YoYo Games Glog

The new website newsfeed is now located via -http://yoyogames.com/news

There will be no more Glog posts featured here.

We are still on target for launching the new site! Our current customers/visitors come to the site for different reasons but through Google Analytics we have broken down what these are. The site should hopefully demonstrate a cleaner landing page and easier navigation to where to go next.

What this means for you? Well, as regular community members this means better engagement with the content; regular up to date news, easily found (and up to date) resources, a simple purchase process, place to upload, play and review games, publishing your games and better social networking.

For first time visitors, the landing page should clearly show what we are about, provide enough interest to find out more, showcase successful games and reflect GameMaker better.

Post-launch, the site will continuously be tweaked, improved, broadened without becoming an overload of information. There are still a number of features to be implemented on the site (we just couldn’t complete in time for launch and didn’t want to hold it up). Our focus thereafter in this area next falls to the Forums and previous website. Nothing major to worry about, just tidying up and fixing known issues. We’ll keep you in the loop of that going forward.

We need to give you a heads up on the (free only) upgrade to GameMaker Standard 8.1 process. When we launch the new YoYo Website, this will be temporarily suspended to allow the new purchase process to be integrated more smoothly. Most have upgraded already so for those who did intend but never got around to it…..please do so now! This doesn’t affect anyone upgrading through purchase, just the free upgrades. We do advise if you want the latest version, then get Standard 8.1 and avoid any possible upgrading difficulties altogether.

It’s worth mentioning that this Glog is about to become no more! We have created a new newsfeed on the new website and all updates will be hosted there. Comments are disabled, so any discussions will have to be taken to the forum instead. We will still keep the old Glog posts here for historical reference.

Large thanks and gratitude go to Trollsplatterer, SEC, Fred Fredrickson, Uriel Griffin, Mark Overmars and YoYo Andrew for their observations and generous contributions to the new site! Last but NOT least to YoYo Team champs Lee, Paul and Geoff for whom the major credit goes to for all the hard work, stress and Red Bull consumption The site will be ready to go live next week..

Jesse Vogel wins Grand Prize Game Creative Challenge 2011 based in Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He won the first prize of 1500 euros in the original puzzle game Project W made entirely in GameMaker.

Project W, No cgc10095
Project W is a platform / puzzle game. The icebergs in the Arctic melt and sea levels rise. Countries threaten to overflow, so you must save those countries. This is done by means of levers that open and close locks. So does your water and undergroundwater level drops. Each level is a red line to see until the water level down so as to unlock next level.

In this game, the theme of the contest - Water - is the central role. The properties of water determine the gameplay. The subject of the game - the world free from flooding, is also well reflected in the levels where the player every time another country helps to lower the water level. Project W is a fun and original puzzle game with puzzles that are hard enough to get stuck, but not so difficult that you’ll be driven to despair. There is a good build-up in the difficulty of the puzzles. The design of the game can be described as ’oldskool’ and is implemented consistently throughout the game.

Read the full jury report here (in Dutch) on all the finalist games http://www.creativegamechallenge.nl/uitslag2010.php

Education

We attended The Game Creators Academy competition final this week in Kirkcaldy and it was a blast. Some of these students have achieved great things in GameMaker.  YoYo Producer Stuart attended and judged the games for the final, a great time was had and was a real pleasure to see young people being so engaged and dedicate so much of their free time. Very inspiring! We hope to have some photos and a video on its way with a wee write up (after some editing) to show you soon.

Dr Jacob Habgood is delivering a series of workshops next week based around GameMaker at  the Schools Videogame Festival hosted at Brinsworth Comprehensive School, Rotherham. See the website here – http://www.gamesbritannia.com Jacob is one of the senior lecturers in games development at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of ‘The GameMakers Companion’ http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Companion-Jacob-Habgood/dp/1430228261 an excellent hobbyist book on game development using GameMaker aimed at pre-university level.

Website

This bears repeating: Improving GameMaker ranging from entry level to serious developers is our future.
Yes, with any change we will lose some people, but we will gain many others. GameMaker has been famous as an excellent entry level tool that is easy to use. We want to continue to make this as popular as it has ever been. The customer base for GameMaker ranges from hobbyists, schools and teachers, web gamers, Universities, etc. The potential of GameMaker is realised prominently amongst the younger generation and we recognise many as incredibly talented, so naturally offering the next steps going forward is expected. Our aim to gain further reach into gaming markets and gain a larger reputation amongst developers.

The face of the new website will showcase published games, the old site will remain and linked to on the main menu. Simple.
The uploading of your games will be alive and well on the old site, this hasn’t changed. All the games previously submitted will stay. Nothing is being deleted. We think this is a good compromise for new visitors seeing a much cleaner site while still offering the same functionality for existing members.

