PreviewLabs

Back in March, we announced that we would take a closer look at a range of technologies, in order to find out how they could be useful for rapid prototyping.

One of the tools we wanted to have a look at was YoYo Games’ Game Maker 8. However, our investigation of Game Maker was cancelled, as we had a look at GameSalad – a seemingly similar technology – right before that, and concluded that this kind of game engines where you create games without actual programming isn’t interesting for us at the moment.

On Wednesday at the gamescom, I ran into Mike Dailly, Head of Development at YoYo Games, and took some time to learn more about their technology.

These are the two most interesting things I learned from my conversation with Mike:

1. While Game Maker allows you to create a game by using drag & drop, it also allows you to write your own source code and thus program in a more conventional way. This could be a key advantage over GameSalad.
2. Game Maker will soon allow you to export games to HTML5 (two days later, this was officially announced on their blog). Currently, not all features work in all browsers, and the generated JavaScript code will be obfuscated, making it harder to fix issues in specific browsers.

While writing this post, I noticed that GameSalad also has HTML5 support.

Either way, I’ve already signed up for the HTML 5 beta release here, so we can have a closer look at the new features in September.