Dangerous Dave's Dlog

Let's see if this gets 7th in Google for the search term "Game Maker for Mac", since my last Game Maker post, hardly about GM for Mac got there nearly overnight. And I haven't even told anyone about this blog yet... Thats awesome

So, Game Maker for Mac. I got the email from YoYo a few days ago, we were all sent a link to a site that contained the runner, but no editor. Today it finally got sorted, and I now have both the runner and the editor (separately, for some reason).

My first impression: Really bad looking. I wanted it to feel like a Mac program, this did not at all. I could have settled for looking good if it was in Windows. None of that either. It's worse than the Windows version. Here's a screenshot of the main editor:



Not impressed. As a Mac user, looks are very important to me (in all parts of my life ;-) ). But I guess I could get over that if it was beautiful on the inside as well (That YoYo Games logo is actually stretched like that, it's not just the screenshot). So I decided to make a game. The first thing I did was (try to) create a sprite. I got an error (yes, while trying to make a sprite). After a couple of tries, I'm no longer getting this error (at all). Cool, let's go and draw something. I got my pencil tool, and started to draw, this is what I got:


By the way, all I did was click in the top left hand corner, and drag to the bottom right hand corner. Once. that other line wasn't me... And that blurring is in the sprite editor, also not a fault of the screenshot. It appears to be affected by the zoom. In fact, the sprite editor works almost flawlessly when zoomed out, it's just a pity it's only half an inch wide on my screen.

My first impression is that it is unusable. I feel YoYo Games may have felt pressured into showing they were actually doing something, but this seems to fall short of beta status. I think it was released much too early.

With that said, there is a possibility that it works fine on their test machines, and the beta has shown that some machines aren't handled as well. My MacBook fits into the Intel processor and 10.5.5 (Leopard) group, which is what they wanted. All bugs I have encountered so far point towards a video card problem, and it is likely I run a different video card than their test machines (with their much bigger budget ).

It will be interesting to see whether others have the same issues. One last thing, did I mention a stand alone game is 19MB when blank?

But one exciting prospect is having easy access to the game data file, which could technically be distributed without the runner to make the games 19MB smaller, but we will have to see about the EULA for that.


-Dave

Edit: A few updates, minutes later

Surfaces don't appear to work. Drawing on the screen doesn't appear to work in conjunction with keyboard_wait(). And a lot of the 3D doesn't work as expected, especially when it comes to non-conventional use, such as drawing in 3D without 3D mode turned on (which works in Windows). Also I get strange effects where draw_set_alpha() has been used. Blobber runs flawlessly . Textboxes don't wrap long strings, and don't stretch to accommodate length when # is used. Fullscreen doesn't appear to work.

The files left behind are just ridiculous. If you have saved the game, the application is created in the same folder as the GMK when the game is run. It is never removed after the game is quit. If you haven't saved the game, it is created on your hard drive. I just found about half a dozen of these apps, all in a uniquely numbered folder, each 20MB. These are games I never saved, but these files are left behind.

Also, double clicking on a gmk file will open the maker, but it doesn't load the gmk.