We want to be able to offer more though, to build upon what’s already there and improve. A good point was made on having a place where developers can meet and talk in professional settings. This is what we are aiming for.

The site is around 80% complete and (fingers crossed) ready by early next week! We are putting together a selected focus group of respected Admins and Mods next week to go through the new site next week. They will help with suggestions, changes and all round thorough road testing.

YoYo news

Mark Overmars has joined twitter! Go follow him @mark_overmars

Mark has tweeted that he is discussing a new book on game programming that Arjan Egges is writing together with him. This is not GameMaker, it is a book on learning C# and intended for undergraduate study. Marks role is more of an advisor and is primarily Arjans book. It will be ready at some far off point in the future but we’ll keep you posted.

Last but not least, Super Snake HD is in iTunes new and noteworthy this week (puzzle and arcade) in the UK, US, Netherlands, Australia, France and Italy stores! Its got 4.5 star ratings already Yay!

iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/super-snake-hd/id428223586?mt=8

Android Market https://market.android.com/details?id=com.yoyogames.droidsupersnakehd

Further to the first glimpse of the new site, we’ve had a number of responses to this both good and critical. This is good. The reaction to restrict uploading games to the YoYo site to version Standard 8.1 was illuminating. We know whatever we do, some of it won’t be popular but in line with the purpose of creating a new site, we feel strong change is necessary. Let me try and explain where we are coming from…

Our new site is long overdue, the current site has become too busy to maintain properly since its very first conception back in 2007. At the time it served the purpose of being a ‘YouTube’ of GameMaker games and is still very busy with around 150 games being uploaded a day!  It was popular and it was great. Back then. But today, it doesn’t fit with what we are trying to do now. So, the reasoning behind making a new site a priority is to do 2 things;

1. To showcase GameMaker as the primary focus.

As a company, we have been ambitious with our growth over the last year and a half thats even surprised ourselves at how much we have managed to achieve. Compared to others that have a lot of investment and bigger teams, we have surpassed  expectations for such a small company. We work at a constant fast pace momentum and have a great team together that work very closely together. We debate, we laugh and argue, but mainly over who ate all the biscuits, it’s not pretty  GameMaker is our focus for the company and we believe keeping the momentum on improving this tool right through from entry level to serious developers, is critical for GameMakers future.

Publishing games with GameMaker is another priority. We want to show what can be achieved at a professional level and this in turn will attract serious developers to GameMaker. With the release of GameMaker HTML5 coming, this is a important product both for YoYo’s future and for developers. More on this later. We recognize that creating games is not just about good game design also about the hard part of marketing and selling and we want to provide a service that helps developers get their product to the right markets.

2. Better navigation, present a more professional image.

The current YoYo site is a colourful, busy place but it has (unfairly) earned a reputation as a kids play site. You and I both know that this isn’t so, however, the general public perception of YoYo and GameMaker is that it  is for hobbyists and amateurs. Those landing on the homepage for the first page are bewildered and hit in the face by a maze of games and its not obvious what they have landed on or where to go next. As our community grows, we need to keep abreast of what you need from it.

Website: We heard your concerns about losing the site in its entirety so we are pleased to confirm that this will NOT happen. We will keep this site alive and will upgrade it in parts so everything works again. As explained, the amount of time maintaining this is no longer a top priority and we are working hard on various new versions of GameMaker and there just isn’t time to do anything with Instant Play. As this takes valuable time away from YoYo with so many browser revisions happening so quickly and it’s impossible for us to keep the instant Play plugin source up to date. We have came to the conclusion that making Instant Play server and Plugin open source is the simplest of solutions for everyone.

Games: We have been listening to the community on making game uploads restricted to Standard 8.1. Again, there are good reasons for this as I will try to make clear. Those buying Standard 8.1 pays for the website. Fact. Without the support of those buying the full version we simply cannot exist and that would mean no more GameMaker. While we understand that there is a great many users of GameMaker 7 and Lite, we cannot place priority on supporting these over the latest (full) version users. However, as we still making GameMaker 8 and 8.1 available, it makes sense to have both of these be allowed to upload from. On checking the upload logs, there is hardly get any GM7 games uploaded recently so there shouldn’t be any complaints on this at all. We get a lot of requests for being able to host your games elsewhere so we also intend to make the code available for hosting all versions of GameMaker on other websites aside from YoYo.

We hope that by explaining a little more about what we are doing here creates a bit more understanding. Remember, we aren’t faceless, greedy corporate suits – we’re just like you, a bunch of geeks carving out a niche amongst the bigboys We have pretty big ideas on where we are going and where we want to be, and a lot of collective experience behind us BUT … it isn’t easy (if it was, we’d all be millionaires!) so bear with us while we navigate some uncharted waters and keep helping us to improve in every way!

