Game-Maker

Last updated

Game-Maker
Original author(s) Gregory Andrew Stone
Oliver Stone
George Oliver Stone
Joan Stone
Developer(s) Recreational Software Designs
Initial release1991;33 years ago (1991)
Platform MS-DOS, Windows 3.1x
Type Game creation system

Game-Maker (aka RSD Game-Maker) is an MS-DOS-based suite of game design tools, accompanied by demonstration games, produced between 1991 and 1995 by the Amherst, New Hampshire based Recreational Software Designs and sold through direct mail in the US by KD Software. [1] Game-Maker also was sold under various names by licensed distributors in the UK, Korea, and other territories including Captain GameMaker (Screen Entertainment, UK) and Create Your Own Games With GameMaker! (Microforum, Canada). [2] Game-Maker is notable as one of the first complete game design packages for DOS-based PCs, for its fully mouse-driven graphical interface, and for its early support for VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, and full-screen four-way scrolling. [3]

Contents

Primary distribution for Game-Maker was through advertisements in the back of PC and game magazines such as Computer Gaming World [4] and VideoGames & Computer Entertainment . At release Game-Maker was priced at $89, and shipped on 5.25" diskette with seven or eight demonstration or tutorial games. Later releases were less expensive, and shipped on CD-ROM with dozens of sample games and a large selection of extra tools and resources. [5]

After some consultation with the user base, on 12 July 2014 original coder Andy Stone released the Game-Maker 3.0 source code on GitHub, under the MIT license. [6]

Construction

Game-Maker consists of a text-mode wrapper, tying together a collection of WYSIWYG design tools. The tools produce proprietary resources that are compiled together and parsed with RSD's custom XFERPLAY game engine. The design tools include:

Game-Maker involves no scripting language; all design tools use a mouse-driven 320x200 VGA display, with a shared logic and visual theme. Users draw background tiles pixel by pixel in an enlarged window, and can pull tiles from the palette to arrange in a "sandbox" area. A further menu allows users to set physical properties—solidity, gravity, animation, various counter values—for each block. The user draws maps by pulling blocks from the palette and painting with them using simple paintbrush, line, shape, and fill tools.

Characters can have up to 15 keyboard commands, plus idle, death, and injury animations. They can hold an inventory and money, earn score, gain and lose hit points and lives, and track several counters—often used for keys and similar functions. Monsters have simple animations and movements, and can also change behavior in response to the player.

Playable games can be exported complete with a portable version of the XFERPLAY engine, sound drivers, and configuration files. All games record high scores and (in later versions) attract mode replays. All games also feature instant save and load, and support standard PC joysticks.

In later versions of the software, games also can incorporate several formats including ASCII text data, CompuServe .GIF files, and Autodesk Animator .FLI animations into multimedia presentations during menus and between levels. Although Game-Maker includes no tools for developing these files, the formats are standardized enough to allow the user a choice of standalone utilities. In addition, image data produced with outside programs such as Deluxe Paint is easily imported and split into background tiles or sprites.

Game engine

Through RSD's proprietary XFERPLAY engine, all Game-Maker games run in 256-color full-screen VGA, at an eccentric 312x196 resolution (switching to the more standard 320x200 for menu screens). Game-Maker games are also distinguished by their eccentric 20x20 tile and sprite size (as opposed to the more standard 8x8 or 16x16 dimensions), populating a standard 100x100 tile (2000x2000 pixel) map size. Transition between scenes is achieved through a slow fade to or from black.

All games share a common interface, with a menu screen offering six options: Play, Read Instructions, Read Storyline, See Credits, See Highest Scores, and Quit. Pressing F2 brings up an inventory screen, while F5 and F6 bring up save and load screens. Although most of these menus can be customized with .GIF backgrounds, their basic layout, labeling, and content are constant across all games.

All games track player score and display a high score table upon the game's end (whether through completion or failure). Later versions of Game-Maker allow multimedia sequences between levels, including .GIF images, .FLI animations, and ASCII text files.

The engine allows one player at a time, with the screen automatically scrolling in any of the four cardinal directions when the character comes within 1/3 screen width or height of the screen's edge. All Game-Maker games lack an on-screen display (of hit points, score, lives, etc.), though much of this information can be tracked in the inventory screen.

