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How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

gamemakerblog.com

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Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#61

Post by amarsahinovic »

krapp wrote: post #43
amarsahinovic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GameMaker is focued on 2D games[0], where Maratis is focused on 3D games (from what I can see). It would be better to compare Maratis to Unity3D. [0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177983/

You can make 3d games in GameMaker as well though i've always though it was really probably not the best use of it. I haven't seen any 3d GM games which blew me away in any case ... and i've never made any.

I know you can, but as you said, it's not the best way to go. If you need 3D games, there are better tools for that than GameMaker.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#62

Post by mratzloff »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #40
mratzloff wrote: post #26

So if I can sum up: the author made some games with Game Maker, made a small profit, then started primarily making libraries for Game Maker. Now he buys GameMakerBlog.com and posts an article about how much money you can make with Game Maker and you should really use it.

I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically, everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform. The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make a lot of money by essentially selling services around doin…

> I just don't think it's particularly fair that just because you are offering information products around some potentially dubious business opportunity that it's a valid criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling picks and shovels, so he must be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)

No, I said nothing like that.

I often skim the top few comments of an article before I read the article itself, to see if the article is worth my time. I appreciate seeing the kinds of comments I made, because it saves me time when others do it. Judging by the number of up votes I received, I'm not alone on this.

I suspect these articles are often up-voted based on the title alone, since they generally have no real content worth discussing (sometimes interesting discussion does arise despite this).

The long and short of it is that as long as there is no down vote button for articles, you will continue to see skeptical comments from HN users.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#63

Post by steveklabnik »

astrodust wrote: post #47
amarsahinovic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with everything else in life, it depends. If you want to build 3D games, then by all means, use Unity (or equivalent). But if you want to build 2D games, I think that GameMaker does a good job (I know you can do 2D games with Unity, but still).

Unity offers a full C# or JavaScript(-esque) development environment, far more flexible than GameMaker. It also supports 2D or 3D depending on your preference, even allowing you to switch between them if you want. Keep in mind a lot of "2D" games are really just 3D ones with no depth because OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics. Unity "free" is superior to GameMaker in virtually every regard,…

> OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics.

I'm sorry, what?

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#64

Post by nobodysfool »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #40
mratzloff wrote: post #26

So if I can sum up: the author made some games with Game Maker, made a small profit, then started primarily making libraries for Game Maker. Now he buys GameMakerBlog.com and posts an article about how much money you can make with Game Maker and you should really use it.

I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically, everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform. The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make a lot of money by essentially selling services around doin…

I don't think there was any intent to say he must be a douche. I suggest you read carefully what was written. He just says that the author is hawking 'make games with gamemaker' but in reality, the author may have gotten some money, but the real moneymaker is in writing libraries and using your platform as a way to sell other games. The way it was written was certainly not passing judgement on anyone.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#65

Post by KVFinn »

popopje wrote: post #2

it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play. Spelunky (the original - the newer, paid version is not made with game maker though was made possible through the popularity of the original) and Gunpoint were both made with game maker and have been very successful monetarily - Gunpoint in particular was the first game the author made, and its success means he is now a…

Gunpoint and Hotline Miama are both very successful games made with Gamemaker. Both good games, I might add.

Spelunky was re-written for the port but the original is decent. It definitely ran right up against some limitations at the time.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#66

Post by astrodust »

steveklabnik wrote: post #63
astrodust wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity offers a full C# or JavaScript(-esque) development environment, far more flexible than GameMaker. It also supports 2D or 3D depending on your preference, even allowing you to switch between them if you want. Keep in mind a lot of "2D" games are really just 3D ones with no depth because OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics. Unity "free" is superior to GameMaker in virtually every regard,…

> OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics. I'm sorry, what?

How else do you get pixels to the screen at reasonable frame rates? You load it into a texture and place it on a 3D polygon that just happens to be sized the same as the screen, making it in effect a 2D canvas with 1:1 texel to pixel mappings. Doing old-school "bitblitting" isn't going to cut it today, the overhead is too huge. GPU texture manipulation and layering is orders of magnitude faster than what you can do in the CPU space.

Windows uses Direct3D for the native UI, and OS X uses OpenGL for the same thing.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#67

Post by codexon »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #40
mratzloff wrote: post #26

So if I can sum up: the author made some games with Game Maker, made a small profit, then started primarily making libraries for Game Maker. Now he buys GameMakerBlog.com and posts an article about how much money you can make with Game Maker and you should really use it.

I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically, everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform. The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make a lot of money by essentially selling services around doin…

There's nothing wrong with selling picks and shovels, but blog posts like this are often exaggerated.

There is no way to confirm he actually made good money using game maker. If he made 80k, no doubt people here would give it a try, but what if the real number was 10k? People probably wouldn't bother.

Because there are so many blog posts that sound like this (I made lots of money doing X and now you can do it too by buying Y I am selling) I tend to have a healthy dose of skepticism.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#68

Post by FreakLegion »

j_s wrote: post #3

So many cross-platform game building tools available these days... hard to know which one would be worth learning! Personally I see Unity as having the most possibilities; I guess I'll add GameMaker to the list of things to check out. One general thought I have is how hard it would be to use these for business apps... particularly the reporting/dashboard style where there isn't as much need for standard CRUD input co…

If you're interested in game-like front ends, have a look at Scaleform[1]. It sits on top of the Flash content pipeline[2], so the toolchain is very mature. It's also included with most serious game engines by default (e.g. Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity), and is used for the UI of virtually every AAA game.

1. http://gameware.autodesk.com/scaleform

2. But uses its own rendering engine, with far better performance than Flash itself.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#69

Post by TrueValhalla »

Kiro wrote: post #58

Are the games for web only? Are they working on mobile browsers?

Both! HTML5 games are not bought on the App Store, they are played directly in your browser. So you can, for example, open up Safari on your iPhone and play a HTML5 game for free, right in your browser.

You can also play that same game on your desktop PC, by visiting the same web address. Though all of my HTML5 games are specifically optimized for mobile.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#70

Post by aryastark »

astrodust wrote: post #66
steveklabnik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics. I'm sorry, what?

How else do you get pixels to the screen at reasonable frame rates? You load it into a texture and place it on a 3D polygon that just happens to be sized the same as the screen, making it in effect a 2D canvas with 1:1 texel to pixel mappings. Doing old-school "bitblitting" isn't going to cut it today, the overhead is too huge. GPU texture manipulation and layering is orders of magnitude faster than what you can do i…

Your definition of "reasonable" really needs a qualifier here.

If you're doing AAA games in 2D, yeah you will use the GPU. But an indie game? You probably don't need it. Especially if you're writing the game without Unity (i.e. straight C++). The costs of setting up and working with 2D in OpenGL is high. I've done it. It's not fun, it's not pretty. It's a bitch, plain and simple. Texture atlases, font rendering, UV coords, texture uploading, vertex buffers, shaders. That's a ton of crap you have to worry with. Just to render simple 2D sprites to a screen. Many people can and do skip it and go straight to SDL or somesuch. It works, and modern CPUs are more than adequate.

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