“We’re not saying it’s necessarily going to be perfect first time round. So we needed a machine translation solution to that and the technology is good enough now. Pieces are added, pieces are taken away, pieces are changed.
We need to have some exception rules and we’ve had to do some work on it, as you might imagine, but we’ve got half a million words on the manual and it changes every single release. We’ve found that with the new deep learning in Google Translate, we can basically automatically translate the manual. “It’s something we’ve wanted to do for quite a while. “We’re adding three languages,” Cox says. That’s a really cool thing for a lot of aspiring independent developers or students.”īeyond that, the studio released a Creator Edition for developers on a budget and has just announced fully localised versions of the engine in German, Spanish and French. You do not need to be an fully registered Xbox developer, anyone can register for the Xbox Live Creators program and you can start bringing your game across to Xbox. You can build a UWP game and launch on Xbox. I still think there are a lot of developers who don’t realise this. “UWP is a big thing in the applications world but maybe less big in the games world. “That’s very cool, because it opens the door to any developer to come onto a console,” Cox says. After that, the studio partnered with Microsoft to allow the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version of GameMaker Studio 2 to work with the Xbox Live Creator’s Programme. YoYo Games also brought in special pricing for educational use, re-released Studio 1 as part of a Humble Bundle and partnered with Amazon on a Kindle Fire export option alongside bolstering its mobile features. We now have a steady stream of Mac users as well as Windows users.”
Then we had our first major update in July time, and that was when GameMaker Studio 2 came to Mac as well. We saw new people coming across from GameMaker Studio 1, which was great.
The software was popular, the uptake was very good. “We released last March, just after GDC, and we had a very good launch.
It was a proper new product, a proper new release. “There’s three years worth of development that led up to the release of GameMaker Studio 2, so that underpins it all,” says James Cox, general manager of YoYo Games. Years of development work for YoYo Games is paying off and the company has big plans as it continues down the path now clearly laid out before it. The engine has seen great success and has been updated continuously since GDC 2017, snowballing its popularity among established game developers, hobbyists and students. It’s been a year since the launch of GameMaker Studio 2 and over that time the developers at YoYo Games haven’t slowed down for a second.