OFFICIAL GameMaker's 20th Anniversary

rmanthorp

GameMaker Staff
Admin
GameMaker Dev.
Happy birthday, GameMaker!! :D:banana:

There will be a few more things to share in the coming days but for now, you can read about our celebrations below:

https://www.yoyogames.com/blog/541/gamemaker-s-20th-anniversary

YOYO GAMES CELEBRATES 20 YEARS OF GAMEMAKER WITH OUR COMMUNITY
Friday, November 15th, GameMaker celebrates its 20th Anniversary. In honour of the occasion, we are preparing a number of events for new and existing GameMaker creators, including a GameMaker 20th Birthday Game Jam, a special one day anniversary sale, and the announcement of the impending open beta release of 2.3, GML updates and sequences for GameMaker Studio 2, that will offer game creators even more tools to bring their vision to life.

This weekend, running until Thursday 21st November, we are hosting the GameMaker 20th Birthday Game Jam. The theme of the Game Jam is the number 20, meaning the challenge could be to create something in 20 hours, or with 20 lines of code, or at a resolution of 20x20px. The GameMaker 20th Birthday Game Jam is open to anyone, whether they are a huge team or a solo creator. The YoYo Games office will even be taking part! GameMaker Studio 2 will also be available for free to use on the game jam throughout the jam, so anyone can get involved with the Game Jam, regardless of whether or not they already own a licence. Sign up and get involved here: https://itch.io/jam/gamemaker-20

“We are so happy to be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of GameMaker with our community. In the games technology world, 20 years is a lifetime” said Stuart Poole, YoYo Games’ General Manager. “It’s a very important milestone for the engine, which has continued to lead the field in 2D game design, offering creators the most powerful and user-friendly 2D game development environment in the industry. We are so proud of what GameMaker has achieved thus far and even more excited about its future.”

We have also been hard at work preparing some amazing updates for GameMaker Studio 2. Version 2.3 including Sequences and the big GML updates are due to reach open Beta before the end of the year, with plans for a full launch in Spring 2020. Sequences enables fast creation of complex cutscenes along with simple GUI-based manipulation of animations and audio, all of which can be positioned or context-triggered to occur discretely anywhere within the game. In short, the already simple-to-use interface of GameMaker Studio 2 is becoming even more powerful, allowing advanced development tricks to be done with little to no coding.

“The ease of control and iteration that Sequences will provide to GameMaker users is going to drastically improve game development workflow for Indie studios, and we expect it to lead to a paradigm shift in GameMaker game aesthetics,” said Russell Kay, CTO of YoYo Games. “This is the first of many changes that we have in the pipeline, that will make 2D GameMaker games stand out for their beauty while retaining GameMaker’s essential simplicity and capability to support rapid multi-platform development. We can’t wait to see what our community does with it."

Over the last 20 years, GameMaker has become synonymous with 2D game development, offering creators the most intuitive, easy to learn, yet powerful 2D game creation suite in the world. GameMaker Studio 2, the latest iteration of GM, allows for incredible flexibility when creating for multiple platforms, with a single code base giving developers the ability to run their creations natively across PC, Mac, Mobile, HTML5 and consoles.

GameMaker has allowed indie developers to bring their vision to life, with titles such as Nidhogg 2, Minit, Hyper Light Drifter, Spelunky, Downwell, Nuclear Throne, Gunpoint and Undertale and so many more amazing games. As we celebrate the last 20 years of this game creation suite - having been originally released in 1999 by Computer Science teacher Mark Overmars, before growing rapidly and being acquired by YoYo Games in 2007 - we are looking forward to the future of what GameMaker can do for more creators looking to enter into game development.
Join us in sharing your best GameMaker memories! :squirrel:
 

True Valhalla

Full-Time Developer
GMC Elder
Wow! 20 years...it's been quite the journey, hasn't it? Congratulations to everyone at YoYo Games for reaching this milestone. GameMaker has been such an integral part of my life for so long and I'm incredibly thankful that's still the case today.
 
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matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
Can't wait for the 2.3 beta. Also, 20 is a great theme for the jam. So many possibilities!
 
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Skeletor

Guest
Nothing like making the announcement right at the last minute.

I'm in :D

[edit]
I just saw your post @rmanthorp, in the other thread. I see the hold off was intentional now. Hopefully heaps will enter. It should be good.
 
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Cpaz

Member
Really looking forward to those GML changes!
I'll have to see what my schedule next week is like, I might consider participating in this jam!
 
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Skeletor

Guest
with 20 lines of code
I like this idea actually. I only have to code three lines of code a day to create the game in time. Sounds like my speed.
 
