GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have one-time fee license | Hacker News Reader

GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have one-time fee license

gamemaker.io

220 pointsflykespice88 comments

This company changes their licensing terms every three years or so. This is the same deal that Game Maker Studio 1.4 was licensed under, then they brought out a subscription model for GMS 2 with no free tier. It's hard to take them at their word and have faith that there will really be a full-features free version "from now on."

They’ve been bought and sold a few times which is probably related to the licensing changes.

Currently owned by Opera since 2021.

I wonder if there's anything like a "rug-pull-proof" licensing/development model. Even AGPL is not a guarantee, if a single entity owns the copyright to the entire project (through CLAs), and decides to switch to BSL, and has enough influence to make forks irrelevant.

I think Linux's model is the strongest: individual contributors retain copyright, and there are enough individual copyright holders to make relicensing insanely difficult. Coupled with the project's pace (and the pace at which they change the internal APIs) it basically provides such a guarantee. Most projects however are less successful and the users/downstream developers can't count on momentum as the safeguard.

A project could always be abandoned, there's no way to guarantee perpetual labor on your behalf.

What does this have to do with the preceding argument? Yes, the company could abandon the project, but the concern here is about them taking all the previous work (including volunteer contributions) and proceeding with a more restrictive commercial license; that's what we want to prevent.

> the concern here is about them taking all the previous work

Not unless they retroactively change the license on said previous work, which I'm pretty sure they cannot.

I haven't looked into GameMaker's license specifically, but many projects require a copyright assignment as part of their contributor license agreement.

that allows relicensing of the combined work moving forward, not retroactive relicensing of already released code.

That's indeed what I meant, apologies if I was unclear.

Nobody wants to guarantee perpetual future labor. The guarantee we want is that if there's future labor, then we want the fruits of it to remain FOSS.

The concern is not about free labor, the concern is that the product I'm building might get killed by vendor deciding to just fuck me over. Whether the software is free (as in beer or freedom) or not is a secondary concern - I'm merely noting that even a license as strong as AGPL is not a guarantee that I won't get fucked.

It is, though? All that is required is that you're allowed to maintain your own fork. Which is guaranteed to you, in perpetuity, by the AGPL.

How's Linux 2.6 going?

Still working fine? You can run Linux 2.6 just fine on the hardware it supports and even backport newer features you want.

There is. It's called Pay The Author. If you don't have a bare license conditioned on someone's pinky promise, but rather you pay the author and thereby perfect that promise into an actual, enforceable contract, then when someone attempts a rug-pull you can actually file suit to enforce your legal rights. Simple as.

That's the nice thing about a one-time license fee: whether they maintain that license "from now on" is basically irrelevant. There is only "for the version you bought". They can change their license all they want in the future, that one-time fee license will forever be valid for the specific version you were willing to pay for.

It's why some folks are still using Photoshop CS6.

I actively use game maker and as much as I love it, I really got screwed over by this.

I bought game maker studio version 1 for mobile and paid a great deal of money for it, it was shortly before they released the new version of 2.0 with the new model and then android dropped support for 32 bit mobile applications. I was unable to build my android apps moving forward because 1.0 never supported 64bit while 2.0 did.

It took me a bit to finally come around to using the engine again (I currently pay the monthly fee as I develop my game)

Pixel images are stable enough that they remain usable forever. Windows is a relatively stable platform as well, so not updating your development tools mostly works there. But on mobile there are too many breaking changes and updated store requirements for that to work for long.

can you get gamemaker 8 legally somehow?

Last time I used Game Maker was just before they got acquired by YoYoGames, it actually inspired me to learn programming along with Roblox (early 2007).

It’s cool to see how it’s still going!

A lot of old things from 90s are still going surprisingly strong - Python, JavaScript, Java etc.

Agreed! I'm assuming this is the same gamemaker I used back in highschool (~2004), which is what got me into programming in the first place.

Game Maker was how I got into programming in the early 2000s! Looking at the website now, it looks very different today, but the core is still there.

Wow, I followed that exact same path! First GameMaker, then I moved on to Roblox later, and now programming is part of my job!

I think I might still have some of the old .exe files for the games I made back in the day...

Same! I created numerous games with early GameMaker as a pre-teen. I even managed to use it for making various useful little programs, like an interactive calculator to show my Dad’s company that the bandwidth required for multiple security cameras would eat up all the bandwidth available on the relatively slow internet connections. It definitely had an enormous positive effect on my career in software.

