puzzles.

Now if my game becomes challenge of the week I am certain of being the winner of every challenge if I so desire.

The terms of entry for the gift cards don't appear to preclude me from being a participant - the wording appears to exclude everyone at Yoyo / Opera but not the creator :)
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
hi @milleson
I've made a game in GMS 1.4 a couple years ago, and now I imported it into GMS 2.3.6 to try exporting it to Opera GX. However when uploading, it stops progressing any further at around %20. What could be the problem of my game?
(btw it works quite correctly when I play it offline in Opera GX mode)
We are doing an update tomorrow that should resolve some upload issues, and improve logging on our side to better see what could be going on for failing uploads. Please try again sometime tomorrow (maybe mid day UTC+1). If it still doesn't work, please share the timestamp (with time zone) and hopefully we can track it down and figure out what is going on.
 

Mehdi

Member
We are doing an update tomorrow that should resolve some upload issues,
hello and thanks.
I started a fresh project in GMS 2.3.6. (with many small-sized sprites imported from the earlier version) . It doesn't build the Opera Gx export yet. It stops uploading in around 60 percent. (Our timestamp: UTC +3:30)

(By the way in my DevCloud on opera it shows up the game title, but it is not there really.)
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
hello and thanks.
I started a fresh project in GMS 2.3.6. (with many small-sized sprites imported from the earlier version) . It doesn't build the Opera Gx export yet. It stops uploading in around 60 percent. (Our timestamp: UTC +3:30)

(By the way in my DevCloud on opera it shows up the game title, but it is not there really.)
Thanks, will look into the logs around that time! Yeah, in DevCloud it first creates the game entry, then uploads the game, so it seems to fail at the upload step.

We've seen others with this issue and it appears to be device specific, we found out more details during the day. So if you have the ability to test another machine to upload I would advice to test that for now.
 

Mehdi

Member
Thanks, will look into the logs around that time! Yeah, in DevCloud it first creates the game entry, then uploads the game, so it seems to fail at the upload step.

We've seen others with this issue and it appears to be device specific, we found out more details during the day. So if you have the ability to test another machine to upload I would advice to test that for now.
Thanks
I tried the project on other machine. But the same result: The build stops somewhere and this is quite disappointing. Please check my problem.

(By the way, my PCs are both Windows 10)
 

Mehdi

Member
@milleson
Any new update of the Opera GX export issue? I want to send my game to November competition but the build is not produced for my game. Can you please check the problem with my game?
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
@milleson
Any new update of the Opera GX export issue? I want to send my game to November competition but the build is not produced for my game. Can you please check the problem with my game?
Problem appears to be on GMS side, even though it says uploading we are not actually getting the request sent to us so we don't see any logs.

I talked to another creator and they managed to solve it by updating their music files (which were on .ogg format) to .mp3. Potentially something with packaging the resources fails, or for some creators when it's too large it fails. We've not been able to reproduce ourselves so hard to give any exact steps what you can do to solve it. Experiment maybe also creating a new empty game and uploading that to see if that works, if so then likely the same issue as this creator so experimenting with reducing the size/changing format might work.
 

Mehdi

Member
Problem appears to be on GMS side, even though it says uploading we are not actually getting the request sent to us so we don't see any logs.

I talked to another creator and they managed to solve it by updating their music files (which were on .ogg format) to .mp3. Potentially something with packaging the resources fails, or for some creators when it's too large it fails. We've not been able to reproduce ourselves so hard to give any exact steps what you can do to solve it. Experiment maybe also creating a new empty game and uploading that to see if that works, if so then likely the same issue as this creator so experimenting with reducing the size/changing format might work.
as to our case, we have no music right now and the only thing to be taken into consideration is that we have imported almost 20 MB sprite assets from another project into it. Is 20 MB assumed as too large?
By the way, there is no problem with empty or small projects with not much graphics. But the very project which we want to create and share on GXC keeps failing.
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
as to our case, we have no music right now and the only thing to be taken into consideration is that we have imported almost 20 MB sprite assets from another project into it. Is 20 MB assumed as too large?
By the way, there is no problem with empty or small projects with not much graphics. But the very project which we want to create and share on GXC keeps failing.
> Is 20 MB assumed as too large?

No, we allow up to ~200mb uploads atm I think. We have several games that are quite large (~150mb), but there appears to be issues on some systems where packaging the resources fails when they are large, so likely that 20mb is what is causing the issue for you. I'll try to get someone from GMS side to support to look into this.
 