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Skeletor

Guest
how do you define 20 lines of code?
anything that ends with ; is counted as a line?
Definitely.

No cheating my cramming what would be normally 1000 lines to one line of code.

I am talking correctly formatted well crafted lines.

If there is 30 semi-colons in the source code. That would be 30 lines to me.
 
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zendraw

Guest
and i can make as meny object as i please? ofcorse they wuld be limited becouse of the code, but still.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
Definitely.

No cheating my cramming what would be normally 1000 lines to one line of code.

I am talking correctly formatted well crafted lines.

If there is 30 semi-colons in the source code. That would be 30 lines to me.
Code:
if (i += 5){}
Or is that not legal GML?
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Woo, let's go on a trip down memory lane! :D

I've been using GM since before 2006 sometime... I wasn't particularly good at keeping logs, so I don't know exactly when I started, but I've got an old game build that was released in "summer 2006", so that's what I'm going on. And let's face it, anything I made before 2006 probably wasn't worth remembering anyway :p I've been using Game Maker since 6.1, and I've mostly kept away from all the cool advanced features, doing stuff by combining the simple basic features in complicated ways instead (in other words, the Unix way). Maybe I'm somewhere on the stupid and stubborn spectrum, but I've usually had my code work the first time I tried it as a result of keeping things simple.

Gun Princess was made in GM 6.1 and essentially was a Cave Story ripoff. My goal was to "have Cave Story BUT MORE" so I made dozens of guns (most of which are unbalanced like all heck and completely redundant), hundreds of rooms (to the point my potato computer couldn't handle them and I had to put them in external files), and made hidden areas in hidden areas in hidden areas so there was tons of stuff to explore. The game had a soundtrack made from equal parts XM chiptunes and MIDI files, made before I learned how to make music, and one of the "modding friendly features" had an arbitrary code execution exploit.
upload_2019-11-14_0-22-45.png
Those were the days. And the game was run through the GM6-to-vista-converter, so it's still playable today if you feel like torturing yourself!


Coincidentally, I made a break on actively developing that game to make an entry for one of the old Yoyogames competitions, Heart of Ruin: Final Columbus, which to this day is the largest project I've ever finished. Or, well, whether I finished it is debatable. GMS1 rolled around, and execute_string got deprecated, so I had to abandon it when GM8 stopped working. At that point I'd added in like 12 secret dungeons and 15 weapon upgrades, which had reduced the code base to a heap of duct tape and toothpicks held together with actual ducks instead of duct tape. It was also the first project where I used GML instead of D&D, resulting in some of the most unreadable code ever known to mankind.
upload_2019-11-14_0-27-20.png
It's basically a better version of Gun Princess, but it suffered from me frontloading a million dialogue lines in the beginning (so you get bored of all the plot before you get to do any actual gameplay), and most of the dungeons basically just are filled to the brim with enemies to chew through with very little in the form of platforming, exploration or area gimmicks.
Fun fact: one of the elite enemies is the Smiley Cog, the controversial GM8 logo that ended up getting scrapped after user complaints! I was one of the supporters of that logo.


I currently don't really work on a "game" project... I'm doing preproduction stuff for a massive open world cyberpunk tactics RPG, but the project has been growing for close to a decade and I'm terrified to ever start working on it. The stuff I've been releasing lately has all been commercial game assets (usually project files), keeping in line with my tradition of being helpful and a cheapskate :p (Or maybe it's me not having the determination to finish a full-scale project anymore these days, who knows). Currently I'm working on a be-all, end-all metroidvania engine that's been in progress since February, and I'm writing a 200-page detective noir novel to use for worldbuilding purposes / brand recognition / write down how the world WORKS for that RPG later. I've also learned to actually compose music that don't physically hurt you. It's been a fun 20 years, that's for sure. Let's make it 20 more! :D
 
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Skeletor

Guest
Code:
if (i += 5){}
Or is that not legal GML?
To me that is fine. There is only so much you can throw inside the braces before you hit a semi-colon. ;)

A semi-colon is pretty definitive. There is no arguing that this isn't the end of the road then.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
To me that is fine. There is only so much you can throw inside the braces before you hit a semi-colon. ;)

A semi-colon is pretty definitive. There is no arguing that this isn't the end of the road then.
I believe the canonical way is
Code:
do{ /*all your code here*/ }until(true)
C code standards often recommend using "do -- while false" to wrap macros so they can't bleed into adjacent code, GM's counterpart would be "do -- until true".
 
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Skeletor

Guest
and i can make as meny object as i please? ofcorse they wuld be limited becouse of the code, but still.
Do whatever you want. I'm not the one running the jam or setting the rules.

