The game is free. We plan on releasing its source soon.

It’s a small diversion, made for fun during the DBC game jam, so we decided to release it for free. The game is very simple, but can be pretty fun when played with a partner. Let’s say it’s a belated Valentine’s Day gift from the Moa.

Co-Op is a space shooter with no shooting. The only way to kill enemies is to cut them with a flexible power beam connecting players’ ships. The goal is to max your score before you inevitably die due to your partner’s mistake.

System requirements:

WINDOWS:

Should work on anything with at least 512Mb RAM

MAC:

Intel Macs with at least OS X 10.5

Pre-order to play the preview build of the game now. Learn more.

Cinders is an atmospheric visual novel, illustrated by Gracjana Zielinska.
 
It’s a story of four women and the choices they make, inspired by the classic fairytale of Cinderella. It focuses on the characters and their motivations, features an active female protagonist, and questions the naive morals of the original story. It’s also heavy on player choices and role-playing. The game contains many more decisions than most visual novels, some crucial to the story, some simply allowing to shape the protagonist’s personality.

Learn more about the story and themes of Cinders.

The game is under steady development and should be released around Q2 2012 for Windows and Mac OS X.

 
Why it’s cool:

• A classic story gets re-shaped as you want.
• Beautiful art by illustrator Gracjana Zielinska.
• Tons of choices and several different endings.
• Enchanting soundtrack by Rob Westwood.

Extras:

• Wallpapers
• Main music theme
• Dramatic music theme

System requirements:

WINDOWS:

Should work on anything with at least 512Mb RAM

MAC:

Intel Macs with at least OS X 10.5

The game is free. We plan on releasing its source soon.

Co-Op is a space shooter with no shooting. The only way to kill enemies is to cut them with a flexible power beam connecting players’ ships. The goal is to max your score before you inevitably die due to your partner’s mistake.

The game features several types of lovable enemies, cute cardboard aesthetic, combos, and many ways to break a friendship. It’s pretty fun and requires some good coordination between the partners to be any successful. It’s also possible to play it solo, if you are ambidextrous enough.

System requirements:

WINDOWS:

Should work on anything with at least 512Mb RAM

MAC:

Intel Macs with at least OS X 10.5

If you bought the game, please check your email for a new download link from BMT Micro. If you are a member of the press willing to do a preview, please contact us and we’ll fix you a copy, too.

The new version includes a lot more story content, along with numerous fixes and improvements. Writing took much longer than we expected, so to make use of that extra time, we got around to implementing some cool new stuff from your suggestions and our own wish list.

Notable changes:

• Branch icon appears when current events are an outcome of earlier choices.
• Every character now has several more poses for specific situations.
• Small face icons were added next to character names for better readability.
• Rewards visible in the main menu for completing various events.
• Auto-play option is available.
• Fast-text option for the quick readers out there.
• Many new sound and visual effects were added.
• From now on, save files will be compatible between game versions.
• Several bug fixes and other minor improvements.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new build. If you have any feedback, please leave it in the comments or on our forums.

As for the general development progress — we’re getting there, but there’s still a significant amount of writing left to be done. We have hired an additional writer to speed up the process. If everything goes well, we should be able to set some release date soon.

I’ve developed a certain love-hate relationship with the software. We’ve had some good times together, but there were times when I considered filling divorce papers and turned my head after the younger and sexier Unity. So far, we decided to stay together. For the kids’ sake, you know.

GameMaker is a rather popular tool among amateur and freeware developers, but you rarely see it used to produce commercial-quality games, and there aren’t many publications on how it fares in professional game development.

With YoYo Games trying to attract more serious developers with the release of GM HTML5 and the upcoming GM Studio, I thought it could be interesting to do a little rundown of the good and the bad in the software from the perspective of someone trying to utilize it for commercial work.

The Good:

Fast development: This was always the main advantage of GameMaker and other similar tools for me. You can develop damn fast in it. During the DBC game jams I was able to create working projects in only a couple of hours. Working as in: fully playable, with complete mechanics and already looking somewhat pretty. At Codeminion, I sometimes found it faster to show the programmer what I want using a GameMaker prototype, than to describe it and go through several feedback loops.

Being able to develop fast is crucial when you have to worry about budgets and deadlines. Of course, a skilled C++ programmer can work similarly fast in a good framework. But — well — you need to pay that programmer and spend months on developing the framework first. GM saves a lot of time and money here.

