Looks like the cat is finally (officially) out of the bag!
What was alluded to in a few obscure screenshots and then not very subtly in the YoYo Games Competition 5 rules has now been made official in a Glog post today; that YYG has been hard at work on a version of the Game Maker runner that works on PSP.
YYG also announced that they have hired Russel Kay as their Chief Technical Officer in charge of all future Game Maker development. Kay is the former Senior Software Architect for Realtime Worlds, and while his new post at YYG seems to imply that Mark Overmars may not be taking as big a role in future versions of Game Maker, Sandy (presumably) tries to lay those fears to rest in the announcement:
Also, don’t worry about Mark Overmars, he won’t be disappearing. Mark is too busy with his university commitments to take up a full-time role at YoYo Games, but he has recently strengthened his links with us and he has been fully involved in the process of recruiting Russell at every stage. Mark has already been working closely with Russell and he will continue to have a great influence on Game Maker and our community.
I'm pretty excited for YYG and Game Maker - I think that if they can successfully make the jump to consoles/handhelds they could become a very lucrative company (almost like Steam for consoles/handhelds). I also think that with new talent on board, we might see larger advancements in the power of Game Maker, and sooner.
Of course, if they can't make that happen it could spell the end of Game Maker. But with a lot of smart, talented people on board, I'm not concerned about that. Interesting news, anyway.
7 Comments
He’s not too good at it, is he?
Anyway, sounds like a bit of a bulge in the budget. GM8 sales must be pretty high.
I remember back when people used to post thread after thread on the GMC asking whether Game Maker will ever come to GameBoy Advance, PSP, the DS, etc. But so many osx developers are moving to the iPhone/iPod touch now that it doesn’t surprise me one bit that yoyogames (and developers in general) are also now looking towards handheld support.
Can’t wait to hear more about this new possibility. Maybe it’ll get me back into using game maker again ;)
So, whatever happened to ‘never using Twitter’, ayee?
To be honest, I felt forced into it. That probably sounds stupid, but as a creative type in California and an indie game dev online, I figured I’d at least reserve my name so nobody else could take it.
I really want to just hook it up to my Facebook account, so I don’t have to visit the site much, but I haven’t found a good way to do that yet. For the most part, everything I’ve posted there has been a carbon copy of a post on Facebook.
Wow, this is certainly unexpected news. Big move by YoYo, I’m impressed. I’ve been pretty disappointed with YoYo, to be honest. Seems like a lot of potential has been squandered so far. Hope the changes are big success for them … especially if the changes include putting someone on bug patrol for GM8.
My opinion of YoYo Games is still relatively neutral. For the most part, they haven’t really done anything particularly wrong yet, but then they haven’t done a whole hell of a lot right yet either. I completely agree that it is much squandered potential though. When Mark helped form YYG and they took over GM’s development, I really expected to see things take off – I imagined that the things it had previously taken Mark years to accomplish could be done in mere months with a real team of developers behind it. Sadly, this isn’t yet the case, as most of YYG’s efforts currently seem to have been spent on monetizing Game Maker. And that’s fine with me
Wow, this is certainly unexpected news. Big move by YoYo, I’m impressed. I’ve been pretty disappointed with YoYo, to be honest. Seems like a lot of potential has been squandered so far. Hope the changes are big success for them … especially if the changes include putting someone on bug patrol for GM8.