Writing on the GMC administrator KC LC explained the purpose of the Reviewer’s Choice forum as being “devoted to bringing member’s attention to worthwhile games. That doesn’t mean reviews can’t find fault with a game, or suggest improvements. But we won’t allow members to post reviews that bash bad games.”

A discussion is currently underway as to who will have permission to post reviews once it is officially opened.

The launch issue of what appears to be the Game Maker magazine with the least regular release schedule contains brief game reviews and short articles on Game Maker news topics. Also present are featured resources such as graphics and game engines and a coding tip.

There isn’t a great deal of textual content but the non-complicated design doesn’t feel like it is lacking anything. There is however a wordsearch.

The pages appear to be made up of images rather than containing actual text which is a minor irritant and I suspect might cause scrolling lag problems for people reading the file on older machines.

A good start but I’m not really a fan of the 6 month wait to read more and I would hope for more content with half a year of writing time.

Download 7.5MB PDF (left click only)

This is the first time that Sandy has commented on YoYo Games’ finances at the YoYoGames.com website.

I haven’t been able to work out a reason for the spike in traffic at the end of October/early November but the drop in August can be appointed to over 24 hours of downtime effecting the main site.

The last figures we had previous to this were “upwards of 10TB a month” in June last year. See also YoYo Games record annual loss of £180,000 which Sandy refers to in one of his Tweets.

The introduction section of the magazine also reveals that the publication is apparently editorless yet this is the best issue so far.

The main review is of the YoYo Games featured Time Still, also present are short reviews of Prototyping the Invaders, Sludge, Wheels of Imagination 2 and Myths.

NAL is the interviewee in a segment which has much improved from the previous release. He provides information on the games development projects he is currently working on and passes on some game making advice.

Although designer Matt Haigh left the magazine after just one issue the improved two-column layout has been retained and aside from some mysterious background image selections this release is very well presented.

Finally I believe I can look forward to the next issue without expecting to find something wrong. The reviews could be a little longer – I wouldn’t mind if less games were featured – but overall a very well done issue.

Download GMIndie Magazine Issue 6

• Keith Stuart made a post today in today’s Guardian Games Blog title “How to become an indie developer in eight steps. Developer Rob Fearon recommends Game Maker:
  

  “Personally, I prefer Game Maker which is a whopping $25. Shoddy DRM and lack of regular updates aside, it’s an immense package.”
  -Rob Fearon, Guardian Games Blog

  A number of the developers mentioned in the article may be familiar to you.

• Ubisoft recently revealed how they plan to combat piracy of their titles in the future – by requiring users to create an online account which they can then use to download purchased games on any computer. Something similar for Game Maker someday?

Third place: Flood the Chamber by scoz
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 13,152
Current Public Rating: 4.0
Previous placements: None
Play on Game Jolt

Second place: TowerClimb by Davioware
Created in: Construct
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 3200
Current Public Rating: 4.3
Previous placements: First place in Minimal Contest (with Spectrum Wing)
Play on Game Jolt

First place: Super Space Rogues by rotten_tater
Created in: Game Maker
Current Total Plays/Downloads: 173
Current Public Rating: 4.8
Previous placements: Third place in Minimal Contest (with Fetus)
Play on Game Jolt

With a total of 15 entries this was the worst turnout yet for a Game Jolt competition, though some of its entrants gained a large amount of publicity. Flood the Chamber, the third-place winner, was featured on sites including Destructoid and the Indie Games blog (hence its massive play count).

CROS, the administrator and runner of Game Jolt, has announced plans for an interim contest which will be held over a single weekend in February deemed most suitable for those likely to enter.

Regardless of what it says above this is from the Jan-Feb 2010 issue

A serious question this.

Indie Game Magazine is a paid for 6-issues-a-year publication, available both online and in print, that features reviews of Indie games and articles aimed at the creators of such titles.

The cheapest normal subscription price is $19.95 a year (about $3.30 an issue) with an extra $5 on top if you want access to back issues and have access to “insider information” articles on the site. A print subscription costs $40 in the US and $50 in the UK and Canada.

Markup played with the idea of a printed edition long ago (images sadly were hosted elsewhere) and at least one other Game Maker magazine looked at the concept.

