GameMaker

I mean, I mean, saying that, you know, sure, I don't like playing beat 'em ups quite so much anymore.

Uh, I say this as someone who has spent quite a lot of time in Game Maker Studio trying to make a side-scrolling beat 'em up-

[laughs]

.... and learning how to code one.

When did this idea start? When did you know that you were going to drop it on the 40th anniversary? And just a little bit about the journey of making this game go from concept to reality.

Yeah, so I started using GameMaker all the way back in 2008, and I had always been practicing and attempting to do Metroid fan games with that childlike kind of interest in it and wonder.

And Metroid Prime in 8-bit was something I started and scrapped quite a few times in that process.

I wouldn't say I got very competent at coding until a few years ago.

... and that you can find in Hypnospace Outlaw.

Jay Tholen made, uh, New Active Object, which is this cool, super weird jazz album that is made entirely out of the sound effects that came with Game Maker Studio.

[laughs]

That's so cool.

Yeah

... and Game Maker during that time period, right? Um, some early iterations of it.

And so we would just kinda take those, make characters based on like the Tales Of series or, uh, Ys, um, and, you know, find Japanese emulators or Japanese, you know, versions of the game that we can check out and play.

Um, and I would, you know, design ideas and, you know, figure out like, you know, um, [tsks] you know, like move sets for the, for the, for the characters and helping with like world-building stuff.

They rebuilt the whole game?

They rebuilt the whole game in a proprietary engine instead of using Game Maker.

Damn.

And we're talking about this pre-recording that didn't end up happening for Big Gay Nerds a couple days ago.

And I think that you're trying to figure out why would you do that? Because again, doing a complete engine change, rebuilding the entire game in a new engine, one that you're making yourself, in that short span of time, is a really insane thing for any developer of any scale to do, especially when Mystery has been in early access for, like, multiple years at this point.

Mm-hmm.

And then I looked up how much it costs to get the version of Game Maker that lets you export things to consoles.

And

You had to back those discs up too, since the only way ACS knew to save the game state was to write any changes directly to the game world.

Activision's counter to this was Gary Kitchen's Game Maker.

Well, its sound and music maker parts were actually by Alex DiMeo, and sample games were Chopper by John Van Rysen and Dan Kitchen's adaptations of the company's earlier titles Pitfall and Mega Mania, but I suppose clarifying all that would have made the title too long.

GameMaker was a fully integrated development system with its own editors for audio, animated sprites, backgrounds and gameplay.

The code editor had a number of conveniences, like color markup, automatic indentation for if blocks, and there was even the trace mode that made your program run step by step so that you could monitor every variable and see where something went wrong.

And your finished and debugged game could be made into an independently playable disk.

and yet Game Maker was not perfect.

First of all, there was the interface.