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GameMaker A little love for GM:S

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appymedia

Guest
Hi All,

I've been going through testing various different game engines for 2D work (no names) and trying each out to see what workflow is good for me, platform support, performance, etc, etc.

Things have certainly come on a LONG way since I last used GM:S (last time was 1.4, this time 2) and I've been having a blast. Simply great fun to use. Just setup my XB1 in dev mode and deployed a first UWP game. Works a charm, was impressed how easily I could drop into the debugger and still profile code and so on even though its running on the XB1.

In my reading around something that struck me is the opinion a lot of people seem to have of GM:S around DnD and GML. For some reason the fact there's a DnD option seems to make GM:S less capable (wrong in my tests, quite the opposite) and GML isn't a 'proper' language etc. Every definition of the term 'programming language' GML passes with flying colours. I've coded for quite a while, from 68K ASM on the Amiga / ST through to C# / PHP. I'm certainly no uber coder but even I can see GML gets the job done and IMO pretty damm well, I like the simplicity of it personally. Also, the whole prototyping thing. Not understanding why people seem to think GM:S is for prototyping only, really! Not even sure how many of the people stating opinions on GM:S have actually USED it.

Needed to get that rant out :)

As you might have guessed GM:S 2 is where I've settled (I did use GM:S 1.4 a little as well), looking forward to creating some fun stuff :) :)
 
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elsi11

Guest
I had used GM a couple of times in the past. It was always: trying to imitate a youtube tutorial, inevitably failing, getting annoyed and abandoning everything. I also tried the other engines a couple of times: Construct, Unity, Unreal Engine. I watched performance comparison videos, and GM looked pretty solid. Also the "big boy" Engines simply had too many buttons and numbers and such stuff, and the actual coding looked absolutely intimidating. So I came back to GM, and watched some shaun videos, picked up some coding tricks while also being tutored by my professional coder friends on an mmo. I learned about objects and classes and stuff, and I read one java book. And then I tried Unity for real, but came back to GM with the speed of light.
And that's it. I learn new stuff every day from the good fellows on this forum that have to put up with me, and it's all good. Decided to make my first couple of games with GM.
 
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appymedia

Guest
Glad to hear @elsi11 IMO GML gives us everything needed to make games and quickly. There's always improvements that can be made but I've not come across anything where I've not been able to do something either by brain power or a little googling around. I don't feel less of a programmer, I feel more empowered by being able to get things done. I've spent time with C++ / SDL and made a few things and I can tell you which experience I enjoyed and got the most out ;)
 
Joe Ellis

Joe Ellis

Member
I don't see much difference between gml and most other mid-level programming languages (java, c-style), it used to be more limited in the gm5-6, 7 8 days but its come a long way, I think any comments about it now mainly stem from stuff they've seen from these older versions.
But out of any programming language I've used or seen, gml is the nicest and simplest, its pretty much how I would make my own perfect language.
 
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