Cheers,

The YoYo Team

We are ssssssseriously happy to finally release our brand NEW game – Super Snake HD!

Made by Mark Overmars and Jochem Schut, Super Snake is made exclusively by YoYo Games Studios…
Super Snake HD contains 80 challenging levels of varied game play in 4 worlds all in stunning retina graphics! Eat your way through 80 levels of Puzzles, Power-ups and Poultry, spanning 4 wonderfully wicked worlds in this unique and modern take on the classic game of Snake!

Features:

• 80 unique levels spanning 4 worlds
• 240 Stars to collect!
• Beautifully coloured HD graphics
• Head to Head Multiplayer! Compete with friends on one device in a world first for Snake!
• OpenFeint and Game Center!
- Over 30 Achievements to unlock
- 5 Leaderboards to climb
- Invite your friends and keep them posted through Facebook & Twitter

Super Snake HD has a multi-player mode in which you can also battle between 2 players and five world-wide leader boards and over 30 achievements in Game Center. New updates with new levels coming soon!

Super Snake HD is available on Android

-https://market.android.com/details?id=com.yoyogames.droidsupersnakehd

and iPhone, iPad and Touch devices for only $0.99!

- http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-snake-hd/id428223586?mt=8

YoYo News

Big welcome to Jack Oatley who has joined YoYo HQ last week!

here’s his community profile http://www.yoyogames.com/users/JackOatley Jack is our new Junior Software Engineer will be working on something new and exciting to add to one of our existing games! That’s all we can say really, but as you can see he is settling in nicely getting to grips on projects with Darrell.

From Sandy: I’ve been with the folks in Dundee again this week.  I usually make the journey every second week.

As you may be aware I’m overseeing a major revision to the website, this will take several months to complete, but I’m hoping to get the first phase of this done before the end of July.

Games uploaded to the current YoYo site are now only going to be possible with games made with GameMaker 8.1. Obviously we know that many of you have these underway so we’re going to give you a few months before the cut off. This may disappoint a number of you but we are reflecting the changes happening with GameMaker as a premium software tool and raising the bar on the quality and content coming through. We still want this to be the best place to discover and enjoy GameMaker but we hope you agree that better games means better fun!

Re the website development. We have made big strides this week in the style and design and its starting to take proper shape. A quick screenshot of our progress on the design was shown via twitter last Friday. This isn’t the finished article but a first look at where we are going stylewise and content. Let us know what you think?

In bigger news we have a brand, NEW game release this week which has been long anticipated here at YoYo! This is due for launch so keep your eyes peeled…:)

Some of the YoYo team on currynight (L-R Sandy, Malcolm, Lee, Kirsty, Andrew, Jack, Darrell, Russell – happily just out of shot)

Today we are announced on Develops list of the Worlds top 100 game studios!!!http://www.develop100.com/

It’s based on the critical reception to games released during 2010 in association with Metacritc. Regardless to say, we are sitting with some pretty big grins right now Drinks anyone…?

GameMaker

We would like to give a hand of support to Shanna Falgoust who is attending the International Society for Technology in Education conference at the end of June who is promoting GameMaker in a workshop and Games and Simulations Arcade. Take a look at what’s going on below;

WORKSHOP LINK:

http://www.isteconference.org/ISTE/2011/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=60830665&selection_id=65428444&rownumber=1&max=2&gopage=

GAMES AND SIMULATIONS ARCADE LINK:

http://www.isteconference.org/ISTE/2011/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=60979585&selection_id=65428444&rownumber=2&max=2&gopage=

Shanna is a community education instructor of Texas Community Education Association http://www.tcea.com/about.htm and an award winning graphics designer. She’s also a technology teacher at Boerne ISD and has implemented a game creation unit executing the idea to support 21st century skill building in an effort to engage students in the classroom. Shanna has said many of the students have tested and used Alice, Scratch, Games Factory, and Game Maker, but prefer Game Maker because of its ease of use. “This is a great product to implement problem-based, project-based and inquiry-based learning into educational curriculum. Students are engaged and remain motivated to learn and excel! Game-based development is a fantastic instructional tool and strategy to use in the classroom. There is absolutely no better learning motivation for our youth than providing them with tools they are familiar with in their personal lives”.

We are very impressed by Shannas dedication and passion to teaching with GameMaker and hope to put pictures up of her newest showcase soon.

In a similar theme, YoYo Games is an official sponsor of the Creative Game Challenge http://www.creativegamechallenge.nl/ This is a competition organised by Utrecht University set up last year by Mark Overmars for Dutch secondary school students (age 12-18). The theme for this years annual game dev competition is Water. All the games entered were made using GameMaker and the 9 prizes up for grabs (€1,500 for the winner) and will be announced on June 24th.