Yup, same here! Used GameMaker extensively before getting into Minecraft modding and Ludum Dare game jams with different engines (LWJGL and XNA/MonoGame). 16+ years later and I'm a Senior Gameplay Programmer

This is nice but they really need to fix their new UI, it's a mess. The sprite editor is lovely but the multi-window layout is needlessly confusing, it's extremely cumbersome to edit code in drag-and-drop compared to the old studio 1 UI, and it's extremely unstable, with regular "game maker has become unstable, please save your work and restart" messages.

I'd sooner pay 50 euros for Game Maker with a stable, simpler UI than 0 for the current one.

Many thanks to Mark Overmars for the development of GM, it was a core part of my toolkit in the early 2000's and introduced me to offline programming.

Like many others, I had (appropriately) written off gamemaker entirely as soon as they changed to a subscription model. It was always a solid choice for making games, so I'm glad to see that it might be worth using again.

Every time I see GameMaker, I think Gary Kitchen's GameMaker. Ahhh... Good times.

I’ve wanted to make a game for a while now as a side project; but art styling matters immensely to me - more than the gameplay itself, honestly. I feel like I need to become a good artist first…

I bought this on the strength of the main instructor's concept art course[0]: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learn-to-create-game-a...

[0] I'm halfway through and have made more progress in a week than in a lifetime of false starts (complete with Black Friday coupon): https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/1289989?coupon_code=YIPPEE

There are so many generative AI tools for creating game assets now, you don't really need to become a good artist.

https://www.scenario.com/

https://www.rosebud.ai/ai-game-assets

https://www.layer.ai/

Coming soon https://unity.com/products/muse

True; but other indie gamers would never forgive me because it’s seen as plagiarism.

Ignore them.

What are some of your favourites?

I've been using https://cascadeur.com/ to animate the models that I hire artists to make

What are the best tools for commercial use? I've been using Midjourney for some stand-in assets, but I haven't researched the license implications.

That only really works if there is a way to keep all the generated art in the same "genre" (aka looking similar). Most tools I've used create completely different outputs on each run and trying to subtly tweak something is difficult.

While I wouldn't personally use them, that appears to be the point of all three of the services he listed.

I think they added those links later, IIRC the comment was just the first line of text when I replied but that's interesting for sure.

Can we share a few resources for these?

Updated comment with examples

but you'll be banned from Steam

How does this work exactly?

Every time I’ve played with AI generated art it’s like rolling the dice for any given image or single peace.

Then I ask for another, and I get something completely different that would never fit with the first piece…

A game requires some level of consistency across the assets.

> How does this work exactly?

AI> Design me some game graphics that look similar to Mario Bros, except instead of the main character being a plumber, make him an electrician and instead of having a brother who is a plumber also, give him a sister who sells stuff on Etsy.

Even if that gives me a baseline, then what? If I want more I find I get something out of left field. The non-deterministic nature of AI makes it kinda hard to iterate all assets right?

Well it takes some work to get something you like...

But prompting with things like, "Return all future images for this chat in the style of x" help.

You're not just going to be able to say, "Create all my artwork for my game" but prompting and honing in on something is easier, imo, than learning how to create that artwork yourself.

If you do something like pixel art, you can also get a rough draft from dalle then do some editing yourself. Again, it isnt doing everything for you but its significantly easier and faster than learning how to be an artist yourself.

Generative AI is not non-deterministic, it is just chaotic. (That is, small changes to input may have large and hard to predict changes in output.)

OTOH, there are lots and lots of tools to improve controllability. Still, though, tricky for most game assets (though inprovements are being made by leaps and bounds) beyond static illustrations/icons.

ControlNet lets you direct posing, for starters.

Those are just frontends on top of Stable Diffusion. They won't provide what you need for a game - the results aren't animatable or rigable.

Just going to comment this exact thing. You can achieve the same as any of these glorified SD wrappers with custom loras from civitai and controlnet, but animation which is crucial to any 2d based game (outside of a few genres like puzzle / card games) is non-existent.

Do any of these generate animations for 2d?

If you have the money for it, you should really consider hiring a contract artist to supplement your gaps.

A concept artist and a 3D modeling artist altogether will cost like $3000 for 1 fully complete character that fits your vision. For 2D probably a lot cheaper.

