Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

gamemakerblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–76 of 76 posts

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#71

Post by astrodust »

aryastark wrote: post #70
astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Most of the popular 2D engines use OpenGL or Direct3D in the back-end, it allows them to do compositing much more easily, and at near zero cost. You don't have to worry about a thing if you're using the right library, it's no harder than the usual canvas calls.

This isn't just about performance. On a phone it's about not burning the battery down by loading down the CPU with expensive tasks that the GPU can do more easily.

Don't forget you can do your font rendering in the classic environment, then ship that texture image over for placement. It's not all that difficult with the right tools, many of which get packaged up for you transparently. You're not stuck in OpenGL by any means.

Most "2D" games are just 3D games rendered in isometric mode, top-down, with the depth information being used for layering.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#72

Post by pearjuice »

colkassad wrote: post #33
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.

So in effect, a standard HN submission.

He should have went with a blog on Medium and a more HN-worthy title; "How GameMaker shaped my life, career and start-up".

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#73

Post by pearjuice »

No matter how good the story; GameMaker will always be remembered as the Microsoft Frontpage of game development due its drag-and-drop functionality and (mostly) imature userbase. Sure, you can do cool things with and use all sorts of advanced features but some impressions just stick.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#74

Post by Widdershin »

derefr wrote: post #25
Nekorosu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Spelunky was made with GameMaker. It was extremely enjoyable to play which led to the development of the XBox version. It contradicts your statement "it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play.", doesn't it? Also I'm sure the dev tools don't play such a big part in the gameplay's quality of the result as you think.

Game Maker is scriptable in a Turing-complete language, so of course you can make anything in it--it's just a matter of blind determination. VBA is also Turing-complete, which means you can write your game in Powerpoint. (It's a lot like Flash, in fact.) But I don't see many people doing that, and for good reason. :) But I think another, more devious way to phrase "it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in…

I've made tons of games in Game Maker. GML was my most proficient language up until mid last year.

The tossup with making games in Game Maker is how much you hate the language versus how much you like the standard library. I have encountered absolutely nothing that has the ease of use and breadth of the Game Maker stdlib for making 2d games. Maybe Unity's 2D support will change that, but we'll see.

Re: How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

#75

Post by aryastark »

astrodust wrote: post #71
aryastark wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Most of the popular 2D engines use OpenGL or Direct3D in the back-end, it allows them to do compositing much more easily, and at near zero cost. You don't have to worry about a thing if you're using the right library, it's no harder than the usual canvas calls. This isn't just about performance. On a phone it's about not burning the battery down by loading down the CPU with expensive tasks that the GPU can do more ea…

> This isn't just about performance.

Yes, but let's not forget you made it about performance.

There are plenty of reasons to choose to use OpenGL. Lots of freebies come with it. But you can still do 2D games without the GPU. That's the point. You can't just keep moving the goal posts however you want.

Post reply on HN