Working on some stuff! One project is a web game in Flash/Starling that is gonna be SUPER cool I hope:

The other is a new STEAM/CONSOLE game about barbarians who puke. For this project I decided to get out of my Flash comfort zone and try some new development platforms. I played with Unity and its 2D tools for a couple weeks, but it was taking me a REALLY long time to get anything done. The workflow and 3D base (even for the 2D tools) was too unfamiliar to me. C# is also a much more strict language than as3 and I was feeling bogged down.

I was able to get things working, but imagining the amount of time and continuous learning curve involved with making a BIG game in Unity was starting to freak me out!

So I did some research into some popular indie games that are under development now or released recently to try to find an alternative to Unity that would still allow us to meet our goals:

1. Publish on Steam with local multi-player and controller support

2. Have the option to publish on consoles (xbox 1 + ps4 + Wii + others?)

3. Web preview support if possible (not necessary, but pretty desire-able)

4. Mobile support (not really likely, but nice to have the options open...)

It came down to a decision between Open FL and Game Maker: Studio.

Open FL was really tempting because it's based on Haxe and uses syntax and display list-style stuff that's very similar to as3 that I'm already comfortable with (it's also FREE). I could use FlashDevelop and feel pretty much right at home with the process, but (and this is a big butt) its console support is a bit shaky and it's fairly new and not as well documented and has a small-ish community (though it's growing). I've heard that it has some funky quirks and can be tough to port projects between platforms...

Game Maker, I had always assumed, was a cheap (in quality, not in price) method for high-school kids who can't code making games with a simple drag and drop interface. I thought it wasn't a serious platform for game dev and was more of an educational tool... then I started noticing that some NICE games are/were made with Game Maker (Hyperlight Drifter, Nidhogg, Nuclear Throne, Rivals of Aether etc.) Once I saw that legit games were being made with GM, my only question was whether it would be as unfamiliar to me as my experience with Unity.

So I downloaded Game Maker: Studio and tested it out thinking that, if it was a beast to learn, I'd fall back to Open FL...

BUT MAN IS IT AWESOME!

For someone coming from Actionscript and Flash, everything just seemed to make sense immediately. What took me 4 hours to make in Unity took me 20 minutes in Game Maker and I could see the whole game feasibly unfolding from beginning to end (unlike my anxiety about unknown hurdles in Unity). Game Maker actually reminds me a lot of as2 style coding rather than as3... which is kind of a good thing for me!

So, Game Maker it is for Barfbarians! A further bonus is that GM has better html 5 support than Unity so we might actually get a web-demo of Barfbarians out there before all is said and done.

To prove how easy it is, here's a gif of Barfbarians already running local multi-player with game pad support at 60 FPS! WOOOO!

 Leave me your thoughts on all this, even if it's just to say "Hi!"