Discussion What can you do with Gamemaker, other than make games?

[otterZ]

Before I get replies such as "Well, what do you expect to make using a game engine? Games!" just hold up a sec . . .

I can't find the post now but there is one guy who makes digital art with Gamemaker and displays his art on screens that can be viewed from both sides, as if the digital art were inside a piece of thick glass. I tried multiple searches on the forum but can't find his old posts now as I forgot his username, if someone has a link please post it up. His digital art displays looked amazing and is such a creative idea.

Also, it could be argued that I am not really making a game as my main project, as instead I'm building a workout app using Gamemaker.

Does anyone use Gamemaker in ways that are a little bit different? Or, thinking outside the box, just for fun, does anyone have any ideas of using Gamemaker in ways that vary from the norm, but are at the same time useful or have a purpose?

 

[TsukaYuriko]

I made a PowerPoint-esque presentation about a game I made in GM that was the project I made during my chamber of commerce and industry exams, for example. Not because it was a requirement, but because I found it easier and more comfortable to use than the alternatives...

 

[zendraw]

you can do whatever you need as long as it can be done in this engine. i once needed to turn numbers into words for invoices, so thats what i did. maybe you need a calculator, you make a calculator. big part of games consists of mechanics that make sense outside of games aswell. like scrolling down menu options. you can make a list of food that you eat, then you pick what food you want for today, andprint it out, you also can add prices to the food so you can pre-calculate how much money youll need when u go to store. or if you got hard times with money you can setup your budget for the month. and so on.

 

[Kezarus]

One could make Neural Networks like this video: Deep Learning Cars. Not reeeealy big NN with lots of data, but simulation driven ones should be way easier to do than using a more robust language to actually make a racing engine and then run a NN. In GM you already have the engine to make a simple race game... and fast!

I think simulations that needs to be displayed on screen are also interesting to do here. Again, nothing ginormous, but still lighter than using Unity as I seen latelly.

And... hmmm, map making tools? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Gamebot]

I usually deal with algorithms. From simple encryption and decryption, magic squares, number systems ( Including my own algorithms that DONT match up with the proper amounts ). To 3D algorithms which are just a bunch of 2D algorithms within different layers or planes.

Recently, with the help of Excel I created a .csv file of all numbers for all drawings for the two big lotteries in the USA Power Ball and Mega Millions. I could use Excel easier but I want to be able to compute and see all information I want to see when I want to see it. Not flip through or find what i'm looking for on a bunch of worksheets.

 

[Elodman]

... Does anyone use Gamemaker in ways that are a little bit different? Or, thinking outside the box, just for fun, does anyone have any ideas of using Gamemaker in ways that vary from the norm, but are at the same time useful or have a purpose?

Yes: Demoscene

( Wondering why everyone is so shy / uninterested, that not posting even simple kewl fx there ? )

 

[otterZ]

It is so interesting how people are using GM2 in different ways. Thanks everyone for replying as looking at how people are using Gamemaker outside of making games fascinates me, and I can't really put my finger on why that is.

Elodman, you just sent me on a journey via YouTube watching a demoscene party. I'd never even heard of this scene. Some really creative entries and great for sparking future game ideas. Looks so much fun to attend them too as everyone is having a laugh and having fun being creative.

 

[Lumenflower]

One could make Neural Networks like this video: Deep Learning Cars. Not reeeealy big NN with lots of data, but simulation driven ones should be way easier to do than using a more robust language to actually make a racing engine and then run a NN. In GM you already have the engine to make a simple race game... and fast!

You might be interested in carykh on Youtube, he does alot of these kinds of machine learning networks. To build on this GM is good for entry-level prototyping of neural networks. I wrote a multilayer perceptron and although it was very slow at handling training data (I had to leave it running overnight to get any meaningful response from it) it did work, and it was probably far simpler to program than it would have been in other languages (absence of intuitive n-dimensional arrays notwithstanding).

I also sometimes use it for small maths-based tasks, for example a few years ago I did some work with iterated exponentials and wanted a quick way of computing sequences of power towers and plotting them on a graph. GM made that super easy to bang out in an evening and gave me graphs ready to show off (I did not have access to MATLAB at the time, and even now I cannot stand MATLAB syntax and will avoid it wherever possible). More recently I needed to generate a large set of 'shots bingo' cards for a social I was running, so I wrote a quick program to generate arrays of numbers according to certain rules which I could print out.

Looking back these things would probably have been far better in - say - Python or MATLAB for example, but as an engineer with minimal programming experience outside of GM, I admire GM for its ability to handle these kinds of tasks while allowing me to stay cosily inside my comfort zone.

 

[Deleted member 13992]

I wrote a program in GMS that took waveforms I'd drawn and converted them into arrays. I'd then paste those arrays in microcontroller code for my electronics projects / signal generators/processors (as seen on my oscilloscope below).




These days I use Processing for this though. I had hit a bottleneck with the speed of draw_getpixel. And I ran into issues when trying to scan pixels for images larger than the screen resolution.