I don't want to sound like a spoil sport since I just got back after a couple of years, but I need to get this off my chest. I was recently playing The Cleaner and Seiklus and got a flood of nostalgia playing these. It made me recall the years when sites like this, newgrounds and gamejolt would release cool games once in a while that would introdude, modify or polish game design ideas that were usually novel enough to tickle my fancy. This site is of course known for its community and its lax attitude and used to be a cool place to experiment with game ideas. This was most likely due to the ease of access of using Game Maker 7+and its compatibility with window vista. I looked at the games posted on this site and while I was expecting games that didn't meet the quality of more polished entries of years past a strange feeling crept up on me as I played them. It was not the collision detection, the controls nor the simplistic sprites that bothered me. It was the general lack of ambition.
It seems the move to GMS, as well as the prevalence of other engines like Unity has taken away the competitive spirit the older game maker community once had. I must be old or hanging in wrong circles but it feels wrong that a veteran site like this is lacking in enthusiasm.
I don't want to beat on you guys for not trying. But come on. Let us encourage others to put a little back in their backbone. Lets make them feel like they car able to make something they are proud of making. And lets do this now that the year is just started.
Half of the trouble I've personally had is that I haven't really been able to find and stick with an IDE that just lets you churn stuff out like GM6/7 did, for better or worse. There are lots of great tools out there, but it's just not the same and I've definitely done a poor job of adapting!
Really, the hard part for me was the shift to greater graphical quality. GMS gives so many options (vector sprites, skeletal animation, texture packs) and it took me time to learn what it had to offer. The marketplace is helping alleviate issues I had with the switch but the initial investment is usually where people get suck.
It's very true. Although the learning curve back in the day was not necessarily an easy one, the learning curve nowadays is much steeper.
Plus, I feel like indie game design used to truly be somewhat of an underground hobby. But it is so mainstream nowadays that people probably feel like they will never make something worth playing, even if they somehow did find the time and energy to learn every "advanced" technique or skill in the book. And that can be a discouraging and exhausting spiral to start to slide down.But I'm with you. Who cares if you're not competing for top lists in an app store. It doesn't have to be about that if you don't make it that. And we, as a community, have traditionally been incredible about not making it about the (though we definitely also give credit where credit is due). It would be awesome to get the true "love" of game design back into the spirit here.Imagine to imagine, create to create, play to play, and do it together as a community because relationship of any sort is what makes it all worth it in the first place. And don't forget to put your heart into it–you have it for a reason, and nothing you do is really "you" without it.I loved Seiklus back in the day.
I'm quite a fan of GameMaker: Studio, and I'm excited to see the big titles coming out made with it, like Rivals of Aether and Undertale. Its inspiring to see it making waves.I will make a worthwhile game and post it to this site sooner or later, I just gotta stopped being hammered by school first.
I hear you though, I miss the days of when I could go to just about any game site and there was a vibrant community of devs sharing cool things and talking. 2000-2008 was like the Renaissance. Gamejolt has a ton of smaller but nonetheless ambitious stuff on it, but it still seems largely disconnected as a community to me. Same goes for Tigsource. Indie dev has just gotten way larger and a bit more impersonal as a result I guess. No one really bonds over a piece of software in the same way. I kinda think the same thing has happened to flash, although I'm not really sure. I think once a few people start posting things on 64D again though, things could really pick up. We already have the community aspect better than most places, some more people just need to spark something. Too many people left this site without doing more. Myself included. I missed this stuff, man.Maybe we should host a game development competition where the goal is make a game inspired by the freeware games (they weren't called "indie" back then) of 2000's? 640x480 resolution, no antialiasing, no cool shaders or other modern stuff.
By the way, I might not have told this before, but I made my first games using Game Maker almost then years ago. I stopped using the software in 2009, and a few years later I started to learn C++. Anyway, when I still used Game Maker, I played those early games made using that software. They still have a special place in my heart.