History

G. Andrew Stone's Block Designer 3.00 RSD Game-Maker 3.0 Block Designer.png
G. Andrew Stone's Block Designer 3.00

Game-Maker developed from a series of modification tools for a top-down competitive maze game called Labyrinth, [7] designed by Andrew Stone in January 1991. Although the engine is different, [8] Labyrinth shared code and file formats with the later XFERPLAY engine and graphical resources with several later first-party games.

Graphically it was 320x200 8-bit (like Game-Maker). It split the screen in half, putting two players' top-down views of the maze side-by-side on the screen. ... Every time someone trod over the grass, it would droop and get a little more brown until after about ten times there was a clearly defined brown path. ... To make all these subtle grass changes, I needed a block editor. So, BLOCEDIT was born. [7]

G. Andrew Stone, "The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker", Gamasutra

Whereas Labyrinth grew out of Andrew's interest in NetHack and Piers Anthony novels, one of Andrew's first goals was to expand his tools and engine to permit side-scrolling action-adventure games. "In fact, making something like Metroid was sort of the bar I set myself for version 1.0. Which is why I added the secret passage features, and gravity, early on." [7]

In July 1991 [9] Andrew and his father G. Oliver Stone incorporated Recreational Software Designs to pursue Game-Maker as a business venture—with Oliver as president and Andrew as CEO. [7] Through Oliver's business acumen RSD made deals with KD Software and GameLynk to distribute Game-Maker and host its online community. [7] Through 1992-1994 RSD placed a series of full-sized ads (and some smaller sizes) in major computer magazines, and in 1994 they sub-leased a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. [7]

At the time of Game-Maker's release the software was revolutionary both in concept and technology; although there were earlier game creation systems, Game-Maker was the first general-purpose graphical GCS for the dominant DOS/Windows-based PC. Throughout the design process Andrew was adamant that Game-Maker's tools remain entirely visual, involving absolutely no programming from the end user. [7] Its engine also supported full-screen four-way VGA scrolling, and later full-screen double buffered redraws, well before these were the standard. [7]

Several updates followed over the next three years, adding Sound Blaster support, improving the design interface, and refining the game engine—yet many features kept being pushed back. Although his brother Oliver Jr. spent a summer on the project, and wrote the code for the sound and Monster editor, Andrew handled the bulk of the coding and updates – a task that, thanks to the lack of standardized drivers or libraries at that time, became all-encompassing and difficult to maintain. [7] Over the software's lifetime Andrew found himself so "waylaid by video driver and [engine] problems" that he was unable to focus as much as he wanted on adding and refining features. [7]

By the mid-1990s the advent of 3D video cards and the introduction of Windows 95 meant that to keep up with the marketplace Game-Maker would need great changes both in concept and in coding. Furthermore, the continued lack of standardization meant a large investment in coding ever more complicated drivers and libraries—work that would be thrown away as soon as standards were established. [7] Despite plans for a radical professional-quality update, RSD ceased support for Game-Maker around 1995.

In a 2011 interview Andrew mused about Game-Maker, stating that by his own principles he was surprised he hadn't released the source code years earlier.

Yeah, you know I should have OSSed a long time ago as I am a proponent of open source. At first there was the possibility that I might jump back into it. And later the fear that whatever startup company I worked for at the time would try to claim it. But upon mature reflection I think that is impossible. [7]

G. Andrew Stone, "The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker", Gamasutra

Later, on 1 July 2014, Andrew posted to the Game-Maker Facebook page, asking for community input on releasing the code. [10] On 12 July he posted the Game-Maker 3.0 source to GitHub, under the MIT license, [6] suggesting that although people were free to use the code how they liked, "if there is interest in preserving the old games you guys made then porting Game-Maker to modern OSes is the first step." [10]

Release history

Game-Maker 3.0, CD-ROM edition RSD Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM disc art.png
Game-Maker 3.0, CD-ROM edition