Mehdi

Member
I'll try to get someone from GMS side to support to look into this.
Thanks.
Because of the shortage of time I deleted 90 percent of my art assets and now the problem is solved.
However Please check this issue and find a solution for it.
 
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Mightyjor

Member
Overall I really like GXC, but there’s a few features that I can’t help but feel are sorely missing:

- a comments section for each game is an absolute must.
-stats for creators to see how many ratings or plays a game has gotten is an absolute minimum. The fact that this isn’t here yet is a huge pain. Would love in the future to see more details down the road, average length of playtime, keywords they can search that brought them to the game, etc.
- would love some kind of profile as a creator, ideally would be able to update posts like a social media profile.
- when sorting a list by highest rating, there should be a weighted list based on how many times it’s been rated. What appears to be in place now at the top of highest rated is a couple games with one or two five star ratings.
 

Zhanghua

Member
Thanks, will look into the logs around that time! Yeah, in DevCloud it first creates the game entry, then uploads the game, so it seems to fail at the upload step.

We've seen others with this issue and it appears to be device specific, we found out more details during the day. So if you have the ability to test another machine to upload I would advice to test that for now.
Hi,
Could you please refine the register up and login in for CN of auth.opera.com???
We can't register this site and use the GX export normally, because the google reCAPTCHA
 
I recently tried to get an online acquaintance who uses Opera GX to go to my studio page and they wouldn't because they thought it might be malware (as a sidenote, I've "known" and played alongside them for a few years now and I know some of their friends in RL, so it's not as though I was messaging a random person). I'm pretty sure they were suspicious of all the "aaf2-15ec77bb609b" things in the URL. Might be a good idea to look into making more formal URLs for individual games / studios to reduce the "dodgy" vibes (or maybe the person is just paranoid AF, but still prettier URLs would be nice regardless).
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
I recently tried to get an online acquaintance who uses Opera GX to go to my studio page and they wouldn't because they thought it might be malware (as a sidenote, I've "known" and played alongside them for a few years now and I know some of their friends in RL, so it's not as though I was messaging a random person). I'm pretty sure they were suspicious of all the "aaf2-15ec77bb609b" things in the URL. Might be a good idea to look into making more formal URLs for individual games / studios to reduce the "dodgy" vibes (or maybe the person is just paranoid AF, but still prettier URLs would be nice regardless).

A ) Agreed. Especially since they are bothering with enforcing unique names for games. I don't suspect the world will collapse if the urls are some url-converted version of the game name.

B ) Even if we keep the unique key urls: do they have to be so long? 53135680-2510-4825-93f2-d385a790f260 is a ridiculously pompous url when youtube with it's lifetime-of-the-universe amount of videos can make do with a 10 digit base 64 code. Even if we want to cover our bases and let each human on earth upload 100 games to Opera GX you could easily give each game a unique base-64 id with seven digits, and still have a good deal left over.
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
I recently tried to get an online acquaintance who uses Opera GX to go to my studio page and they wouldn't because they thought it might be malware (as a sidenote, I've "known" and played alongside them for a few years now and I know some of their friends in RL, so it's not as though I was messaging a random person). I'm pretty sure they were suspicious of all the "aaf2-15ec77bb609b" things in the URL. Might be a good idea to look into making more formal URLs for individual games / studios to reduce the "dodgy" vibes (or maybe the person is just paranoid AF, but still prettier URLs would be nice regardless).
Hey! Hehe, yeah, we have had loose spec to simplify the URLs for a while just that we haven't been able to plan it. Since names can change we will still keep a key in the URL to ensure base URL doesn't change when name changes, but can greatly reduce the length (probably 6-8 chars) and also include the title of the game to make it more recognisable.

Thanks for the suggestion all! 🤗
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
@rmanthorp

Are achievements coming soon or should I DIY it?
If I DIY it and you do it later will I be able to synch the systems?
If we end up doing achievements then likely you'll be able to sync them to us when you launch the game and you've stored achievements in local storage.

