Gamemaker engine for mobile AGS games...

Started by Glenjamin, Tue 03/09/2019 22:52:08

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Glenjamin

Hi everyone, it's been a minute,

Just wanted to get your thoughts on something.

I moved on from AGS to Gamemaker and unity, specifically for mobile support.  The thing is, I'm still working on adventure games in gamemaker and due to my background with AGS I instinctively structure my games like AGS would.

If I do a really good job and make it nice and neat I could release the code to the AGS community so they could make their own games mobile friendly with a relatively painless conversion process.

Is this something you'd like? My intention isn't to take away from AGS and I don't want to do that either, but it would be neat to have more AGS originals being able to play in-browser...

Slasher

That would be great if it were an option  (nod)

doimus

Quote from: Glenjamin on Tue 03/09/2019 22:52:08

I'm still working on adventure games in gamemaker and due to my background with AGS I instinctively structure my games like AGS would.


Out of curiosity, how did you handle Gamemaker's resource handling? Has this changed in recent times? I've been out of the loop since GMS2 was introduced...

The reason I'm asking is I have developed a point'n'click engine in GMS v1.4 back in he day. There's even a thread in this forum somewhere...
But I eventually abandoned it as I realized Gamemaker was introducing more problems than it was solving.

Biggest issue was resource caching - GMS kept everything in RAM, all of the game graphics and sounds, *uncompressed*, *all* the frickin' time! Which is not a problem for simple tile-based games, but once you hit it with dozen or so high res background images and animated sprites, things go south quite quickly, especially on mobile.
That demanded creating own resource handling system to load room data, etc. -  custom room editor, custom bytecode scripting system... By this time I realized I was using 80% of time just handling GMS peculiarities, and said fudge it.

And all of that would be irrelevant if Gamemaker had its own resource caching system and was loading dynamically from data files. Apparently this was an intended, built-in killswitch mechanism that prevented users from creating other "game makers" in Gamemaker. To be fair, it still could be done, there are quite powerful functions for dealing with binary data, but doing that kind of work in GM Script is ... painful.

Greg Squire

I used to use GameMaker Studio 1.x also, and I too was working on a point-n-click engine of sorts in it. I even built a couple of game jam prototypes with it (such as this one https://gregsquire.itch.io/the-not-so-great-escape).

However I abandoned it after I ran into the same issue with it gobbling up RAM as all resources were loaded into memory (along with another myriad of other quirks). GMS 2.x may address this, but I suspect it might not. I haven't really touched the 2.x versions.

I've stepped away from adventure games at the moment, as I'm working on a VR game in Unity currently. However, I intend to return to my old adventure game project, but I think I'll be using Adventure Creator for Unity for that (https://adventurecreator.org). I've played with that a tiny bit and seems super easy to use and I'm already familiar with Unity now, so it's a good fit for me.

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