The Game-Maker Archive – Part 10: The Integrator
by [name redacted]
One thing that Game-Maker serves to underline is the sheer talent that goes into game design. Especially by 1995 standards, Game-Maker makes it simple to whip up some graphics and sound resources, click a few flags, slap them together, and call it a game. Depending on your tools and the time you invest, you can get your game looking rather snazzy. Depending on the thoroughness with which you read the manual and study the program’s quirks, you can pull some clever tricks with Game-Maker’s engine. Yet a videogame is more than a bunch of sprites and levels and samples.
As Game-Maker’s own structure suggests, to a large extent a game’s content is just window dressing for the main executable to call up and sell itself to its audience. Unless there’s something more fundamental to justify and connect that information, it’s all just data. Facts. It doesn’t have a perspective; it make an argument. It doesn’t communicate a coherent idea.