It’s very flexible and pretty capable: Think about any 2D game you like. You could probably do it in GameMaker. It’s a huge advantage over the more focused game creation tools like Ren’Py or RPG Maker. Even custom-built engines are usually done to meet needs of a particular game or genre.

Meanwhile, GM can be used to make arcade shooters, complex RTS, platformers, visual novels or any experimental game you have on your mind. Not having to learn new tools for each project saves a lot of time.

Performance is a-okay: I often hear that GM’s performance is its biggest issue. Well, hardly (as you will see later). It’s more than capable for most 2D projects. Of course, if you want to make something very technically-advanced, you probably would be better off writing your own engine. But let’s be honest — most commercial 2D games don’t need to be cutting-edge. You generally want them to work on older machines, as it’s a big chunk of the indie audience. Nice art is usually more important than pure tech-prowess here.

I consider ArcMagi and Cinders to be relatively pretty games, with plenty of effects, particles, cool transitions and such. They both easily maintain 60fps, even on netbooks or older hardware. I never really felt like I have to cut something cool out to prevent framerate drops.

I think part of the problem is that GM is very simple to use and it’s tempting to be lazy. It’s easy to just include all the art assets within the project, draw them all on the screen with tons of particles and then complain that it slows down and uses too much RAM.

Most of the slowdowns can be solved with simple optimisations and more responsible memory use. Which is something you have to consider in any commercial game, regardless of the engine. I assure you that when I was working on Phantasmat, using a much faster custom-built engine, I still couldn’t slap everything I wanted on the screen without any considerations for the lower-end hardware.

It’s cheap: Just that. It’s cheaper than pretty much any other commercially-viable engine. It doesn’t matter that much when you have budgets in the tens or hundreds of thousands, but for a small indie developer, paying over thousand bucks for Unity and a few plugins, just to try it out, may be a big deal.

It’s easy to learn: GM was designed as a teaching tool and it shows. It’s pretty easy to grasp, syntax rules are very leeway, documentation isn’t written in Klingon and there are many tutorials available. It’s something even an artist without former programming experience can pick up and use. It allows for more participation from your non-techy team members, which is a big advantage in small teams. And let’s not forget that time used to learn new tools is development time as well.

Predictable: Except for a few hurdles I’m going to list in the next section, GameMaker is pretty predictable. It’s been around since quite a while and it uses pretty low-end tech. If it works for you, it’s probably going to work for your clients as well. If it doesn’t, you can assume it’s your and not the engine’s fault with a good degree of certainty. Depending on the complexity of the project, this can shave off a few weeks or months of QA work.

Good multi-platform prospects: HTML5 exporter is already out. iOS, Android and a few others are coming later this year. Many games have been internally ported to iOS by YoYo Games already. Even given that it will likely have some troubles at start, it looks like the tool is going to get even more universal.

Lack of competition: There simply aren’t many alternatives. Coding your own engine can be superior but takes precious development time. Lots of it! Tools like Ren’py or RPG Maker focus only on a certain type of games. Construct, Stencyl and MMF2 all use visual coding that gets very hard to debug and read as the project grows. And using Unity to make a 2D game is like trimming a bonsai tree with a chainsaw.

GameMaker may not be perfect (oh, believe me, it’s so not), but it’s still likely the best rapid 2D game development tool around.

The Bad:

Bad first impression: To get GameMaker, you have to go to the YoYo Games’ website. It looks like poop. Then you download the software, boot it up, and hey — a big shocker — it looks like poop too! Gotta love that Windows95 feel!

It’s superfluous but it scares many developers and makes them waive GM as a kids’ tool. It’s not (at least not exlusively), but it certainly doesn’t make the best first impression.

Mac versions sucks like an atom-powered Dyson: No, really. It’s b-b-bad! First of all, it’s based on the GM7.0 while the Windows one is v8.1. This means that compatibility goes only one way. If you have a project in v8.0+ you can pretty much forget about porting it to the OS X. And it’s not even the biggest issue here.

Initially, it just didn’t work. As in: it was impossible to make a game in it. It crashed on every other function call, it was impossible to load a sprite with transparency, and drawing more than three lines of text was enough to slow the game down to a crawl. To be able to work on Cinders and release Magi on the Mac, we essentially had to do few days worth of QA work for YoYo Games. Got in contact with the developer, filled several bug reports, added better reproduction steps and examples to the bugs reported by other users, and so on.

It became usable eventually, but it still has more flaws than it’s worth to count. The interface falls apart, code editor has a mind of its own, and don’t ever count on error reporting to tell you what caused a crash if one happens. It’s just going to freeze or produce a bogus error message. If you know your way around GM with your eyes closed, you’ll manage. But if your first experience with the tool is on the Mac, I pity you.