However, no promises on achievements atm, it's super interesting thing to do but it's not currently in the prioritised list so not coming soon (probably).
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
Overall I really like GXC, but there’s a few features that I can’t help but feel are sorely missing:

- a comments section for each game is an absolute must.
-stats for creators to see how many ratings or plays a game has gotten is an absolute minimum. The fact that this isn’t here yet is a huge pain. Would love in the future to see more details down the road, average length of playtime, keywords they can search that brought them to the game, etc.
- would love some kind of profile as a creator, ideally would be able to update posts like a social media profile.
- when sorting a list by highest rating, there should be a weighted list based on how many times it’s been rated. What appears to be in place now at the top of highest rated is a couple games with one or two five star ratings.
Thanks for the feedback, all great points! Stats, profile, and highest rating are all things that we hope to get to shortly.

W.r.t. commenting, I see the need as well for this since it allows players to interact with creators with is really important, but since it would require some form of moderation we can't yet commit to saying when we can do that.
 

Mightyjor

Member
Thanks for the feedback, all great points! Stats, profile, and highest rating are all things that we hope to get to shortly.

W.r.t. commenting, I see the need as well for this since it allows players to interact with creators with is really important, but since it would require some form of moderation we can't yet commit to saying when we can do that.
It’s great to hear plans for those are in motion. While I understand the need for moderation with a comments section (and I won’t presume to tell how to make your service) I just want to point out a strong argument for a comment section. At the moment, there’s no real incentive for creators to upload games other than a chance at the monthly prize pool. Creators can’t yet monetize, so most of us instead are looking for constructive feedback or an opportunity to build a following around good games. Without comments/reviews/creator posts, there’s really no advantage to putting your game up at all and I imagine the platform might not gain any traction among serious devs, instead being used solely by free GMS2 users who can’t export to anything but OperaGX, so quality of games may start to drop dramatically.

Anyway like I said, it’s your platform. These are just things I’d love to see as a game developer.
 

milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
@Mehdi you mean for when you upload in DevCloud? I think we support a couple of formats, but the only one I know on top of my head is mp4.

If you have webm you can convert that to mp4 using ffmpeg roughly like this from the terminal
Code:
ffmpeg -i video.webm -crf 30 -vf "pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2" output.mp4
You can skip the "pad" code if you want, it's there incase the resolution of the webm isn't divisible by 2 (ffmpeg will complain if it's a problem, then you can add it).

Edit: Note, the "crf" controls the output quality, lower increases quality with the cost of file size.. So experiment with that if you feel the video becomes too low quality.
 
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milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
It’s great to hear plans for those are in motion. While I understand the need for moderation with a comments section (and I won’t presume to tell how to make your service) I just want to point out a strong argument for a comment section. At the moment, there’s no real incentive for creators to upload games other than a chance at the monthly prize pool. Creators can’t yet monetize, so most of us instead are looking for constructive feedback or an opportunity to build a following around good games. Without comments/reviews/creator posts, there’s really no advantage to putting your game up at all and I imagine the platform might not gain any traction among serious devs, instead being used solely by free GMS2 users who can’t export to anything but OperaGX, so quality of games may start to drop dramatically.

Anyway like I said, it’s your platform. These are just things I’d love to see as a game developer.
Noted! Very valid points, it's stuff like these comments that makes me really happy to be here in the forums! We'll try to figure out a way to incorporate commenting, likely not achievable short term since setup but it's now at least higher on our radar now, so we should hopefully be able to deliver something useful for all of you and the players!
 

Mehdi

Member
ffmpeg -i video.webm -crf 30 -vf "pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2" output.mp4
Thanks for reply. sorry for vague questioning. I mean playing webm file in my game. (which is supposed to be uploaded onto Opera Gxc)
There seems no extension exists yet for playing in-game videos (cutscenes) on opera gx platform. What can I do to show a 1min clip in the beginning of my game?
 
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Mehdi

Member
Anyone knows how can I play a short video in a game developed for Opera GX? I know there are video playback extensions in Marketplace but none are developed for Opera.
 

Mehdi

Member
Is there a size limit for uploading? My game gets stuck during upload.
there are games over 200 MB of size on the platform already.
I had the same problem as you. But after I changed my internet connection, I could upload my game.
 

Alexx

Member
there are games over 200 MB of size on the platform already.
I had the same problem as you. But after I changed my internet connection, I could upload my game.
Please explain what you mean by "changed my internet connection"
 
Something I've sat on for a little while but I think I should express it now:

I've had a couple of bugs that are unique to the Opera platform that were relatively hard to debug. The debugger works like 10% of the time for me when booting into an opera export and it makes it a serious pain in the arse for debugging, otherwise the debugger just gets stuck attempting to connect. I have to rely on show_message() to output various data and, of course, if the data is invalid, that crashes the application, rather than me being able to see "Oh that is undefined" or "Oh, there's no variable yet so it's undeclared" (as simple examples) that I can do in the debugger.