Game distribution

During Game-Maker's lifetime, users could distribute their games through the Gamelynk (aka Night Owl, later Frontline) BBS in Kennebunkport, Maine or through the Game-Maker Exchange program – an infrequent mailing to registered users, compiling submitted games to a floppy disc with occasional commentary from RSD president G. Oliver Stone. [11] Many user-generated games also wound up on public bulletin boards, and thereby found wide distribution and eventual salvation on shovelware CD-ROMS. [12]

RSD's initial terms of use were rather restrictive. To quote from a pamphlet titled "Distributing Your GAME-MAKER Games" and dated 9 May 1993:

Under your Game-Maker license agreement, you may distribute any game you create to up to ten people and your gameware to any number of people. You may not distribute the Game-Maker design tools, but you may include Game-Maker's gameware (picture blocks, monsters, characters, sounds, etc) along with your games or gameware. Commercial distribution of games is not covered by your license agreement and such distribution requires a commercial distribution license, since games contain valuable software owned by Recreational Software Designs.

The pamphlet goes on to detail standalone games, promotional games, and shareware and BBS distribution. For standalone games (which is to say, games that are meant as an end unto themselves), RSD asks a royalty of $500 for the first 200 games sold or distributed, then a small fee for each subsequent copy. The higher the number, the smaller the fee. For promotional software (distributed as part of a promotional kit), RSD asks $1000 for the first 1000 copies and then smaller fees for every copy up to 25,000. Beyond that, RSD asks no additional charge.

Shareware and BBS distribution is a curious case. Although RSD prohibits free distribution, the license does allow a loophole for shareware so long as the author requests the user to pay a minimum registration or license fee of $5.00, then makes a quarterly payment of 10% of all collected fees. These restrictions were rarely enforced; as a 15 June 1993 pamphlet titled "Distributing Games" suggests, freeware games were common and tolerated despite the license agreement:

To distribute a game via Shareware, simply place a text file statement along with your files letting the user know your terms. You can find example statements in any Shareware product. For Freeware, include a statement that says that you own the product but will allow others to distribute it freely, or even that users can incorporate your work into their games.

Open format

Despite the limitations on distribution, Game-Maker's design format is notoriously open. From its outset Game-Maker was designed as a collaborative tool, with the intent that users not only trade design tips but pick apart and freely sample from each other's work. A series of full-page magazine ads, run in the early 1990s, spends nearly as many words selling Game-Maker as a modification tool, along the lines of Galoob's Game Genie accessory, as it does describing the software's design features, promising that users can "modify and enhance Game-Maker games". [4] "Is a game too easy? Increase the speed. Too boring? Add danger, sounds and monsters. Too plain? Dress up the graphics, add animation. Too short? Add new levels." [4]

This "remix" philosophy stems partly from the Stones' own collaborative family dynamic, [7] and – as with the insistence on an entirely visual, code-free interface – partly from concern about overwhelming the end user. "[W]e realized that it would be pretty hard for a ten to twelve-year-old to do it all himself so there were practical considerations." [7]

To that end Game-Maker games are distributed as an unprotected bundle of resource files, both specialized (i.e., Game-Maker's unique graphic and animation formats) and common (including CompuServe .GIF, Creative .VOC, Autodesk .FLI, and ASCII text files [12] ), making it a simple task to identify and edit most Game-Maker games. The decision was a defiant one on the part of programmer G. Andrew Stone, who argued that any user concerned about protecting, rather than sharing, his work should take on that burden himself.

I deliberately (in fact I remember an argument about it) made no effort to protect a game's content -- anyone could load up anyone else's game in the editors. My feeling was that if you were sophisticated enough to build a game that really needed protection, you could wrap it in your own encrypted .zip file or something. [2]

G. Andrew Stone, "RSD GameMaker", Effluvia of a Scattered Mind

As it happens, one of the earliest games distributed with Game-Maker was GameLynk's Barracuda: Secret Mission 1, a user-derived project that is most distinguished by its presentation whereby its file structure is hidden by LHarc compression and the portable Deluxe Paint Animation player is tacked onto the Game-Maker executable to provide intro and exit animations. [11]

Limitations

Through its history several aspects of Game-Maker's engine, design interface, and feature set have experienced scrutiny from its user base.