For me, $3000 is worth the months/yrs of saved time.

Of course if you are having fun learning the art side and don't care about the destination as much then ignore this and have fun with it! If you practice every day for a year you'll probably start getting close to what you invision.

EDIT: I'll also add that it's possible most of the aesthetic you're looking for can be achieved via shaders (for both 3D and 2D games). A lot of art looks very different in-game because of shaders doing all kinds of manipulations.

They could start with stick figures and placeholder graphics to communicate the idea, then level up; a great example of this iterative approach is Factorio, which redid some of its graphics and graphics pipelines over the years, starting off with basically MS Paint style graphics, then moving to a detailed 3D model transformed to 2D sprites pipeline.

Then there's the Kingdom of Loathing games that never moved on from shitty Paint drawings, lol.

Find that good artist then either:

1. pay them to make art for the game you want to make, or

2. work with them for free to make the game they want to make.

Good luck.

there's an artist out there that probably has the opposite problem, this is how many games are made

Of $100. This is quite steep compared to when the pro version only costed $20. I don't think the lite version prohibited commercial use either, it was just limited in what it could do.

I believe this is the "same" GameMaker I built my first game when I was 13 back in 2001 or 2002.

For me I think it was version 5 in 2003 https://gamemaker.fandom.com/wiki/Version_5

At least the screenshot tingles something in the brain.

Same. I was so active in the legacy forums before YoYo games deleted it all. I found an archive of the old forums on archive.org and I'm extracting the folder as I write this (process has been taking over an hour so far and it's only halfway). So far it seems to be almost 60GB of information. I thought it would just be text, but I guess it's that plus all the images. I can't wait to see what 10 year old me was up to back then. It's been 20 years.

are you talking about gmshowcase.dk ? The site YoYo games literally pulled from existence to become their own "half baked" showcase?

Me too! I started programming because of Game Maker.

I lost all the games I did. I wished I had saved them somewhere.

I would be curious if someone with Game Maker experience could try Adventure Game Studio and report what did they think of it what is to like and what isn't, what is good and what is bad.

Have toyed with both. GM is far more flexible and powerful. Yet if you want a point and click adventure game then AGS will get you quite far without much programming knowledge. Getting AGS games on mobile will probably require a publisher deal with one of the few who work with AGS, like Wadget Eye.

I made superslimesoccer.io with game maker back in the day, still going strong with 1000s of daily visitors

Probably only doing it because competition. They had the chance to do it +20 years ago

neat, too bad my Game Maker 5 license won't qualify though. still kinda salty it didn't transfer over when YoYo bought it out.

Who needs game maker when we have godot, etc?

Different strokes for different folks. It’s like asking why we need PowerPoint when we’ve got LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is a substandard imitation. Godot is more powerful than Gamemaker. It can do anything Gamemaker can do and it’s free.

Godot is definitely far more powerful but it has a higher learning curve.

Gamemaker is far easier for beginners who are making that Gamemaker type of game (typically top-down, pixel-art for graphics, etc).

That is true. It’s just an unfortunate that GameMaker is the one of the that isn’t open source

That is the problem actually. You don't always need powerful.

people who want console support without paying a third party company to port their game, for starters

True, you pay them instead of Godot. Unless your third party company is w4games, then you're just paying godot with extra steps.

Who needs Vue when we have React? Who needs Javascript when we have Typescript? Who needs MariaDB when we have MySQL? Who needs Docker when we have Podman? Who needs Burger King when we have McDonalds? Who needs Wish.com when we have Amazon?

...

MariaDB is MySQL.

#notmysql

Who needs Java when we have C#?

Who needs C#? Nobody.

Who needs Python when we have machine code?

Who needs programmers when we have GPT?

The point is that this is still proprietary, but we already have FOSS that does the same thing. Who needs AIX and HP-UX when we have Linux and BSD? Who needs leaded gas when we have unleaded gas?

Who needs Lego when you can buy a welder in a supermarket?

Not I

Can Godot export to mobile/console/etc easily?

There are some versions issues, and you need ask somebody to configure pipeline for you (install Android Studio, Xcode, VSC, etc, figure out how to work with it, etc), but overall answer - yes, you could choose version of Godot, which will easily export to mobile/console, after ONCE spent time to configure pipeline.

Sure, once will appear new release, too different, so will need again do pipeline configuration.

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