Research = Progress

Or, at least, that's what I am going to advocate to make up for the fact that I have, again, spent too much time gaming and not enough time programming.

Damn you, World of Warcraft. Why must you have addicted me to your schemes again?

When I'm not reading about WoW or scrolling endlessly down my Facebook news feed, I do actively try to find more things about programming to investigate. Yesterday, my search was somewhat accidentally rewarded, simply by visiting Humble Bundle.

For anyone not familiar with Humble Bundle (seeing as I had no idea it existed just a few months ago), this is a company who gathers together collections of games, software, or books and provides them in this "pay what you want" scheme. Some of the money you pay goes to the providers of these materials (publishers, developers, etc.), some goes to Humble Bundle in the form of a "tip", and some goes to charity. Because you can choose how much you want to pay, you can also choose who gets each piece of your proverbial pie of money.
It's a pretty neat platform. Most of the games are only redeemable through Steam, and the books are often Hi-Res PDFs that you must download, but there have been some fantastic bundles lately.

The one that caught my attention this week was actually a bundle of rarities from Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors of all time. After snatching that bundle up, I was nosing around and noticed the weekly bundle included a piece of software called GameMaker.

Let me distract myself for a moment by saying that the way I've been training myself to code is pretty down and dirty. I use Sublime Text to write and GCC/Clang to compile. Sometimes I make a Makefile for the little programs I come up with, but most of the time, it is good ole' gcc name.c -o name.
I have never worked with an engine before, and even if GameMaker isn't the greatest engine out there, the price was certainly right for me to get started with it (the bundle came with assets already, in addition to source code from projects made in GameMaker that are already on the market).

Researching GameMaker brought me to a developer called MoaCube who wrote up this review on GameMaker prior to the release of GameMaker Studio, which is the software included in the Humble Bundle. It was nice to see a developer who had projects out there in the nebulous space of the internet marketplace give a candid look at the engine and relate their experiences.
MoaCube has some really gorgeous-looking games that I look forward to investigating more closely. The review article goes into some detail about the games they built with GameMaker.

So I went ahead and picked up the bundle with GameMaker in it. The way I figure, if nothing else, I can root through some code and have real, working games to compare with any tweaks I might make.

Of course, because there have been 60,000+ bundles sold, the company website, YoYoGames.com, is experiencing huge latency issues and ultimately needed to go offline for maintenance, so I can't actually comment on GameMaker because I have yet to get my hands on it.

Since this is the case, I'm going to truncate this post for now and come back to the subject of GameMaker later. It is not the only research I've done, and this particular research led me on another tangent of research, but I think that may be best tackled in a completely separate blog post. Plus, I have work to do and this post ended up long enough as it is.