One of Game-Maker's more notorious qualities is its exclusive use of Creative's proprietary .VOC and .CMF sound and music formats, [7] and its absence of integrated design tools for those formats (or recommendations as to external tools), leaving users to work out their own solutions – or often not. [13]

The use of .CMF was a last-minute decision; Andy had been working on a .MOD-style tracker format, but development was indefinitely delayed. As a temporary measure his brother Ollie plugged in code provided by Creative Labs. [7]

I got waylaid by video driver and XFERPLAY [game engine] problems. The music was going to be completely dropped, but then my brother pulled this free code up and made it work! [7]

G. Andrew Stone, "The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker", Gamasutra

Other common frustrations include a lack of multi-key mapping for character behaviors, such as pressing Z + a directional arrow to jump in the direction pressed (a problem stemming from a lack of standardized keyboard electrical layouts at that time); the extreme simplicity of monster behaviors [13] (partially due to a desire to eliminate programming from the design tools); a lack of persistent flags for game events [8] [14] (partially due to memory constraints); and the lack of on-screen displays for health, lives, and other counters [14] (due to Andrew's emphasis on full-screen rendering [7] ).

I just felt that the full screen greatly increased the game quality. I guess I just hated staring at the action through a fifteen-inch monitor already when playing video games. I mean, try it in real life. Get a big piece of cardboard, cut a fifteen-inch square in it, and then walk around your house with it held at arm’s length for a day. [7]

G. Andrew Stone, "The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker", Gamasutra
Oliver Stone's Monster Maker 3.00 GM-Monster-Maker.png
Oliver Stone's Monster Maker 3.00

Monsters are a particular point of contention. Compared to characters, monsters have only limited interaction with their environments. For instance, monsters are not affected by gravity or other physics—and have no contextual AI to speak of, aside from a limited awareness of the character. [13] Monsters also lack variable counters, such as hit points. [14] Instead each monster (including NPCs, character shots, and some kinds of power-up) has a fixed "power level" between 0 and 255, and a collision between unequal monsters is resolved by destroying the weaker monster. The engine therefore does not lend itself to graduated damage (i.e., sword 1 does twice the damage as sword 2). Rather, collisions are all binary; either a weapon works, or it doesn't.

Workarounds

For advanced users, many of the engine's limitations have workarounds. One can approximate gravity's effect on a monster by defining a heavy diagonal path; the monster will move horizontally until it reaches a ledge, at which point it will fall until it hits the ground again. Similarly, although monsters lack hit counters, the user can create chains of identical (or successively injured-looking) monsters to approximate the same effect. [15]

In later years users have found ways to subvert or play along with the system's properties to achieve effects, mechanisms, and even genres unaccounted for in the engine's basic features—including extensive in-engine cutscenes, boss sequences, AM2-style sprite scalers, [16] [17] RPG style battles, [17] [18] parallax scrolling, [18] shooting galleries, and destructible terrain. [17] [18] [19]

Influence

As one of the first complete game design suites for IBM-based PCs, and the only one devoted to action games during the early '90s Shareware boom, Game-Maker "anticipated the thriving indie game community we have today with countless game engines, web sites and indie game companies." [2] Several of its users went on to later note in indie or commercial game development, such as renowned Seiklus author cly5m, [20] [21] Slender: The Eight Pages designer Mark Hadley, Liight programmer Roland Ludlam, [22] Warhammer Online background artist Justin Meisse, [23] and Bionic Commando associate producer James W. Morris. [14] [24]

Some games produced with RSD's tools, such as Jeremy LaMar's Blinky series, have become cult favorites. [25] Others, like A-J's Quest, Die Blarney!, and Matt Bell's Paper Airplane, reached a wide circulation during the 1990s Shareware boom, appearing on many CD compilations. Game-Maker seems also to have made an impression in the Benelux, with references in various academic papers, [26] coverage in the largest game magazine in the region, [27] and dissection by the local demoscene. [28]

Notable games

G. Oliver Stone's Pipemare Pipemare.png
G. Oliver Stone's Pipemare

Related Research Articles

<i>Rise of the Triad</i> 1995 first-person shooter video game

Rise of the Triad: Dark War is a first-person shooter video game, developed and published by Apogee Software in 1995. The player can choose one of five different characters to play as, each bearing unique attributes such as height, speed, and endurance. The game's story follows these five characters who have been sent to investigate a deadly cult, and soon become aware of a deadly plot to destroy a nearby city. Its remake was designed by Interceptor Entertainment and released by Apogee Games in 2013. The shareware version of the game is titled Rise of the Triad: The HUNT Begins.

Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.

<i>Wolfenstein 3D</i> 1992 video game

Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen. Originally released on May 5, 1992, for DOS, it was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game Castle Wolfenstein, and is the third installment in the Wolfenstein series. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player assumes the role of Allied spy William "B.J." Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein and carries out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis. The player traverses each of the game's levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with a knife and a variety of guns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SCUMM</span> Game engine developed by LucasArts

Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) is a video game engine developed at Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, to ease development on their graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987). It was subsequently used as the engine for later LucasArts adventure games and Humongous Entertainment games.

A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs such as a level editor. The "engine" terminology is akin to the term "software engine" used more widely in the software industry.

<i>Catacomb 3-D</i> 1991 video game

Catacomb 3-D is a first-person shooter video game, the third in the Catacomb series, the first of which to feature 3D computer graphics. It was developed by id Software and originally published by Softdisk under the Gamer's Edge label, released in November 1991. The player takes control of the high wizard Petton Everhail, descending into the catacombs of the Towne Cemetery to defeat the evil lich Nemesis and rescue his friend Grelminar.

<i>ZZT</i> 1991 video game

ZZT is a 1991 action-adventure puzzle video game and game creation system developed and published by Potomac Computer Systems for MS-DOS. It was later released as freeware in 1997. It is an early game allowing user-generated content using object-oriented programming. Players control a smiley face to battle various creatures and solve puzzles in different grid-based boards in a chosen world. It has four worlds where players explore different boards and interact with objects such as ammo, bombs, and scrolls to reach the end of the game. It includes an in-game editor, allowing players to develop worlds using the game's scripting language, ZZT-OOP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Silverman</span> American game programmer (born 1975)

Ken Silverman is an American game programmer, best known for writing the Build engine. It was most notably utilized by Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood, and more than a dozen other games in the mid- to late-1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3D Movie Maker</span> Movie making program by Microsoft

3D Movie Maker is a children's computer program developed by Microsoft Home's Microsoft Kids subsidiary released in 1995. Using the program, users can make films by placing 3D characters and props into pre-rendered environments, as well as adding actions, sound effects, music, text, speech and special effects. Movies are then saved in the .3mm file format.

<i>Abuse</i> (video game) 1996 video game

Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997. The game's source code, along with some of the shareware content, has been in the public domain since the late 1990s and has been ported to Linux and many other platforms.

<i>Kroz</i> 1987 video game

Kroz is a series of Roguelike video games created by Scott Miller for IBM PC compatibles. The first episode in the series, Kingdom of Kroz, was released in 1987 as Apogee Software's first game. It was also published on Big Blue Disk #20. Kroz introduced the scheme of the first episode being free and charging money for additional episodes; a technique which defined the business model for Apogee and was adopted by other MS-DOS shareware publishers.

Doom, a first-person shooter game by id Software, was released in December 1993 and is considered one of the most significant and influential video games in history. Development began in November 1992, with programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. Late in development, Hall was replaced by Sandy Petersen and programmer Dave Taylor joined. The music and sound effects were created by Bobby Prince.

Wintermute Engine (WME) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games.

SpeedTree is a group of vegetation programming and modeling software products developed and sold by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (IDV) that generates virtual foliage for animations, architecture and in real time for video games and demanding real time simulations.

RPG Maker, known in Japan as RPG Tsukūru, is a series of programs for the development of role-playing video games (RPGs) with story-driven elements, created by the Japanese group ASCII, succeeded by Enterbrain. The Japanese name, Tsukūru, is a pun mixing the Japanese word tsukuru (作る), means "make" or "create", with tsūru (ツール), the Japanese transliteration of the English word "tool".

