“Noted independent developer Cactus [Jonatan Söderström] received the inaugural Nuovo Award for his abstract visual puzzle game, Tuning. The Nuovo Award honors “abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.”

The Nuovo Award was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures, including previous IGF Innovation/Nuovo Award winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code’s Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.”

via IGF.com

• Ted Lauterbach has redesigned his RottenTater.com website and it is looking very pretty. Ted has designed games such as Fetus, Vatn Squid and Super Space Rogues.

• I came across a rather nice video introducing the concept of views in Game Maker. I do question the need for them in the example application nevertheless I thought the demonstration using printouts of a Game Maker room was a clever idea.

By sheer coincidence I was reading about the history of Lemmings just a few days ago (is a good read). Russell was responsible for the game concept and name of the iconic game which was ported to many platforms and is estimated to have sold over 15 million copies.

DMA (which since a takeover is now known as as Rockstar North) will perhaps be better known to younger readers as the creators of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Russell went on to found Visual Science Ltd who were responsible for the PlayStation version of the game.

If you are interested here is an interview with Russell Kay albeit a few years old. I think this development is the most exciting to happen at YoYo Games for a long time – possibly ever – as it demonstrates that they are serious about substantially developing the Game Maker brand.

There game is in a playable state but there are some problems with speed, a few graphical glitches and background music has not yet been implemented.

YoYo Games have hired a Chief Technical Officer in Dundee and will be making an announcement “indirectly” related to Game Maker for PSP tomorrow.

Yesterday’s downtime which affected all YoYo Games services including the Game Maker Community was caused by “simple maintenance” which went wrong following a firewall conflict. Around 30 minutes of downtime was followed by a period where games on the main YoYo Games were without screenshots.

Photo credit: Dundee by Flickr user macieklew, released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Linked which is part of the UpUrLoad file hosting website utilises 39dll to make it easy to maintain a global highscores table.

Created tables can be viewed directly within your game (there is no need to launch a browser window when sending or retrieving scores). Scores are sent as encrypted md5 strings which include a secret key visible only in the creator’s Linked account. There are versions available for Game Maker 6-8.

This is probably the easiest to use online highscore solution for Game Maker games that I have seen.

Although the idea is plausible and there are always lots of volunteers in the beginning the initial thrill wears off in just a few short weeks. If a strong group is not built up by then the projects slowly deteriorate until it is just a small group of elite leaders that are talking to the wall. Here is a look at just a few of the many problems that plague these so called “Community Games”.

1. Lack of proper leadership
Although from the outside it just looks like the position with all the glory and the honor (and the mod powers!), the leadership position plays a very critical role in the overall out come of the game. Too often the leaders of these projects are relatively inexperienced in creating games, much less leading a group of lots of people. More experienced members who would have the knowledge and technical know-how to run such a project realize all the responsibility involved and generally tend to run in the opposite direction.

2. If you want it that way then why not you do it?
A problem I have encountered in many of the games out there is large groups making decisions, that are generally not their business. For example, why should the sprite makers and artists choose what program the sound and music crew must use to make music? It doesn’t really affect them. The musicians, who are hopefully experienced in their field should be able to make a decision themselves, independently from the rest of the community. Why should the people outside the music department get a say in something that does not affect them, but it will affect the musicians, and possibly make them leave.

3. Activity Levels
The activity and devotion of members in the project is easily one of the top deciding factors in the overall speed of the game. As with most projects (including community games) activity and enthusiasm is always exuberant in the beginning of the game. Unfortunately after the initial rush activity levels start to diminish. This is partially because people get bored with the game or perhaps just wanted to see how it is progressing without contributing. It could also be because at the beginning of the project, there is not a lot which can be done. Leadership roles are still being established and story lines are being written. The challenge is having something for everyone at all times that people can work on.

Another interesting angle that the GMCG is taking is to name a weekly “Top Contributer”. They are also thinking of awarding actual prizes to members as a way of saying thanks as well as an incentive to other members. However, we have yet to see a prize given out. I find this also very true with media groups that try to produce weekly or monthly projects. Viewers like the idea initially, but since they only want to tune in (or read it as the case may be) now and then, the people that run it get discouraged after and give up.

4. Group Decisions
Although some game projects just set up a monarchy and have one person call all the shots, that doesn’t really hold with the spirit of a community game. Alternatives include having a small group of “leaders” that make decisions for members, or having all-out community votes. Unfortunately community votes take lots of time and that can bore members that just want to work on the game. One of the alternatives to having votes or monarchs is to have community discussions or “meetings” if you will. The people that are working on the game will all go on a set chat room at a predetermined time and discuss the aspects of the game, as well as the pros and cons of new ideas. One of the downfalls though is that people are spread out over many timezones and have different schedules which makes it hard for everyone to get their fair say.

