Game Maker has been my go-to development tool for as long as I've been making games. It's what taught me to love programming so much that I've gone back to school to study computer science. It allows stupid fast prototyping of games. It's easy to use. But I'm leaving. After I wrap up all the projects that I'm currently building with Game Maker, I've decided it's time to move on.
When I first bought Game Maker for $20 it was one dude's (Mark Overmars) labor of love & came with the promise of free updates for life. Then it was bought out & the free updates stopped. It was just recently bought out again, by some gambling company. I don't like the taste of it. It's still a great tool & I almost gave in & bought the most recent version anyway. It's only $50, but you want to develop for MacOS in addition to Windows? Extra $100. Linux? Another $100. HTML5? That's $200 more. Then there are the myriad known optimization & audio engine problems. None of these things on their own are enough of a reason for me to leave. But all together- the buyouts, the cost, all its quirky little issues, the fact that I've long outgrown the drag & drop interface that first got me hooked- it all adds up to time to say goodbye.
So I'm doing some research & finding lots of interesting sounding alternatives. OpenFL has my attention at the moment; free, open-source, & multi-platform. Some great games have already been developed with OpenFL (Papers, Please being one of my personal faves). There's also the free, open source ENIGMA,which is Game maker compatible, making it another tempting option. The point is, there are great, free alternatives. I'm not Big Mr. Open Source or anything, but given the choice I'll take GiMP over Photoshop any day.
I've got a lot of unfinished Game Maker business to wrap up so I'm not making any big decisions here, really, except that I'm committing myself to learning a new development tool once I flush all my current projects out of the pipeline.
It's been fun, Game Maker, & you'll always be my first. I hope we can still be friends.
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