The javascript console log is next to useless with it's -1 line assignments and sometimes bizarre wording of errors. I recently ran into an error where an instance variable that was defined in the create event was outputting a bug that the variable wasn't declared when it was trying to be read in the draw event. Completely inconsistent and would happen on like 5% of boots, with no changes in how the program was used. I still don't really know what was happening after multiple hours of debugging attempts. It was "fixed" (I don't know if it actually was or not because of the inconsistency) by renaming the variable. So who knows what was going on, I certainly couldn't look at the value the variable was holding beforehand.

Also, json_parse() seems to be broken when it comes to reading empty or null strings only in the Opera export (which effects the actual gxc_* functions provided by yoyo for use to connect to the Opera platform as in rare cases certain strings can return null and when the listener tries to parse the data it fails completely because it's trying to json_parse an empty string before returning an error number like it should). Seems this is actually a bug to do with saving json files introduced in the latest stable version.

All of this has been said, not as criticism of the implementation of the Opera export (there's going to be bugs, we're all game developers and we know that), but to come back round to the point that a lack of feedback on the uploads is lethal to the quality of the platform. If my game fails on the title screen for a certain percentage of users, how do I find that out? I can test (and employ bug testers) as much as possible, but there's always a percentage of bugs that will leak through into live release. Without some form of user feedback, bugs becomes a kind of heisenberg uncertainty. Was that user score that reduced my overall score by a whole 1 point because the player really didn't like the game? Or was it because it crashed on launch for them and so they marked it a 1? How do I fix it if either is true? I don't know because I have zero feedback from anything happening on the GXC. It's a cross your fingers and hope approach.

I'm honestly a little bemused by the "we didn't include feedback because moderation is hard/costly" approach that has been floated. Are there any other games platform out there that don't allow feedback? Are internet users and especially gamers not conditioned to expect to be able to give their thoughts on the slightest little matter that troubles their merry way? Why was this not considered appropriately before launch? It's clearly a necessary part of the creative process of creating a game and it's also a vital part of creating a bug-free (or as close to) game. Who knows what games are doing what to what users without feedback?

I think if Opera actually wants to have any sort of competitive/intriguing alternative to the majority of game markets out there (regardless of the fact it's free...itchi.io is free and doesn't require opera to run) they simply have to allow user feedback. It gives frustrated gamers when a game fails an outlet to both express their frustration and highlight the actual issue so the developer can attempt to fix it, while also giving developers valuable feedback on their games. It allows other users to judge how well a game might suit their idea of "a game worth playing" outside of the incredibly simple "this game has a 4.51 score and this one has a 4.23 score".

This problem will only grow once transactions are introduced into the platform. How can Opera call itself a gaming browser without realising that microtransactions/ad revenue combined with an inability to comment on games is going to lead to a wild 💩💩💩💩storm of gamers getting furious when they pay money for stuff that might not work and can't at the very least vent their frustrations to other potential customers/players/the devs.

All that being said, I'm having fun with the GXC platform, it's awesome being able to export a fully working game to a browser without having to deal with the massive headache that is HTML5, and I've been spending a lot more time than I should tweaking for it. So to the whole team, while this may sound super negative and angry, I don't mean it like that. I mean it more like a wake-up call. The sirens are sounding and we need to fortify the beaches before the breach happens (especially monetisation), otherwise everyone will be up 💩💩💩💩s creek without a paddle.
 
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Oh, and I forgot to mention, why are challenges a separate launch state? Why can't we start/stop challenges in-game? This is bizarre to me.

Why can't my player play a round of insane difficulty in my "normal" game, feel they've gotten a good score and have it submitted to the "challenge" (which is only really a leaderboard when it comes down to it)? Why do they have to launch the game in the insane challenge difficulty? I really hope I'm wrong about this and I've just completely missed the function that enables/disables challenges, but if not it's such a bizarre oversight to me...If a player launches my game (which they will probably do from the "normal" game to begin with), they actually have to close down the game and relaunch it FOUR times as they feel their skill level increases and they are ready to take on new "challenges". It's hard enough to get a player to launch a game once and now there's this wild amount of friction between deciding you want to attempt a highscore and actually attempting it?