<i>Amulets & Armor</i> 1997 video game

Amulets & Armor is a first-person role-playing video game for IBM PC compatibles created by David Webster and Eric Webster and United Software Artists and published as shareware in 1997. In 2013 the game was re-released as Freeware and open-source software.

Pie in the Sky is a 2.5D and 3D first-person shooter engine most popular in the mid-to-late 1990s by Pie in the Sky Software, also known as Power 3D and the 3D Game Creation or 3D Game Creation System engine. The engine was used in two games by the company as well as many other independent games and amateur projects after it was turned into a commercial game creator, largely because it minimized the amount of computer programming knowledge needed to make 3D games in its editing tools, making it suitable even for beginners with no game-design experience.

A game creation system (GCS) is a consumer-targeted game engine and a set of specialized design tools, and sometimes also a light scripting language, engineered for the rapid iteration of user-derived video games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stencyl</span> Video game development software

Stencyl is a video game development tool that allows users to create 2D video games for computers, mobile devices, and the web. The software is available for free, with select publishing options available for purchase. The software was originally called "StencylWorks" while in development and for the initial release but was later shortened to just "Stencyl".

References

  1. "Game-Maker". The Personal Computer Museum. Archived from the original on 26 April 2012. Retrieved 9 May 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 G. Andrew Stone, "RSD GameMaker"
  3. DIYGamer, "The Original Game-Maker" Archived 1 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  4. 1 2 3 Computer Gaming World, "Issue #114 (January 1994), page #209"
  5. DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive – Part 14: Laser Light" Archived 20 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  6. 1 2 G. Andrew Stone, "Recreational Software Design's GameMaker product, released in 1994"
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Gamasutra, "The Making and Unmaking of a Game-Maker Maker"
  8. 1 2 Gamasutra, "Bonus Time with Andy Stone"
  9. New Hampshire Department of State, Corporation Filings
  10. 1 2 G. Andrew Stone, "Facebook Game-Maker page, July 1st 2014."
  11. 1 2 3 DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive – Part 11: Mark A. Janelle" Archived 22 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  12. 1 2 DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive – Part 13: The World Wide Haystack" Archived 28 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  13. 1 2 3 Sylvain Martin, "My RSD Game-Maker years"
  14. 1 2 3 4 Gamasutra, "James W. Morris: Learning to Game, Gaming to Learn"
  15. DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive: Mike Perrucci" Archived 22 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  16. Mike Perrucci, "Invasion of the Blobs II."
  17. 1 2 3 Alan Caudel, "New Dummy 7 Game!" Archived 1 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Gamasutra, "The Game-Maker Story: Infoboxes"
  19. A-J Games, "Builder: Build footholds. Destroy obstacles. Be observant."
  20. autofish.net, "RSD Game-Maker"
  21. insert credit, "From Shooter to Shooter: The Rise of cly5m" Archived 19 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  22. Gamasutra, "Roland Ludlam on Liight and the Hurdles of Game-Making"
  23. MobyGames, "Justin Meisse"
  24. MobyGames, "James Morris"
  25. 1 2 3 DIYGamer, "Jeremy LaMar: Doodles, Dawdles, and the Creative Cycle" Archived 22 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  26. Mike Wiering, "Clean Game Library"
  27. "Game-Maker review". Power Unlimited, March 1994
  28. Bilou HomeBrew's Blog, "vgmaps tool for RDS Game-Maker"
  29. MobyGames, "A-J's Quest (DOS)"
  30. MobyGames, "Barracuda: Secret Mission 1 (DOS)"
  31. MobyGames, "Blinky 2 (DOS)"
  32. 1 2 3 DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive: Samples and Demos" Archived 22 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  33. DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive: Mark Hadley" Archived 25 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  34. MobyGames, "Parsec Man 3D (DOS)"
  35. DIYGamer, "The Game-Maker Archive: Matt Bell" Archived 22 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  36. MobyGames, "Paper Airplane (DOS)"
  37. MobyGames, "Peach the Lobster (DOS)"
  38. Gamasutra, "Inside the Mind of Gary Acord"