Sandy Duncan Interviewed On Microsoft Development Radio

In a video released by Microsoft Development Radio, CEO Sandy Duncan of YoYo Games has spoken of the potential that GameMaker holds for Windows developers as well as outlining several large developments users can look forward to.

You can watch the video below.

According to the CEO, the company’s flagship product GameMaker Studio is designed for developers who wish to make money from their games. As such, he explained that GameMaker has been designed to ‘get games distributed and money made easily’. Duncan said the reasoning behind GameMaker’s general limitation to 2D-only games was so that developers wouldn’t have to worry about the technical side of games, unless they wished to do so.

Describing the software as “a release for creativity”, he went on to explain that although many other 2D engines with “drag and drop” interfaces existed, GameMaker outperforms them with its powerful scripting language and versatile platform support. GameMaker is so efficient that Duncan estimated it takes a third of the time to develop a game when compared to using competing software Unity.

GameMaker Studio supports the following Windows platforms: Legacy (i.e. Vista, 7 etc), Windows 8, Windows RT (designed for mobile), Windows Phone 8, and JavaScript/HTML5. A single project will work on all platforms without modification, and according to the interviewer developers can tap into exclusive Windows 8 features such as live tiles and score sharing with less work when compared to using Visual Studio.

Although the interview focused on Microsoft’s Windows platform in particular, GameMaker also supports Mac OS X, HTML5, iOS, Android, Ubuntu , Windows Phone 8, and Tizen

When queried about the release of the next beta, Duncan was careful not to expose a set date, but mentioned that something will come out later in the year, possibly around August. A definite feature will be unified shader support; developers will be able to write one shader that will work on all types of hardware. Other definite features include increased performance for CPU instruction processing, giving developers a performance increase in CPU intensive areas such as AI, and an overall richer GameMaker experience.

Notably, Duncan said that there is a good possibility that there will be a better implementation of vector graphics, including importing graphics from Flash files later on.

Following this interview, an additional interview with CTO Russell Kay was posted.