Indie Game Magazine are currently holding a “pay what you like” sale on the $24.95 subscription package. I say “pay what you like” but when I tried to get it for free (you will find out why later) I discovered that wasn’t truly accurate as I was met with an error “product:j_id112: Validation Error: Specified attribute is not between the expected values of 1 and 10,000.”

I have seen issues of the magazine before and decided that it wasn’t worth paying $3.30 an issue for. Essentially I judged the quality to be below that of GMTech which is available free. It is also considerably shorter – excluding the cover, contents pages, advert pages etcetera there are 14 pages of material in the January-February 2010 issue. It is not a bad magazine but I do not feel it merits a price tag when similar material is available on blogs – congratulations to the team behind it if they have been getting more than a handful of sales.

This brings me on to my main point. At the bottom of the front cover the magazine has the following notice:

“Indie Game Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.“

A link to the license is here which states “You are free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work”. So I just paid $1 to get something which it is perfectly legal to distribute freely. I had previously found back issues of the magazine on the Internet freely available to download (although the sites they are uploaded to do also contain obviously illegal material).

I paid my $1 so you don’t have to. Is there something I am missing here or would I be okay to upload/link to a copy?

Update: I have decided to make a download link available: Download Indie Game Mag Issue 8 for Jan-Feb 2010 (13.1 MB). Not sure if this is what they intended but it is legally sound. Please post your opinion of it here!

Listen again:
Direct link: gmlive-30-jan-2010.mp3

Next show: 13th February.

• GMLive have released the discussion topics for their rescheduled show this Saturday.

• Jack Brockley has created FlashPunked a blog about the new FlashPunk ActionScript library. It appears to be popular to remake Game Maker games using FlashPunk – more about this in GMTalk which was released last weekend.

The Blog

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.

5. MagicWand

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.

For the last few months, 64Digits has been down due to switching their server. 

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.

Here are the winners for the 4th YoYoGames Competition 

 
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.

Sandy Duncan announced on the YoYoGames glog today that the price for Game Maker 7 Pro will increase in February due to the ever changing value of currencies.

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.

First things first: Over on the official glog, Sandy Duncan has said that judging of the contest 04 entries has been delayed. YoYo Games estimates that the winners of the popular competition will be announced before the end of January.

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

Sandy Duncan has said on the official YoYoGames Glog that the Help desk on YoYoGames has been answering 95% of submitted help tickets within 24 hours, which has improved drastically in the last two weeks.

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.

I just wanted to say thanks for the positive feedback on our previous announcement.

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/).

Hello readers,

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

The growing popularity of InstantPlay clones, and the heated discussions surrounding them, has finally forced the GMC staff to take action. In the past few weeks a slew of InstantPlay-type plugins of wildly differing qualities have been promoted at the Game Maker Community. After several days of public fighting among rival developers and critics, longtime GMC mod KC LC hid all of the plugin topics and created a single topic with a notice explaining why they were removed and that the staff was discussing the issue internally. She said the reasons were “a general concern about security issues, errors, and the growing flame war among supporters.”

The worst offender in security issues, Revel Quick Play, had several proposed and working exploits demonstrated. The creator, Revel, seemed to largely ignore concerns and kept posting buggy new versions. Several members besides the Author (including Smarty and NakedPaulToast) called him out in this issue. Revel did not address the issues. This, along with other problems, prompted another member, Caniac, to declare that he would create his own rival plugin following the same flawed protocol handler model (despite much better existing alternatives). His solution never materialized, despite large amounts of promotion pre hoc.

After KC LC hid the topics and announced that a policy was being decided upon, an extremely vocal debate ensued in the topic between various plugin developers, critics, and members of the community at large. While there was near-universal agreement that a competitor to YYG’s InstantPlay was needed, many members expressed strong concerns about security. The general consensus among consumers was that they did not want a ‘collect-them-all’ approach with dozens of plugins. They wanted a simple plugin that would work outside of YoyoGame’s own website. As the topic degenerated into a large-scale flamewar, KC LC hid that topic as well and created another notification post today, this time in a pre-closed topic.

The staff have not yet published their official decision.