What is the best game engine: is GameMaker right for you?
For developers just starting in the industry, the task of choosing the best game engine can be daunting. Here, we'll try to address many of the issues concerning one of the most popular game engines, GameMaker, so you can see if it's the right game engine for your project.
You can read our other in-depth guides on all the major game engines from this page.
If you have a day job but are secretly dreaming of being a developer, chances are you've given GameMaker a try.
Above all, GameMaker is an engine for novices – the artists, the writers, the non-programmers, the people with ideas who have never written a single line of code and wouldn't know where to start. But GameMaker is also much more than that. It's the high-end 2D engine, the top-down action games engine, the puzzle-platformers engine, the pixel art engine.
Vadym Diachenko has built a career from working with GameMaker. After gaining renown for online multiplayer mods, he was recruited to work on Nuclear Throne, Forager, Nidhogg 1 and 2, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, and Caveblazers, among others – all of which were created with GameMaker.
"The engine is perhaps the most known for a wide variety of pixel art games made with it," he says. "But [we] have seen an increase of higher-fidelity games like Swords of Ditto, Levelhead, Synthetik, or Nidhogg 2."
GameMaker was created by YoYo Games 23 years ago, with an underlying goal to "streamline the development process" using GML Visual, a drag-and-drop visual scripting tool.
The engine is currently available under its latest iteration, GameMaker – formerly GameMaker Studio 2 (GMS2) – which was released in March 2017. The tech has been downloaded more than 12 million times to date and more than 2,500 users register to use the engine every single day. Since GameMaker was acquired by web browser firm Opera in 2021, the engine has apparently seen a three-fold increase in the number of active users.
GameMaker supports a dozen platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Windows,
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