This year 113 games were submitted and 20 games have been nominated. Pictures of last years prize event can be found here – http://www.creativegamechallenge.nl/experience2009.php City of the Duce is one such game created by one of our community BlueMoonProductions http://www.yoyogames.com/games/161125-city-of-the-duce# and has been announced as being one of the games shortlisted! For the full list of those who got through can be found here (in Dutch): http://www.creativegamechallenge.nl/allegamesgc2010.php

Best of luck to all! We look forward to seeing the results.

Games

Heres the Wanderlust guys interview about behind the scenes details about the game’s developments using GameMaker http://www.indiepinion.com/steffenj/interview-with-team-wanderlust/ We love the quote “the perception of GameMaker is that it cannot produce high-quality titles like Wanderlust, well I’m here to say…you can accomplish a lot with it!” Thanks for the nod guys and best of luck making this a hit!

Games

Karoshi version 1.1.0 has now been submitted for approval to Apple, and is now already out on Android from Friday!

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.yoyogames.droidkaroshi

The iOs release is imminent for release hopefully later this week.
This update includes the following;

OpenFeint implementation:

• Android: Achievements (11 new), Leaderboards
• iOS: Achievements (11 new), Leaderboards, Invitation and Social Notifications

Sandy was in the house last week, cracking the whip in all directions! All projects are into schedule and we’re hitting our targets to make sure all projects of YoYo are updated, improved and keep pushing new content out there. Hopefully the next time he’s up there’s going to be a curry in our near future  Sandy also started a new (personal) twitter account @lordoftheyoyo – go add him!

Educational

Dare to be Digital (for those not familiar) is an acclaimed video game development competition for students in the UK held in Abertay University, Dundee. For 9 weeks in the summer, teams develop a prototype game and showcased to the general public. Those who compete are usually ‘ones to watch’ in the industry and an ideal platform for aspiring game dev students to flex their talents.

Dare Academy is a new initiative developed under the Dare to be Digital umbrella. The aim of the Academy is to provide learning and skills for anyone who wants a career change or for continued professional development. We are pleased to promote that they are running a GameMaker course  http://www.daretobedigital.com/dare-academy/DareAcademy_GameMaker.php A project based course, producing your own game, to be ready for release on the Android market. Aimed at anyone with a game idea and wants to publish it.

Community Interest

A hard working team in our community have worked very hard on a game they are going to release that you might be familiar with called Wanderlust: Rebirth.

Wanderlust: Rebirth Trailer

This game, made entirely on GameMaker 7, is a 4-player co-op arcade RPG and the team were voted in as a top 100 indie project for 2010 on indieDB.com. Jason Gordy and Matthew Griffin met through the GMC and have been working together on this game for 4.5 years and must have taken a huge amount of effort and dedication! We are really proud to get behind these guys to show just what kind of quality that is possible with GameMaker

Cracking job lads, well done, round of applause here!!

SCREENSHOTS: http://www.wanderlustgame.com/media-screenshots.shtml

GameMaker

Small reminder that GameMaker Standard 8.1 will only be on sale for $25 until June 1st 2011 – then it will go up to $39.99! This will not affect upgrades which are free to those who have GameMaker 8 (with a valid purchase reference).

Still working away providing new updates, thanks to all those who provide feedback so we can fix, debug, improve. Keep em coming!

YoYo Activity

Mike, Russell, Sandy met Mark (Overmars) last week in his hometown of Utrecht. Very quick visit but really useful for YoYo to get together and brainstorm face to face. As you can see Mark is happy (or laughing at one of Sandys bad jokes) and actively involved with YoYo in future projects

New team member this week is Darrell Flood (better known to some of you as Dadio - http://www.yoyogames.com/users/dadio)  who will be working with Geoff on the art side of things.

He’ll be handling the polishing of artwork for future games as well as some gameplay mechanics and level design. Darrell has been in Japan for the last 9 years doing online art contact (& survived the earthquake and radiation) has a large interest in Anime and claims to be a serious games junkie! Please say hello

The website is still at the early designing stage. Some of the google analytics are proving interesting and thought we would share some of what we see recently on our homepage.

From 16th April to 16th May 2011;

• We have had 1.5 million visits.
• 56% of these are new visitors.
• We are up 8.43% on our visitor count.

We won’t bore you with the endless details but in all, it’s not too shabby but we reckon we can improve this significantly with some improvements to content and clearer navigation. Looking forward to sharing an outline of this with you very soon..

Game Releases

Teaser alert! We’ve been very busy lately updating a couple of popular games with some NEW content. We expect these to be ready in the next month (or even sooner) if we can test these out without too many problems. Watch this space for when we can reveal what and when… Remember to follow us on Twitter @YoYoGameMaker and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=121109091254730 for up to the minute release info as and when it happens.