It’s worth noting that the upcoming GM Studio will have an option to export to Mac and should be free of these issues. However, it’s going to be Windows only. If you ever tried to debug a game’s port without being able to work on the computer you’re making it for, then you know what that means.

True multi-platform development is said to come with GM9. ETA: chances are that if you look outside of your window when it comes out, you’ll see this.

Issues with fullscreen on Windows7: For some reason, GM gets lazy on Windows7 and doesn’t want to use interpolation for scaled image. It defaults to a basic nearest-pixel algorithm instead. It looks like this.

Why is it important? Because it happens when you run the game in fullscreen and it has to be scaled to fit the screen (you can’t possibly support every existing resolution natively). Most engines produce a slightly blurry, but overall workable image in this case. So does GM, unless the user runs Windows7 (hardly a niche).

Now, imagine you are making a casual game to sell on BigFish Games. Something GM is theoretically perfect for. You finish the game, it gets initially accepted and you receive their tech requirements doc. One of the first points is: “The game has to open and run properly in fullscreen”. Have fun.

Sprite loading issues in GM8.1: Oh, this one! Still sends shivers down my spine. Some of the Cinders pre-order owners probably remember it. Soon after the preview version launch, a large portion of users reported that the game crashes during scene loading. After some investigation, we figured that it happens on older computers, lower-end notebooks and netbooks with integrated video cards. So, about 20%-30% of our userbase. Scary.

We’ve spent two days and nights trying to reproduce and fix the issue. I pretty much haven’t slept for that whole time. After all, folks paid for a game that wasn’t working. Thank goodness it happened during the beta and not the official launch — that would screw us over completely. Eventually, Marius was able to find an old PC that had the error. After another day of testing and desperately trying to find the reason behind the crash, driven by a hunch, I decided to compile the game under GM8.0 instead of GM8.1 and see what happens. It worked!

Turns out that GM8.1 likes to crash on weaker PCs when loading larger textures. Something that probably won’t happen when you are just playing around, but is commonplace in bigger projects. It took a few weeks of bothering Russell Kay (one of GM’s programmers, a very cool and supportive fellow by the way) to get it fixed. Now it doesn’t crash, but instead produces weird graphical glitches and major slowdowns on the affected PCs. Cool, huh?

In the end, I have to use GM8.0 for all my PC releases (good thing that I kept the older version), even though I paid for GM8.1. The problem is that GM8.0 has some issues with font anti-aliasing that were fixed in 8.1 Argh!

Awkward dev schedule: You would think that the above two issues are pretty significant, and should be fixed as soon as possible. After all, loading assets and pixel interpolation can be considered core functionality.

Well, as of now, GM8.1 hasen’t been updated since several months and the programmers are focused on GM Studio and HTML5, both unfortunately based on the broken GM8.1 codebase. The fullscreen issue in particular was waived as something to fix in GM9.

It has to be said that both programmers working on GameMaker seem to be very competent and smart people. But one can’t stop wondering if they aren’t mismanaged. Focusing on new releases, while the core product is still kinda shaky, seems like a weird strategy to attract more serious developers.

Built-in editors are bad: GameMaker utilizes various built in editors for art assets and level design. They are all pretty unwieldy. It never bothered us much, as we just use normal graphics software for the art and our own solutions for level building, but it’s worth mentioning that you can’t expect to make much use of what’s already there. It’s possible to drag some objects around and make a simple game, but a larger commercial project — not so much.

Lack of portability: I said that publicly available exporters for Mac, iOS and Android are coming soon. It means they aren’t available now.

That is unless you want to go through a pretty unfavorable deal with YoYo Games (50% royalties, exclusivity, they are listed as the developer, some negotiations possible) to get your title ported. The fact that the multi-platform GM Studio is going to be based on the faulty GM8.1 also doesn’t bode well for the program’s reliability.

In general, if you consider smartphones to be an important part of your business model, I would say that using GM is too risky. At least for now.

Teamwork on GM is hard: GameMaker uses a single file for its projects. This means that co-operation with several team members and version control are a pain in the ass. GameMaker HTML5 and the upcoming GM Studio are going to store projects as a folder structure (much like Unity) so the issue is temporary.

Uncertain future: Being honest, GM is getting more and more outdated, while tools like Unity or Stencyl are getting progressively better. Latest GM releases also weren’t too reassuring, especially the Mac version. YoYo Games struggles to become profitable and focuses more and more on game publishing. It’s hard to predict what will happen to the software in a few years. It has great potential for sure, but I prefer to be cautiously pessimistic.