5. On-Lookers
As with many group events, there are always people that sit on the sideline and watch before they jump in and do it. While having “contributor of the week” and giving out cash (or other forms of) prizes are good, that is not always enough to get people to join in. Group leaders need to think of creative ways to get these people “off the bleachers” (or computer chairs in this case) and into the project.

There have been very few changes to the YoYo Games homepage since the launch of the site back in 2007 (see screenshots at the end of post). First things first – I am glad to see the cheesy 1990s marquee has gone, but there are still several features that make me ask ‘why?’.

1. Why isn’t the Game Maker logo on the homepage? Does the casual site user know what “GM 8.0″ is and why they should download it? Sales of Game Maker account for 90% of YoYo Games’ revenue and more users will result in more quality games which can be uploaded to the site.
2. Why is so much space given over to news that is often more than a month old?
3. Who decided that puzzle and shooter games deserve more attention than platform and arcade games? Arcade games are both more child-friendly and outnumber the ’shooters’ category both in the number of games on the site and the number of featured games.
4. Why do the most popular games continue to get so much exposure? Sure they can be listed somewhere but this space could be better used to highlight more recent creations. I think this makes the site look stale.
5. Why do the spotlight games have numbers? (Just visual). Also why only 2 lines of descriptive text? Far more words are given to the blog posts (see 2).
6. Why is space given to listing a games author rather than a description or larger screenshot? Who made a game really won’t be of interest to the casual browser.

YoYoGames.com homepage over time:

• Something which will no doubt be reported in many places: The deadline for people wishing to upgrade a version of Game Maker 7 purchased in 2009 to version 8 for free is at the end the month. Surely anyone who cared about Game Maker would have done this already…

• A quick blog post about someone creating their first iPhone game using the Unity 3D game development engine.

This is good news for those of us who have hidden aspirations of making those awesome games where the environment is more fun than the objectives. Until then, you can still use the GM6 version, but it will require plenty of diligence since there are some bugs and documentation is incomplete.

In the 37 minute show we discuss the downfall of quality Game Maker media and experiences of collaborating in Game Maker team projects. We also look back at the Game Maker entries in the recent GameJolt weekend Jam as well as taking a quick look at some other issues.

Mono version: Direct Link (34MB)

Show Links

Most recent GMTech Issue
Most recent MarkUp Issue
Independent Developer magazine
GMWeekly
Overbyte magazine

The GMCG @ GMC
GMCG Wiki
Google Doc’s style online Game Maker IDE by James Rhodes (abandoned)
GameCog
Braingale Team
“The incredible Lyl Vypa“

Obligatory lack of Instant Play moan

The Book
Who is making money from Game Maker article

Official GameJolt Jam entry list
NAL’s look at the Game Maker entries in the GameJolt Jam.
SohoPogoHo
Vatn Squid
Paper Dreams

GMC CageMatch on Hiatus
GMLive on Hiatus

Amusing YYG forum post
Game Maker Blog twitter

Music: Store and Save by Hardstroke
The first episode

As you know, this blog has pretty much hit rock bottom lately. I’m hoping to change that with your help. For anyone who is interested in writing tips or articles, please send them to my person e-mail pythonpoole [@] gmail [.] com, as I have not been checking my Scorptek e-mail much recently. I appreciate all of your help, and I would love to be more active here however this is exam month at uni. After April, I will have much more down-time to work on my personal projects including Scorptek.

Scorptek

Some of you have expressed interest in the progress Scorptek is making. Many of you assumed we were ‘way in over our heads’ so to speak to think that we could pull off such a feat and bring our own broadband DSL, digital phone and alarm monitoring services to the continental U.S.A. and parts of Canada. Well I’m here to re-confirm our original intention to become a start-up in this market, and we have made some nice progress lately.

Through our research however, we have found that the one thing that really holds Telcos and ISPs back is providing customer support. Support is very costly, especially if you have to offer over-the-phone support. To give you an idea, if you outsource your technical support to another company, you’ll probably be paying a minimum of $1 per minute! A 20 minute phone call could cost you 3-4 months of losses for that customer. If you think that’s bad, having your own in-house call centre is often even more expensive.