Not only that, but I can't display any scores in-game to do with the challenges unless it's launched in a specific challenge mode. And then it's only for that challenge? Wtf happened to intriguing players, drawing them in through their current mastery and showing them the levels of mastery that can be achieved? There's so much friction to everything that happens. I try to design my games so that within two clicks the player is doing what they want. Whether it's playing the game, changing an option, attempting a high score, whatever. Two clicks. Right now, there's like 50 clicks if a player wants to attempt every challenge in the game and half of those clicks are closing the game and re-opening it. Wut? Pls fix, lol. It's a highscore mechanism, treat it as such and let us register/display highscores when and how we want according to the game.

This doesn't mean remove the challenges from the webpage, they're fine there. We could have a function that determines whether it was launched from a challenge directly or the base game (just like we already can), letting us do some appropriate theming for a specially launched challenge game. Whatever. But let us manipulate challenges on a finer grain than we can currently because it's wildly silly to have to close down and open a game again to attempt a new high score on a new difficulty on a run. This doesn't even touch on challenges that aren't related to highscores. Why should the player have to play a level again just to collect all the "brown tokens" as compared to the "blue tokens"? Challenges could be useful for a lot of things, but as they stand right now, they're a pain for the user.
 
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Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
Just want to point out that until I saw the posts about no comments being available on GXC, I didn't even know that this feature doesn't exist; it just feels like a given to me that alongside the game the players could leave some feedback.
Now that I've found out about it, I'm glad I haven't posted any of my games yet, since I'd likely be missing out on some valueable feedback that way. And the way it is now, I'm not too eager to post my games on Opera GX just yet. Not that I've got any game in broad-audience-presentable state yet, but I hope to change it soon.

The points about user-support RefresherTowel raises are also very important, and when I'd browse for some game I would like to try out, I definitely wouldn't just base it on raw ratings but check comments for what people liked/disliked about the game in the first place, to see if I'd like it myself.
 

Oakleaf

Member
MightyJor and RefresherTowel make very good points about the lac of user interaction. I've had over 1000 players playing my game over the past 24 hours, but so far have received one (1) comment on the game (on Itch.io) and one (1) bug report (on Twitter). Pretty hard to tell how the game is actually doing. Most of these plays are definitely on GXC (although it doesn't show me the number of plays....) because I know how many people have dowloaded the game on other platforms. It's a good thing that it's "under construction" but like RefresherTower said, the decision to NOT have a comment section at all is baffling.

I also agree about the challenges, they could be a useful and simple way to "increase your game's addictiveness", but out of those +1000 players, only 4 have played a challenge, and precisely because the challenge pretty much exists as a "separate game". When I was developing the game, I though of the challenges as a simple way to get a GXC leaderboard into the game, but quickly decided otherwise when I realized how they were handled.

The platform is very promising, but it doesn't really give developers much right now.

Oh, and the only way I know how many players I have is because of online highscores which exists outside GXC. Correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't found any gameplay statistics on the devcloud....
 
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milleson

GameMaker Staff
GameMaker Dev.
Thanks @RefresherTowel, @Alice and @Oakleaf for the feedback! Let me try my best to answer most of the points and give some insights into what we have coming up. Tried to structure this to not be to messy to read, hard to be concise so please excuse the wall of text!

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About the ability to interact (commenting) between players & creators, we have a few steps planned to move towards a richer communication options.

Step 1 is to add new report options that allow GXC users to send reports directly to the creator. Creators will then be able to see these in DevCloud and be notified when they get these reports. Most likely this initial step will not allow for easy back-and-forward communication since it’s more like a one way flow, but should at least initially allow creators to be better aware of any issues players find in the games.

Step 2 would be some type of commenting feature that allows exactly the kind of communication you are talking about. Exactly how it will work we are not ready to commit to sharing details just yet, but likely something comparable to other sites that has been mentioned. My previous comment about moderation being hard wasn’t meant to hint that we won’t do it, I would love to have the feature to actually see what the community is thinking about games, challenges, GXC. It is a high priority and something that we will hopefully solve fairly soon 🙏

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About challenges need separate launch state. Fortunately that isn’t actually the case, you can send any score from the game without launching through the challenge page, however we don’t have any method examples in the "GXC API library" for that use case so understandable why this is confusing. We have some creators that are already sending multiple scores directly from the game (e.g. see this game https://gxc.gg/games/06e81f73-182d-45c0-ab7d-db77d0cd9efb).

