Those of you who are already big on Game Maker will probably already know this, but a little over a week ago, YoYo Games released Game Maker 8, the latest version of the Game Maker engine. I've only messed around with it a little so far, but from what I can see it's grown in quality quite a bit since the beta version! This new releases fixes a lot of old sore spots I've had with Game Maker, and introduces a lot of handy default features that would have required some extra scripting in older versions. The list of new stuff includes:
- A rebuilt window for script entry, with a few handy new features for editing code (and a couple basic amenities that were conspicuously absent in earlier versions, such as line numbers.)
- A greater selection of higher-quality bundled resources; my feelings are mixed on this one. Sure, placeholder graphics will have more flavour, but I don't want this to become the equivalent of RPG Maker's RTP, where games that don't abuse it are few and far between.
- A nice import/export system that allows teams of makers to easily apply each other's changes.
- A completely retooled in-house sprite editor! For one thing, it natively supports alpha channels and the editing thereof. About time, yo.
- Significantly improved game speed. The games themselves will tend to lag much less, and the somewhat annoying preloading will go faster.
- More effective encryption.
- And a lot of other little things, like being able to designate separate collision masks for different frames of a sprite.
Basically, it's looking very cool so far. It's an upgrade through and through, with no features notably gimped or left incomplete, which is refreshing after seeing how Enterbrain handles successive releases of RPG Maker. The price for the full version right now is $25 USD, but Game Maker's always been very nice about their trial releases; there is no time limit, and you can create and publish an entire game without upgrading. A number of higher functions will be disabled, but it's more than enough to get a feel for the engine.
You can read more about gammaker eight here and at their wiki.
P.S. Oh yeah, it's also worth noting for you guys who have existing projects in GM7 that GM's always been quite good about its backwards compatibility. You should be able to open a GM7 project up in GM8 and continue it there without any huge problems. I'm not sure it works perfectly 100% of the time, but the succession works more like rm2k => rm2k3 than rmXP => rmVX.
