Unlike apparently every other user of GM, I have welcomed the addition of YoYo Games from day one.

It's the best place for playing GM games
Many people complain about YoYo Games being full of rubbish games, but it couldn't be easier to find the brilliant ones. Including featured games, on the front page alone there are 16 games that you can guarantee are fun to play, if you manage to play all those the staffs pick section has over 200 more great games. I do not believe that anyone can go onto YoYo Games and not find a game worth playing.

It's a professional outlet, where people can direct other's to so they play their games quickly without faffing around with zips
18 months ago, if someone had made a game they wanted to show off to friends they'd have to direct them to a download link, wait for it to download, open it, extract the contents, and then finally hunt down the .exe file to play it. Now though, a link to the YoYo Games page (a one time install of Instant Play), and then one click of Play Now and they're away.

GM will become more advanced than Mark ever could make on his own, with multimillion dollar investments confirmed
Sandy has said that $5,000,000 are being invested in YoYo Games and Game Maker. This is an unprecedented amount and no one would have ever imagined this probably even 12 months ago.

A Mac version AND C++ rewrite is in the works
Game Maker for Mac will open up a whole new market front, with few ways for Mac users to make games cheaply (or even for free) this is really a whole new frontier for GM. Then once the C++ rewrite has been done, we can probably expect Linux versions and even the possibility of other ports to more platforms such as consoles.

Seamless online highscores soon to come
Currently knowledge of DLL's and servers are needed to generate an online highscore, but soon this will be able to be done with no more than basic GML knowledge. It's also likely that the higscores will be viewable without having to enter the game itself.

Proper review and rating system
A way to rate games in many genres and in different categories. The system is without a doubt abused, I won't say it's not, but there's very few other places that allow such structured, detailed reviews. There are in fact some indepth reviews that I'm sure the makers find useful. Having only small comment boxes encourages.

Sandy keeps everyone more up-to-date than Mark did
Mark rarely released development updates or any new things that were happening. In fact this is because not much used to happen!

Massive prizes in competitions to help amateur game makers
All other contests offer rather minimal prizes (pen drives, computer games etc), but YoYo's have unprecedented amount of up to $1000! The deserving winner of any of the prizes would become much better off, so they are supporting developers so much.

A better server for the GMC than Mark could have afforded
YoYo Games took a long time fixing the GMC errors, but how long would Mark by himself taken? The servers they have now are fantastic and there is the new software with more features and more secure than ever before. It took the efforts of a full-time YYG employer many days to upgrade the GMC, how long would have taken the volunteer admins? (no offense to the admins, they do a great job).

The sites completely free! I don't have to pay a penny to use it!
Don't like the website? Don't use it. It's something extra that wasn't there before and therefore we're lucky to have it. I'll say it again, no one is forcing you to use it!

I think the reason many people still don't like them is because Yoyo haven't done much in the short-term, but I admire the way they've instead invested instead in GM's long-term future. They could have easily released many new GM versions, with more features, but they've gone with the difficult (and sensible) option of making sure GM can adapt to more platforms and is easier to improve in the future. Game Maker will now certainly still exist in 5, 10, even 20 years time, whereas Mark would have given up on it eventually.

Many seem to have the attitude that using the GMC or Yoyo games is a right, when in fact it's a privilege. When you pay for Game Maker, that's all you're paying for, the use of that piece of software, anything else is an extra.

YYG are not going away, and therefore neither is Game Maker. If you ever start to not like YYG, just think, where we would be without them?

A bit of a blatant advert this, but I reckon people will like this a lot




The new GMTech Magazine Wiki has a wealth of resources to help you make your games as great as possible. It consists of articles from past and present issues of GMTech Magazine put together on one website so they can be viewed from around the world and are in a printer friendly format. Currently there are over 125 pages for you to read. It is arguably one of the best looking wiki systems around with a sleek and professional design. Navigation is easy too with articles split into categories and a tagging system so you can find related articles or view all articles by a particular writer.

Because all the tutorials and examples have been written by GMTech's dedicated writers (or occasional freelancers), the quality will always be of a very high standard and everything would have had the benefit of being checked over by our very own experienced proof-readers. There's absolutely no half-hearted efforts with terrible grammar and spelling.

Apart from simple tutorials and examples there are other more descriptive development articles, such as A Game Planning Document, Speeding Up Game Loading , and Level Design. There are also a number of casual articles on topics ranging from Dealing With Comments Correctly to Stopping Beginners Starting Out Of Their Depth.