I am just choosing the direction that I'd like to personally go as a challenge to myself. I'm not telling anyone what they can or can't do. Doesn't worry me what you want to do. :)
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Instead of only using 20 lines of code (which is just an annoying rule to make things harder without making them more challenging), how about a challenge that every line of code must be exactly 20 characters long? (And you can't use more than one space in a row, or end a line in a comment). Some built-in functions can't be used at all because their names are too long, and you gotta keep logic terse and variable names short. And figure out creative ways to pad the end of code blocks.
 
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Skeletor

Guest
Instead of only using 20 lines of code (which is just an annoying rule to make things harder without making them more challenging), how about a challenge that every line of code must be exactly 20 characters long? (And you can't use more than one space in a row, or end a line in a comment). Some built-in functions can't be used at all because their names are too long, and you gotta keep logic terse and variable names short. And figure out creative ways to pad the end of code blocks.
Sure, if that's the direction you'd like to take. :)
 

2Dcube

Member
Or use only 20 variables. You'd have to reuse old ones cleverly if you need more. It works great with Game Maker because there are no type restrictions.
 

Toque

Member
I was wondering why sequences was secretive. Part of the anniversary thing. Makes sense. Can’t wait to play with it.
 
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Skeletor

Guest
Or use only 20 variables. You'd have to reuse old ones cleverly if you need more. It works great with Game Maker because there are no type restrictions.
I'm five lines in already and have something playable. Leaves me fifteen lines to polish the game.
 
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2Dcube

Member
I'm five lines in already and have something playable on keyboard and gamepad. I haven't used any variables yet either. :cool:
Nice. Speaking of which, you could easily make a game by using only built in variables, so maybe "use only 20 variables" is not a good idea.
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Last time someone bragged about line numbers like this it was Lonewolff. I can only imagine who this guy is...
 
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zendraw

Guest
im just tryin to get an idea of what i can do, like do setting variables for keys also count? stuff like that.
 

Roa

Member
just so its clear.... you don't need to abide by 20x20 res, 20 lines of code, or 20 hours. Those are just ideas. The theme is 20, what ever that may be. I'd rather not see a bunch of crappy 20x20 res games to celebrate the advancements a game engine has made in 20 years XD
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Well, I finished my entry to the jam, 20w0 Keeper! I've been super obsessively hacking away for the last 24-ish hours, because I got really infatuated with my maths zoo idea. It's super short, but considering how many of my projects died from being too bloated, it's probably for the better with a short-and-sweet thing than something that overstays its welcome.
upload_2019-11-14_23-54-28.png
Also for the first time in a VERY long while, it's not a platformer game repurposing old assets, I actually tried to do something with the theme instead of shoehorning it in at the last second :p

Oh, and the source file is included, so you can look at all my horrible variable naming conventions for yourself for the first time since... when did I release an engine last? February?
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Oh yeah @rmanthorp , does entries need to be made in GMS2 to be valid or can they be made with any version of Game Maker? I made mine in GMS1.4 since I'm a dinosaur, and I've seen some people discuss making their entries in GM1 (as in Game Maker 1, not Game Maker Studio 1) as a challenge... there's a community topic over on Itchio asking about this, but last time I checked there was no official word on it yet.
 

Roa

Member
Oh yeah @rmanthorp , does entries need to be made in GMS2 to be valid or can they be made with any version of Game Maker? I made mine in GMS1.4 since I'm a dinosaur, and I've seen some people discuss making their entries in GM1 (as in Game Maker 1, not Game Maker Studio 1) as a challenge... there's a community topic over on Itchio asking about this, but last time I checked there was no official word on it yet.
It's not stipulate, so its all fair game. Plus it would be 💩💩💩💩ty to clarify rules now. As long as it runs on a modern OS without backfips, it should be okay.
 

rmanthorp

GameMaker Staff
Admin
GameMaker Dev.
Oh yeah @rmanthorp , does entries need to be made in GMS2 to be valid or can they be made with any version of Game Maker? I made mine in GMS1.4 since I'm a dinosaur, and I've seen some people discuss making their entries in GM1 (as in Game Maker 1, not Game Maker Studio 1) as a challenge... there's a community topic over on Itchio asking about this, but last time I checked there was no official word on it yet.
Yeah! Other GM versions are fine!
 
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flerpyderp

Member
There is an unanswered question on itch.io about how to submit the source code to yoyo privately while keeping the project page public. I'm interested to know the answer, I assumed you just had to make your project file public too.
 

rmanthorp

GameMaker Staff
Admin
GameMaker Dev.
There is an unanswered question on itch.io about how to submit the source code to yoyo privately while keeping the project page public. I'm interested to know the answer, I assumed you just had to make your project file public too.
I've replied on the itch.io : )
 
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