There are other things that may seem confusing or limiting at first, mostly assumptions and decisions on the side of the engine’s authors: for example various background and character objects can be distributed in four layers – which should be enough for most games but somebody will want to have 5 layers for whatever reason; another example is IG Maker’s pre-set screen resolutions: although they do cover most of what one could need, maybe you’ll want a resolution that is just a bit different. Regarding what school of thought you’re coming from, IG Maker’s variety and combination of premade decisions can be regarded as, among other things, a stroke of genius or an unacceptable imposing on the workflow and decision making. It’s probably a bit of both – but if you happen to feel at home in the framework set up by IG Maker’s authors this “flaw” will probably be seen as an advantage.
IG Maker is pretty consistent in cutting out everything that’s not really essential for making games: for example unlike some other (primarily game making) visual programming tools that include some basic tools for editing graphics, animations and similar, IG Maker does away with all these distractions / editors and expects all the assets to be prepared for publishing. Aquaria or Braid-type tiles (rotated, flipped parts of a picture that are combined in the editor) are of course out of the question altogether.
In most cases though these assumptions and premade decisions do work very well in the context of this type of games: the way IG Maker treats environment / gadgets is very articulate and useful, and the whole tiles-based environment is easy to understand and control within a game.
Quirks
There are even a few bugs in IG Maker - note the black rectangle over the graphic
In addition to some design decisions being debatable, IG Maker also has a few that are plain annoying and downright irritating. One of them is the inability to have a few projects opened at the same time, which makes studying example games very impractical. It is understandable that the authors maybe wanted to avoid having another line of tabs on the top of the screen, but couldn’t have this been solved by allowing two copies of IG Maker running in parallel (you can’t have two IG Makers open at the same time currently)? Another random one is that it resets all components of the interface layout every time a new project is loaded – and while I understand why this is necessary it’s still annoying.
Probably the most jarring of all is Enterbrain’s attitude though, one really wonders what were they thinking in first renaming the product from Action Maker to “Indie Game Maker” (probably because they embarrassingly let somebody else snap up the domain from under their nose), then unlovingly dumping it on Download.com … into an archive of 1gb (which they later split thankfully, and are currently also offering the download from their site). Add to this their half-dead English site and their super slow download speed and there are lots of reasons to be irritated with the support. Of course, reporting bugs and any form of customer support simply doesn’t exist.
Conclusion (so far)
IG Maker makes it very easy to actually make a classic 2d game and its visual interface is extremely flexible when it comes to dealing with basics like putting text, characters and backgrounds on screen, collision detection and other “engine-ish” ingredients of most games. What it offers out of the box is flexible enough that most action-oriented 2d games can be made with ease.
But if you want to do it through typing, or happen to have ideas about organizing the game in a way that is different from what IG Maker offers, it’s maybe best to try some other engines out there.
Comments, suggestions and discussion here.
Next:
About exporters (Flash) and DirectX9.0c dependancy
About the ludicrous “wav only policy”;
The way that the event system works, while elegant and understandable, will call for inelegant workarounds for some very simple branching conditions;
Practical problems for collaborations.
Requires DirectX9.0c
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