We are now updating the GXC library APIs to expose this flow better (hopefully live in in next 1-2 days), but in the meantime you can update the
GML:
gxc_challenge_submit_score
method to take "challenge id" and use that instead of the query parameter. The same for all other endpoints that has to do with scores, you can update them to take challenge ID and use that to fetch scores/etc.

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About showing stats about plays and so on, we’ve had it planned for a while to come in ~January. However, since it keeps coming up as a highly desired feature we are escalating it internally to try to get it out faster. I’ll try to remember to create a post in the forums once it’s live to communicate to all of you. Possible that some metrics won’t be there from the start, and/or some metrics might start counting from when we launch the feature, but hopefully it will be a good tool to help all of you gauge how users are interacting.

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The issues/improvement areas with the actual runner I'll have to pass over to someone from GMS side, I’ll ping internally to get someone to look at your comments to try to move forward on those areas.

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Some closing remarks from my side. Since we are still in beta phase mode with the GXC product many features that we want to have in the product just isn’t ready yet, but are either being actively worked on or something that have in the plans to work on. We are trying to listen to both you creators and players to help us decide what to prioritise first, so I’m very grateful that the GMS product already has a rich community that can help us identify what to do next.

So again, thanks for keeping it straight and thanks for the kind words as well about some of the parts you like about the platform ❤
 
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Mightyjor

Member
About showing stats about plays and so on, we’ve had it planned for a while to come in ~January. However, since it keeps coming up as a highly desired feature we are escalating it internally to try to get it out faster. I’ll try to remember to create a post in the forums once it’s live to communicate to all of you. Possible that some metrics won’t be there from the start, and/or some metrics might start counting from when we launch the feature, but hopefully it will be a good tool to help all of you gauge how users are interacting.
That’s great news. I really would love to use GXC as a go to platform for games, but the current reality is that I drop a game there and then mostly forget about it since there’s no feedback for the creator. Comments, messages, number of ratings, heck even number of plays, all would give me a reason to come back to see how my game is performing. Compare that to Itch.io for example where I’m constantly checking that for notifications and player data, which ultimately has me spending a bunch more time on their platform. Thats all to say I’m very happy that player/creator interaction and feedback is being prioritized :)
 

gnysek

Member
About challenges need separate launch state. Fortunately that isn’t actually the case, you can send any score from the game without launching through the challenge page, however we don’t have any method examples in the "GXC API library" for that use case so understandable why this is confusing.
I've made this today, and it's super easy. Just replace in gxc_challenge_submit_score:

GML:
// from
var _game =  gxc_get_query_param("game");
var _track = gxc_get_query_param("track");
var _challenge = gxc_get_query_param("challenge");

// to:
var _game =  gxc_get_query_param("game") ?? GXC_GAME;
var _track = gxc_get_query_param("track") ?? GXC_TRACK;
var _challenge = GXC_CHALLENGE ?? gxc_get_query_param("challenge"); // yes, this one is opposite! set GXC_CHALLENGE to undefined it you want challenge from query to be used here
// don't forget about try/catch in case that any of params is empty
Then define in some script needed variables (this can be written outside of any function, to execute at game start; preferably script/object which inits everything else):
GML:
globalvar GXC_GAME, GXC_TRACK, GXC_CHALLENGE ;
GXC_GAME = "YOUR-GAME-GUID"; // self-explanatory
GXC_TRACK = "TRACK-PARAM-GUID"; // can be obtained from "query parameters"; this GUID is common for all challenges, however public and private challenges have separate one, so there are two possible values here
GXC_CHALLENGE = ""; // fill this right before sending score to proper challenge GUID
"query parameters" button which I'm describing above looks like: 1638397378198.png

Then, instead of writing var _current_challenge = gxc_get_query_param("challenge"); you can just write GXC_CHALLENGE = gxc_get_query_param("challenge");, or force GXC_CHALLENGE to challenge you want.

You can check that in my game, which have 4 challenges, while there's 144 possible combination of board configuration in this game. Modes which initiates challenges are in their description to be easier to find, and a GXC icon is shown in-game when mode which submits challenge score could be activated.
 
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