Why I chose GameMaker Studio 2 over other Game Engines
I recently started making video games as a hobby. The first challenge that I came across was choosing the right Game Engine. I’ve went through the pros and cons of all these engines — Unity, Unreal, Godot, AppGameKit, RPG maker, GameMaker and finally chose GameMaker Studio, here’s how I made my choice :
Is it simple to learn?
My first criteria was whether the engine is simple to learn and make games on. I wanted a Game Engine on which it was very simple and fast to build small demos on before building the final game. ( or POC — Proof Of Concepts). After researching a bit on the internet, I found GameMaker has a very fast learning curve.
Is it for Professionals or Hobbyists?
Next I wanted the Game Engine to scale up as my skills grow, although I am starting Game Development as a hobby now, in the future I might want to build polished and more complex games. I wanted a game engine that has good online community support (for helping in debugging and tutorials), advanced features and a marketplace for plugins and assets(I’m still learning to draw 😐) and GameMaker excelled in this.
Does it provide multi-platform support?
I want my games to be played by wide array of audience so the Engine I chose had to support exporting to multiple platforms (such as Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS). GameMaker supports this feature, but….there is a catch…😣 more on this in next section.
How much is it? (Pricing & Licencing)
GameMaker has different tiers for pricing, you can go for monthly, yearly or buy permanent licence for the software. Remember the catch I mentioned earlier? It is that GameMaker has different licences for different platforms, Desktop licence supports only Windows, Mac and Linux, Mobile licence supports Android and iOS and Web licence for HTML. Compared to other Engines this is a Bummer.
Games made using GameMaker
This was also one of the major factor for choosing this Engine. Many popular and Hit games were made using GameMaker. Here are some of the most popular (and my favorite) games made using GameMaker Studio
So considering all these criteria I have chosen GameMaker Studio 2 as my champion, made my first game: Slime Runner using this Engine.