Dealing with the problem

So, how do we plan to deal with this problem? How can we keep our prices low and actively compete in the market while still maintaining a high quality customer support service? Well we have developed a business plan that includes many strategies to take care of this.

Firstly, we will strongly encourage all customers purchase our ‘Linkbox’. The LinkBox is an all-in-one device that acts as a business grade Wireless 4 port router and also has 2 broadband Quality of Service enabled phone ports (for either phone or alarm monitoring). By doing this we help eliminate problems users may have with third-party equipment which in turn makes solving problems much easier and it will streamline the connection so that the phone service can run at land-line quality with QoS. Customers can also bring their own equipment however support for those customers may be limited.

Secondly, we will develop a sophisticated ‘intelligence’, or rather an ‘automated assistant’ that will help you diagnose and solve most problems. Unlike a typical FAQ that usually don’t help, the system is designed to take care of 80-90% of issues concerned with technical support, billing, accounts etc. This will greatly reduce the load on our support agents and users will be strongly encouraged to use the assistant before requesting support.

Thirdly, this is a great idea I came up with for handling support. There are two main questions that need to be answered.

A) How do we cover the cost of support without any big losses?
B) How do we get a bunch of volunteer or affordable support agents?

This is how:

For our support agents, we are looking for young and eager students like you guys between ages 16-24 who have lots of experience and knowledge in the area of computers, troubleshooting DSL services and it’s a bonus if you’ve also worked with VoIP or digital phone systems and/or alarm systems and monitoring.

You would be a volunteer agent trying to gain work experience.. however for every support incident (e.g. chat session, ticket, phone call), you would receive a generous donation towards your student education fund for college/university!

When customers contact support, certain support options like live phone support will have an incident fee (e.g. $3.99 per call). That fee is donated directly to your college fund which can be used to pay tuition fees, books, supplies and other educational items such as a new notebook computer. Considering that about 90% of support calls are less than 10 minutes, you could potentially earn $1/minute for your college fund. If someone keeps you on the phone for longer than 20 minutes, you can ask them to contact escalated support or keep on the line and get another $4.

What we have found is that many customers are willing to pay for premium support services when they realize 100% of the cost is being donated straight to a good cause, a future education for someone, and it’s not just a way for the company to rip them off.

The result

What is the result of all this?
- Greatly reduced support incidents
- Support service that costs very little to operate
- Way to keep costs low (for customers) and still provide great customer care and support

Interested?

If you are interested in our future work-experience volunteer agent program, here is some information for you:

- You have the potential of earning $10-35 per hour towards your college education fund
- You can work from home (anywhere in the world), we provide the software and hardware to get you started
- Training program and comprehensive support database equips you for anything customers can throw at you (not literally of course!)
- Speaking English as your first or as a preferred language is strongly recommended, bonus points for those who can also speak French or Spanish
- Extremely flexible hours, work when you want to, it could be an hour a day or 10 hours a day. Whenever you are available.
- Play games or do homework while on duty, we are not picky, just don’t have distractions when you are dealing with a support incident
- You must be a current student to apply, and you must have a separate bank account or college fund for your donations to be deposited into
- Earn a certificate after 6 and 12 months stating that you volunteered as a support agent for us for work-experience. This is great to put on your Resume/CV and to show on your college applications

How much can I earn towards my college fund?

Per e-mail ticket: About $1
Per chat session: About $2
Per phone session: About $3

What can I use the money for?
- College/University fees and tuition
- College books and misc. expenses (e.g. car parking at college)
- Living expenses (rent, residence fees, food/groceries, utilities, etc.)
- Educational/Academic supplies including purchases like notebook computers, printers, academic software etc.

If you are interested let us know in the comments below. I think this is a great way for students to earn money for college and you’ve gotta be honest where else have you ever seen such a great deal with so much flexibility. Since you are volunteers and your monetary incentive is entirely paid for by customers, we can afford to have a bunch of students on staff for support from all over the world to provide support all day and night which I think is great. Great for us, great for customers and most importantly great for you to have this opportunity. Let us know what you think.

No good at making graphics? Can’t find someone to make them for you?
GM8 boasts a new MagicWand feature which will produce sprites based on any set of keywords!

Unbelievable! How does it work? This amazing piece of technology pops your keywords into Google image search for CC licensed transparent clip-art images and pulls out the most relevant result. A new window will automatically collect information for attribution and you can simply copy paste the credits into your game info!

Wait, it gets better! If you click on the ‘Generate Monster’ button, it will use a sophisticated algorithm to produce a likeness based on your description. For example, the following settings produce the monster below: skin:green, ears:leafy, eyes:yellow, teeth:ginormous, eyebrows:exaggerated.

