personally, I am not happy with where GM is going, and I haven't since sandy duncan/yoyogames entered the picture.
Well, to be fair, the YYG business model was an abortion from the off. Relying on ad revenue and potentially attempting to monetise (oh, how I hate that word) "my first game" is a bit crap even if it were just to attempt to bolster the GM funds. So many sites with "we're the YouTube of games" and none of them worked. Who'da thunk it?
But! Sometimes you have to fail at something to realise it's a not going to work and I think YYG have seemingly learnt that lesson the hard way.
Their product is where the strength lies and YYG itself should have come second at all times with shifting GM out the door with bugfixes et al being the priority.
GM itself is but a few bugfixes and tweaks away from being as sturdy as it comes. Unfortunately, the progress has been so deathly slow and clearly some of the stuff needed to get it to near perfection is beyond Marks ability. To me, that's where YYG were supposed to step in. Why that hasn't happened is probably entirely related to a lot of the above.
the tone from mark is most likely due to dealing with teenagers and the accompanying attitude. I think he should've finalized GM a long time ago and gone back to teaching. I would not buy a product from someone who spoke to me, the way he is responding to people.
Well, y'know, I've met lots of devs in my time and some of them just aren't fundamentally front facing people when it comes to dealing with bugs and feature requests. I've had blazing arguments with a couple of serious veterans over the years and come to the internet equivalent of fightsies (thankfully in private most of the time!) *but* I don't respect them any less for their work and in a lot of cases, I'll continue to buy and support their work because despite being grumpy mups, they're still brilliant men who make brilliant things.
That's not to say I haven't wanted to repeatedly bang heads against walls at times, but heck, par for the course is that - they probably wanted to bash mine in at the same time. Some people are just best creating things :D
Not sure why you say GM should have been "finalized" though, for a start - what does that mean? A perfectly good product just stopped because you don't like the guys attitude? Stuck in time forever for no good reason? What exactly would "finalizing" entail? Feature locking whilst the rest of the universe continues to move on?
I am moving on to unity, it is 10 times the price, but I think it has 10 times the potential. i am leaving GM to hobbyist children and students, and continuing my work in a professional environment.
Ooh, get you, Mr Grown Up! Like Paul and a couple of others, I can wing some fucking smart stuff out of GM and I look at some of what people pull out of it and marvel at how utterly brilliant that stuff is. Not "brilliant for GM" but plain "brilliant as brilliant can be". Most of this stuff goes on around folks though and most of the time, it never even gets a sniff near the GMC and the likes - after all, why should it?
Right tool for the right job though and if you want fast 3d dev, well, Unity is it - not GM. For 2d stuff, I've got nearly all I'll ever need in GM currently (well, will have once 8 is out of beta and stable). Gimme a Mac version and that's it, sorted for the near future.
Phew, got through that paragraph without saying AND FUCKING SHADERS. I'm getting there! *twitch*
I do hope that many young people and those new to game design learn a lot from GM, I did.
Aww thanks! So do I. But there's nothing stopping them creating brilliant and professional pieces of work in GM as it is now.
Developer
