runouw.com

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/31/no-co ... mash-hits/
Have you played Gunpoint? Hotline Miami? Spelunky, Risk of Rain or Super Crate Box? They are pretty successful on Steam, no matter if free or paid. Have you ever wondered how did "those awesome guys make this games"? PC Gamear reveals that the thing behind those smash hits was the simple Game Maker. I know what most of you are thinking "eww gaemmaker, code ftw", but for those new and want to try to enter the world of developing, tools like Game Maker, Stencyl and probably a lot others alike may be the key.

In May 2013, Tom Francis opened preorders for his 2D stealth hacking game Gunpoint. By the time Gunpoint actually went on sale, a week later, Francis had already made enough money to quit his job at PC Gamer and focus on game development full-time. But for many people, the biggest surprise came not from the game's amazing performance three days after release, but rather the way it was made—that it was developed using a tool called GameMaker.

Now I'm not advertising software for making games, but if you do want to make a step in being a game developer (or a hobbyist), I think this is worth reading. So, what do you think?

We do not ridicule Game Maker because it is a tool that cannot create good games, we ridicule Game Maker because most games released using it are terrible and had no thought put into them

The ones that are not terrible are the ones that do well

Depends on what you use and how you use it. Admittedly, I got my start from GM.

My start came from RPG Maker VX Ace. I used this for several projects with it and it works great. I also used GameMaker, but, I need to look up some tutorials before using it again. I also attempted Construct 2.

GIant bump but as everyone probably knows at this point, the recently explosively popular Undertale can be included in that list now.

Honestly, I kind of like the idea of focusing on art/story/music instead of wasting time and/or money on development teams and coding. Even if gameplay in games using gamemaker isn't necessarily always super innovative or interesting, it makes the entire medium of video games a lot more accessible to content creators. It's pretty neat. Even if you're a code purist.

The biggest issue is that it's hard to port these types of games to other platforms, but that's usually a problem that gets dealt with after determining whether the initial release was really successful enough to consider that or not. And at that point the creators are probably gonna have money to hire programmers anyway.