4. Auto-name

Sick and tired of having random obscure names like obj_1, obj_2, obj_stuff? GM8 will take care of that by automatically assigning more fitting names like obj_green_monster based on the keywords given for the sprite associated with that object.

And there’s more! Scripts will be auto named based on which objects call them and what events they are called from. E.g. scr_greenmonster_collision_and_redmonster_collision_and_yellowmonster_collision_and_keypress_a.

As you can see it makes things much simpler and easier to work with. For added simplicity, the abbreviation option will shorten script names like the one above to: src_gcrcycka

3. Nav Libs

Aren’t you sick of constantly clicking on the wrong lib tabs, especially for 64 bit uses who lack the tab labels?

GM8 simplifies the drag and drop functionality by removing the pointless tabs and replacing them with navigational pages. Now it’s easy to navigate from one lib to the next and back again. Confusion is eliminated by preventing you from randomly jumping between tabs, resulting in a layout that is kept clean and tidy. The D&D actions have also been reorganized so that the code and scripting related actions have been moved to the very last page where they are easy to locate.

Once you add an action from a nav page, GM8 will automatically navigate to the first page of actions. This is great because you always start from the same spot which makes memory recall second-nature.

2. Goodbye Softwrap

YoYo Games has had it’s fair share of troubles with Softwrap over the past couple of years, admitted by Sandy Duncan himself. GM8 will instead use a new custom built registration system. It will have two methods of payment: classic mode and arcade mode.

In classic mode, you pay $25 USD for unlimited Game Maker usage on EITHER 3 desktops OR 1 desktop AND 1 notebook AND 1 netbook OR 1 desktop AND 2 netbooks OR 1 desktop AND 2 notebooks OR 3 netbooks OR 2 notebooks AND 1 netbook.

In arcade mode, you will be required to make a payment of 25c each time you open Game Maker. If your game integrates with the built-in high score system and you run and exit your game without making it on the top 10 high score list, you will be required to pay an additional 25c to continue development.

1. ASCII DOS Mode

GM8 now has what has been dubbed the retro-geek feature, ‘ASCII DOS’ mode. This will convert any 2D based GM game into a fully functional text based game that runs in a standard DOS prompt. Graphics will be replaced by ASCII letter and symbol characters that are linked together to create the illusion of a 2D image. Normal sound capabilities are not yet supported, but GM’s new ‘Beeper’ D&D action and respective GML function will allow you to take advantage of the onboard PC speaker to create true 8 bit audio to satisfy the nerdiness in you.

As if that wasn’t enough, the ASCII DOS mode games that are published thorugh the YoYo Games website will be hosted on a remote telnet server. Now you can simply open up a command prompt on any computer and type the command ‘telnet yoyogames.com/games/mygame’ to have instant fun at work, in the classroom or on a cruise ship. The other advantage to ASCII DOS mode is games are now compressed to a micro size of just 1 kb on average (down from 2 MB) and can be downloaded by most dial-up users before they can say April Fools.

Now, it seems as if someone has hacked the site and replaced the index.php file with one from the gay shock site Meatspin. It seems as if its back to the normal outdated message from FSX, but this also happened a few times during this hack.

Until updated, don’t visit 64Digits. It is recording IP addresses and other information.

 
1st Place, [$1000] : Greentech by Mr Chubigans

Geentech

MrChubigan has been around for a very long time. He was one of the early users of Game Maker. Greentech is a game with a very distinct (green) style that looks as if it is being played on a very old TV. The goal of the game is to control the wind to bring the clouds of pollution towards the cleaning facilities. An easy game play concept but much harder than it may sound. The game is polished and includes a tutorial to teach you how to play. Original and fun to play.

2nd Place, [$500] : EcoRush by andywiltshirenz

EcoRush

EcoRush is a game in which one species tries to invade the region of another, by capturing all the other species. This is turned into a relatively simple but intriguing turn-based board game that required considerable thinking. The game is beautifully polished with wonderful graphics and descriptions of the different areas on earth where the game can be played. You can play both against the computer and against other human players. (You can even let the computer play against itself, which is good to learn the tactics.)

3rd Place, [$250] : Incoming: Battle for the Planet Earth by hcs89

Incoming: Battle for the Planet Earth

This is the first contribution of hcs89 to YoYo Games, and immediately a winner. Incoming: Battle for the Planet Earth is a space shooting game in which you must save the planet from enemies from outer space. It has some elements from Tower Defense as you must carefully place the weapon systems to hit the approaching enemies. But you must also decide where to shoot to and which weapons to use. The graphics is nice and the game play is fast and interesting (although at some stage it suddenly becomes much more difficult).

