So I bought GM Studio because YYG was offering it to GM7/8 users for around $10, and I've gotta say I'm quite happy with it. Thought I'd be more upset about all the deprecated functions and features, but good riddance to those horrible grey message boxes, and honestly most of the removals make quite a lot of sense. Granted, I've only been using it for a few days, so maybe there are some awful frustrations I haven't discovered yet, but in many ways I'm very glad I upgraded.

Converting Diver was pretty quick and easy, and would have been more so if I hadn't been using triggers, which, as a feature, were always something that sounded really cool in theory and that I really tried to use as many of as I could, but they did kind of make code more spread out than it really needed to be. I don't miss them too much.

I also had an extension with a custom action library and some functions that I had to get rid of to get the game to work on the Steam version of GMS⁰, but that wasn't much work, and honestly making my own d&d action library was kind of an exercise in using GM's obscure features just because I could (much like triggers)¹.

There was a place in the level editor where I was using execute_string() (an undo function – I had a ds_stack that I'd alternately put "instance_destroy(thing)" and "instance_create(x,y,thing) in"), so I had to extend that script from two lines to about twenty (all the while bemoaning GM's lacklustre string manipulation²). I was a little proud of the simplicity of the original execution, but execute_string is a bit of hack and I can't say I miss it too much.

I downloaded the entirety of Chiptunes.org and I'll probably choose something from there for the game's music, because pretending to be cly5m is one of my favourite hobbies chiptunes are rad. Probably convert the files to OGG instead of mucking around with whatever GMS's version of Bassmod/JBFmod is.

I don't like how the splash image seems to be constrained to a specific size – so many older GM games did wonderfully inventive things with different sized splashes, and it's bizarre that they'd prevent that. Of course, now that you can turn off the splash image… man, that just seems like cheating. I dunno, the splash image is just such a GM thing, it seems wrong not to have your game start with one. How else will people know to press F4 for fullscreen?³ =P

The achievements are fun. I can't wait to get 1k compiler errors. The games in the Steam Workshop on the other hand… man, it's like I'm on YYG but without the spotlight and popularity features.

Dunno if I'll get Professional or any of the modules, it all really depends on how many lotteries I win, but it's nice to have a version of the program that's actively being worked on and updated again.

0 – Well, actually I only needed to do that so I'd have the option of putting my game on the Steam Workshop, which doesn't allow extensions for security reasons. And I'm not even sure I'll actually end up doing that.

1 – I haven't used D&D in years because of some idea about code elitism or whatever, but honestly sometimes it's just quicker to grab an action like "Call inherited event" than to write the same function at the top of half of my code actions, and I really don't need to prove to myself that I'm a l33t haxxor who's grown beyond drag and drop anymore.

2 – Have GM's strings always started at index 1? Because it really grosses me out.

3 – But, of course, those default keys were also removed, along with the default save system (how will I save scum on noob games?).