There are a number of free applications reviewed to expand your developers tool-kit, and in the future there will be a number of interviews with advanced Game Maker users to get even more advice (currently there is only one interview, but more will be added very shortly).

For the people who also enjoy playing other GM games all of our reviews of completed games and previews of WIP games will eventually be archived on it as well. If you are the maker of any of the games reviewed, you can now link directly to the article on your game topic so people won't have to download the entire PDF to view the one review.

You can comment on all pages in the wiki as well as giving it a rating to let us know what you think of a particular article, you can also leave more general comments on the wiki sub-forum on the main GMTech Magazine forum. This is not a full open-source style wiki (like Wikipedia for instance) but this does mean all content is guaranteed to be well written and nothing is left half-finished so you won't ever waste any time looking around for something worth reading.

We'd like a special mention to xDanielx for creating a GML2color Wikidot system for us to use so that all code on the wiki is in full colour for easy reading and understanding.

We hope you find this a valuable GM resource, and the best thing is more high quality content will be added every time a new issue is released so it'll be updated roughly every month or two. There is also a lot of content from previous issues still to be put on, so more will be added every week.


Links
GMTech Magazine Wiki: gmtechwiki.wikidot.com
GMTech Magazine Homepage: www.gamemakertech.info
GMTech Magazine Forum: www.gmtech.kwix.info/forum


Let us know what you think and whether you have any comments, suggestions, or queries. We hope you find the GMTech Wiki interesting and informative.

WARNING: IE6 renders the website incorrectly.

Timoi
(Wiki Editor)

Go on, using only your elbow, type your username in full.

Rules
1. Letters must be in their correct upper or lower case.
2. NO backspaces allowed.
3. If anyone cheats, I'll have no idea, but you'd be kidding yourself.

My attempt: Tiomopi

ooh er...

664digits ides a gamemakere rerelated site wiyth completed games andf examples, htthey allso havre wepotrlk in progredss games xs o peplfer ca nm vco,m mdernt on the,m.

Yes that was written with my elbow. Follow the instructions below for help.:

FAQ
What does FAQ stand for?
Frequently Asked Questions

What is a question?
A question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression.

Are you (a) God?
While I am not God, many consider me to be a holy figure and I regularly receive offerings from my followers.

Troubleshooting:
HELP, I don't have an elbow but I want to join in!
Don't panic. A chin can be used as an alternative, think of it as an elbow for the face.

I've broken my keyboard, it's all your fault!
I accept full responsibility for any injury that may occur, please send a stamped addressed envelope to 5 YoYo Street and we'll re-compensate you.

I've dislocated my shoulder, what do I do now?
Complain to Marbs, he won't help, but it'll be fun watching hundreds of people spam him.

In other news, the GMTech Wiki has had a facelift (it involved a 3 hour surgical procedure by gmjab and A LOT of botox). The result is it now looks at least 8 years younger. Our slaves worked through the night to get the issue 11 content online too, so enjoy that. If you didn't have a chance to read my article on 64Digits vs Snow Moon, you can now instantly view it online here.

The GMTech Forum has also had it's fair share of plastic surgery and (just like the GMC) it's even moved to a new host, so enjoy that to. Remember you can get your game that's on this website fully reviewed and read by MANY people, it's the among the best free exposure you can get for your gm game.

If you wish to get higher than a 4 star review, a payment of £250 is required to be put into my PayPal account. A 3 star or above is £150, 2 star is £50, and if you don't pay, we'll humiliate you and degrade your game in the public eye. (Only kidding!).

Now roll up those sleeves and give elbow typing a go....

Hi all, this is my first blog post on this site.

I'm a writer for the rather excellent GMTech Magazine (imo anyway) and for my first article I did a comparison of Snow Moon to this very website site you're looking at now, 64 Digits. When I first started I had no experience of either site but I've enjoyed my time here, and 64Digits is now firmly bookmarked in my...erm...bookmarks folder and I try to visit here every couple of days to see what's going on. The article has appeared in the just released issue 11.

Here's a quick extract from it:



You can download the full magazine (Issue 11) and article from the GMTech website.

Front cover preview:




I'd like a special thanks to go to Phazon Yoshi, DFortun8, and Firestormx for their willingness give me their opinion of this site.

I hope you enjoy it and don't forget to tell me what you think of it...