Runners-Up (in no particular order)

Teka Teki - A puzzle game with elements of Tetris.
Jake Skill and the Crystal Quest - A platform game that might look simple but is very challenging.
Gray and Green - Another platform game in which you must bring the color back to the gray world.
Mars Conflict - A space-invader style shooter game.
Planet Earth Crusaders - A top-view battlefield action game.
Agent Bunn-e - A simple, addictive action game that requires quick reactions.
Earth vs. Mars - A strategic space game in which you must wisely use the energy you collect.

And you can find all the other great entries here: All Competition Entries.

-

The next competition theme has not yet been announced.

No specific prices were mentioned in the post, but Duncan did however say that customers in the UK will be the most affected by the price change. Duncan noted that the value of the euro had dropped by almost 50% since the last time YoYo Games had evaluated it, which means that the price of Game Maker could potentially jump to double of what it is right now.

On a side note, Sandy Duncan noted in the comments of the article that work on Game Maker 8 has not yet started.

On a further note, Duncan said he wants people to subscribe to his Twitter feed if they want to know a bit more about him and his personal life. You can view it at http://twitter.com/ZanderDuYoyo

Mr. Duncan also said that using Softwrap for DRM in Game Maker 7 is “high on [his] list of ‘things we should have done differently’” but its not going to change any time soon. This brings up past rumors that Game Maker 8 (or future versions of 7) might not include Softwrap or any DRM at all.

At this point we would like to evaluate the demand for Scorptek Internet and Phone services both domestically (in North America) and abroad.

If you are interested in signing up with our Broadband Internet or Phone services in the future, please indicate which services you plan on using and where you are located (State/Province, Country).

Thanks for your support.

A reminder to our readers that we are looking for applications for those who want to become writers for gmnews (e-mail me personally at pythonpoole/at/gmail/com/).

We appreciate your continued support of GMNews and we want to assure everyone that we have NOT abandoned this website. We understand that some users are concerned about the apparent lack of articles over the holidays and we want to put your concerns at rest. However I feel that in order for you to fully understand what is making it difficult for us to maintain this news blog, I must inform you of the major ‘behind the scenes’ projects that we have been working on over the past year(s) and what Scorptek has planned in store for the near future.

We realize “we’ve been busy” just doesn’t cut it anymore, but to be honest we have been; and here is why:

Over the past year or so, Scorptek has devoted significant time and effort into researching, planning and building business relationships with other companies so that we can begin to venture out into the world outside of Game Maker News and develop a profitable business model. Some of you may remember some time ago when we conducted a survey of your knowledge, experience and use of Internet and phone services. At the time, many of you were puzzled and were unable to see how the results would be beneficial to us. If you recall, I responded by saying that the simplest explanation is probably the best one.

That’s exactly right, the simplest explanation is the best explanation. Drum roll please….. Scorptek will be offering DSL Broadband Internet and Phone services across North America and possibly in other countries in the future. This is exciting for us, and hopefully for you too. We couldn’t have done this without the Game Maker and GMNews community and we appreciate your support.

As we get closer to offering our beta program, we of course will be looking closely here and at other Game Maker communities for users who are eager and willing to test our services at largely discounted rates. After the beta program has ended and our service is fully open to the public, registered members of the GMC, YoYo Games or GMNews will in most cases be eligible for discounts or rebates on the services we offer.

We are also in contact with a UL listed alarm monitoring company, and we may (if we can negotiate a contract/agreement) also be providing self-install home security systems and 24/7 monitoring services with dispatch. The monitoring services also work with your existing security system (if you have one) and are fully compatible with VoIP and broadband phone lines such as Vonage or our Scorptek service.

Finally we may also form a partnership and affiliation with Dish Network Satellite TV resellers to provide you with affordable TV services to accompany your Scorptek Internet, Phone and possibly alarm monitoring services.

So as you can see, this is really taking a large chunk of our time and we definitely hope it will be worth while. Please leave feedback on what you think of our business project and any questions you have. If you are interested in becoming a (volunteer) writer for GMNews, feel free to email me personally at pythonpoole /at/ gmail /com/ and include a paragraph about yourself and what Writing/English/English Lit. qualifications you have or a sample of your work.

Thanks for being patient, and we hope to serve you in the near future.
Please remember to leave comments.

- Benjamin Poole
Managing Director of Scorptek