Summary:

So is GameMaker worth recommendation? For amateur or more lightweight indie — for sure. It’s fast and easy to use, and the above issues don’t affect smaller games that much.

For commercial projects? Not yet unfortunely, unless you really know what you are doing and can live with the problems. It’s fast, flexible and powerful enough, but you risk that one of its quirks will bite you in the ass at the end of a project, and you can’t really count on it being fixed fast.

Using us as an example, we’re happy that we picked GM for Magi, ArcMagi and Cinders. All three games work as intended without making any sacrifices, look rather pretty, were fast to code and can be easily expanded or altered. We’re especially happy with what we’ve got in Cinders. A pretty flexible visual novel engine, similar to Ren’py, but able to produce much nicer graphics, with the possibility to expand it easily with more gameplay elements. And it took less than three months to code from scratch.

We definitely see ourselves using GM for some of our future projects, especially VNs and the more experimental stuff. However, we recently pitched one of our game ideas to a few friendly companies, to secure MoaCube’s stability undermined by the Cinders delay. A bigger game, requiring at least $100k to make. We strongly considered doing it in GameMaker. It seemed perfect for the job, but we eventually decided that it’s too risky and opted to license an engine from an established game developer.

Let me reiterate: when faced with the responsibility of having to spend actual money that isn’t ours, we concluded that using a completely new engine is less risky than working in software I’ve been using for the past 7 years. It made me think. You should consider it too.

GameMaker is a tool with much promise, and may well become a viable choice eventually, but it needs more time and better handling from YoYo Games. They could probably use some constructive feedback that’s not just straight hate, so if you are a professional indie developer, consider getting in touch with them and let them know what bothers you about the software and what improvements would be crucial for you to consider using it. The guys there really wish well and deserve the chance.

It’s also a perfect opportunity to reminisce at the passing year. And boy — what a year it was!

We finally managed to make the transition to full-time indie and launch MoaCube. Which — who knows — may as well be one of the most important decisions in our lives. And, thanks to your support, we’re still afloat. Sometimes, it’s still hard to believe this is happening for real.

On the other hand, we failed to release Cinders this year. Showing that no matter how much you learned on your past mistakes and experiences, threading into a new territory is always much harder than expected. Unfortunately, it likely means that no matter how good the game will be, it won’t be profitable. We’ll probably have to take some more commercially-safe project next year to secure our indie-ness.

Still, I can only wish the coming year to be as exciting and challenging as this one. When the goal is so enticing, who cares if the road is a bit bumpy.

Especially these ferocious (but lovable) space monsters:

The planets are nothing to sneeze at either. Like this space-pretzel. Home of the peaceful race of Pretzelorians.

All the art is done by Marta Dzikowska. An artist I’ve met on the DBC game design workshops. Assets are first drawn on paper with pencils and crayons, then photographed and tweaked in Photoshop. The whole thing has a paper craft aesthetic to it.

The game itself just needs a few more tweaks and a proper game-over screen and it’s good to go. It’s not more than a day or two of work, but with Cinders taking the priority, I can’t really tell when it’s going to happen. Probably after the new preview build is sent to the pre-order owners.

Whenever current events are an outcome of your earlier decisions, this branch icon appears in the corner of the screen (with a cool blooming flowers effect):

We like to boast that Cinders has more choices than most indie visual novels. But the problem is that players still experience only one story at a time, unaware of all the subtle things that change based on their actions. This feature clearly marks the moments where the storyline branches, hinting that things could be different on another playthrough. It should help those who want to find all the endings and their variants.

It’s pretty subtle and definitely not critical to gameplay, but in our philosophy it’s the little things like that that make the game. Like the idea?

You sit at your home, or in a cafe, coding weird games that the general public doesn’t know or care about. No office mates to talk to, no lunch breaks to share the latest batch of stupid jokes, and no co-workers to go out for a few beers after a hard day of work. And your “normal” friends really don’t want to know how you solved that interface issue that bothered you for the last week.

Living in Poland is a factor, too. Our game dev scene — while quickly growing — is still relatively small and centered. Bigger companies can be counted on fingers of one hand and smaller ones only really started to emerge. “Indies”, in the western sense of the word, are few and far between.

