YoYo Games Glog

I had a couple of  interesting conversation on Twitter recently, the first was from somebody who accused our web hosting company for being unprofessional for taking the site down for less than 60 seconds during some internal switchover.  The other was when I (jokingly) suggested it would cost about $700,000 to run YoYo Games this year (actually…. that’s not a ridiculous figure !!).

It prompted me to take a close look at our web host.  Below you can see the actual data from our remote server management panel.  The data here is a little confusing as the underlying trend is up (Xmas is a quiet time).  By the end of this year we are budgeting for about 20TB a month.

Our original web host was charging £1,000 a TB….so you can see our monthly hosting costs (their servers weren’t cheap either) would have been on their way to about £25,000 (about $40,000).  With our current web host we are running at less than 20% of this total.  So next time somoene wants to complian that the maintenance schedule is “unprofessional” all I can say is without the deal we have with these guys and their generally EXCELLENT service you probably wouldn’t be reading this post…..

As many of you may have noticed the site has been much more reliable since the Rails 2.3 upgrade , but there are still many improvements planned for later this year, including siting servers in North America for the first time.

Good news for Mac users …we’ve contracted with a new developer to support the previous contractor who has also agreed to stay with us and finish the work on GM4Mac.  We’ve effectively doubled the effort we had before and work has started on getting the bugs fixed.  We should hopefully have a release candidate ready in a month or two.  I’ll keep you updated here.

Seems we have bigger issues than usual getting Instant Play to work with FireFox 3.6.  We don’t understand what is wrong, it seems as though something quite fundamental has changed and we can’t identify the problem.  Please DON’T open any helpdesk tickets on this issue as we already have a bigger backlog than usual due to staff shortages

After a few false starts I finally managed to get the Wiki to allow me to upload an executable file !!  Result is you can find Game Maker 7 ready to download in the “Old Game Maker Versions” page in the YoYo Games Wiki.

For those of you with Game Maker 8 you’ll find that we’ve (finally) updated the tutorials to work along with Game Maker 8.  You can find them here.

It was brought to my attention today that the default Avatar for registered users on the site was clearly a male silhouette and that this was naturally seen as unacceptable to some of our female visitors.  As of 10 minutes ago, the default Avatar has been changed to the new GM logo !  Thx for the feedback ( I first saw it in Twitter !)

Brought to you from You Tube.  I believe this is the work of Matt Scorah (Game Maker Blog) and it only includes games uploaded in 2009 …it’s brilliant, please enjoy.

Happy New Year !

After a long wait it’s time to have a new competition.  The theme for the first competition of 2010 will be “Design A HandHeld Game”.  We want you to design games using either Game Maker 7 or Game Maker 8 that would be suitable to run on a typical handheld device.  That is no keyboard OR MOUSE (edit: sandy,  Dec 30th) , a fixed screen size and other fixed hardware limitations.

The rules of the competition are as follows :-

1. Your Game must be less than 10MB (uncompressed)
2. .EXE only…NO ZIP files.
3. Maximum Screen Size 480X272
4. No DLLs or other extension packages can be used.
5. No Installation packages.
6. No use of the registry.
7. Game Controls must use ARROW keys and ONE OTHER KEY (space-bar preferred), additionally P to pause game and escape to quit (where quit can be quit to a final menu) are OK (EDITED by Sandy DEC 31st )
8. Game Maker versions 7 or 8 only
9. All games must be tagged “Competition05” (EDITED by Sandy DEC 31st )
10. 3D is OK, provided it uses standard Game Maker features (EDITED by Sandy DEC 31st )
11. Contest finishes March 30th 2010 at Midnight GMT

First Prize is $1,000, 2nd $500, 3rd $250 to be paid by PayPal.

I forgot to mention before the Holidays that we haven’t had time to update the application that creates “Instant Play” versions of your games.  If you upload a game created using Game Maker 8, then it will be download only.  We don’t have an exact date, but with the devs on vacation now until the New Year it will most likely be mid January before we get this fixed.

Apologies.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Game Maker 8.0.

It’s almost exactly 10 years since Prof. Mark Overmars first launched Game Maker, so it’s an especially exciting moment for everyone in the community, but especially Mark.

Thank You Mark.

UPDATE You can now report Game Maker 8 bugs at bugs.yoyogames.com