I think partially it’s because of our gaming habits. We weren’t raised with Nintendo (it wasn’t even officially available here), consoles are a relatively new thing, and gaming is still a bit of a nerds’ niche. We’re largely PC gamers, interested mainly in RPGs, and it’s not uncommon to meet hardcore gamers who never played Zelda, Castlevania or Mario (sometimes even heard of it). We’re not rooted to love platformers or simple retro stuff like the USA gamers. We like big, complex games. Preferably with swords, dragons, branching storylines and two pages of character attributes.

And those are not a good fit for an indie team of few bedroom coders and their artist friend.

This makes me look with envy at the indies from the USA, Canada or Sweden. Whenever I see pictures from a gathering like TIGJam, No More Sweden or the IGF, I realize how I miss having a bunch of similarly-minded individuals around here.

Up until now, at least.

Few months ago, Artur Roszczyk, a developer friend, approached me with an interesting idea and asked if I’d be up for it. He wanted to organize bi-weekly game design workshops. Design Boost Camp or just DBC for short. Something like the TIGJam, but not exactly.

The concept was to make it a bit more focused on the educational aspect rather than rapid game development. Instead of having a bunch of seasoned developers come over and code games for fun, he wanted a mix of veterans and promising amateurs who would like to learn game development.

I admit I’m usually pretty sceptic towards such ideas. They always sound cool in theory, but are really difficult to actually pull off. It’s hard to find the right people, and the organizers often lose their interest after a while or find it to be too much work to marry with their normal daily schedules.

Fortunately, I was wrong. We have five DBCs behind us, and the initiative is still alive and kicking. I gotta give props to Artur here. He managed to involve some really cool people, secured a nice place with enough room, wifi and a projector, and works hard on making sure that every meeting feels fresh. And somehow, he’s able to keep at it, despite having a full-time job and other projects.

Each DBC has its own flavor, but generally it always involves discussing various game concepts. Your own, brought by other people or dictated by a set challenge (like: make a game that captures the feel of a certain short film). After that, it’s free for all. You can assemble a team and try to implement your game idea or at least prototype it, help others with their concepts, give a lecture or listen to one, or just play some board games. It’s nerdy, creative fun at its best.

And boy, has it done wonders to get those creative juices of mine flowing! I missed working with other people so much! Just the general dynamic of brainstorming, joking or even arguing with other game makers.

I also really missed the anything-goes experimental game development. One without any deadlines, commercial viability or strict rules to worry about. On the first meeting, our team lacked a graphic artist, so we’ve made the “assets” for our game by photographing play-doh figures. With a laptop. Good times!

I should be able to release the first playable fruit of these meetings soon. A small experimental arcade game with art done using crayons, pencils and scraps of paper (can’t get more indie than that). I talked about it a bit in the news section.

It’s a co-operative arena shooter for two players. You kill some space monsters, score combos and reach for the highscore. Standard fare. The gimmick is that you can’t shoot. Your ships are connected with a stretching stream of energy and the only way to kill foes is to catch them with the beam, which requires co-ordinating your actions with your partner. Who of course does exactly the opposite of what you wanted, making the game more challenging and fun than it should be.

Total development time is probably still under 24 hours, but it’s great to see how a simple and wacky idea can actually make for an entertaining game. Working only on big, high-quality projects for the past few years, I really missed the feeling. It’s going to be freeware, of course, and I plan to make the editable source file (it’s done in GameMaker) available.

I have nothing more to say here, nor do I have any particular point to make. It’s just that the DBC is exactly what the doctor prescribed, and this joy had to be shared. Thanks, guys!

So here’s a little sneak peak into our future projects and plans.

We’re still busy with writing Cinders, but that doesn’t mean Gracjana can’t work on conceptualizing our next project.

The process starts with several quick sketches in her notebook. We test different shapes, styles and variants of every character to see what fits our vision. Then the best sketch is taken further to become a more polished concept art (like this) that is eventually turned into the final in-game asset.

These are those very early sketches for some of the characters in our next bigger project. Chances of them actually looking like this in the game are pretty slim, but they should give you a hint of what mood and themes we’re aiming for this time.

I recently got involved into a bi-weekly game design workshops (a full blog post about it), and this is the fruit that these meetings bore. A small arcade co-op game with a pretty unique core mechanic of having two ships interconnected with a flexible energy beam.

All the art in the game is actually hand-made using pieces or paper, pencils, crayon drawings and such. It looks quite neat in motion.

It’s a small project, but pretty fun to play, and it’s not like there’s an abundance of hotseat co-operative games out there. We plan to release it soon for free. Most likely with the source code available for those who would like to learn from it.