EDIT: removed post, its irrelevant

Well this is yet another can of worms.

As already stated above in various ways - advertise what CAN be done with this engine.

The 2D game dev tool called Construct 2 showcases what others have made with it on the main web page. This tool like Game Guru is coded by one man, and also has a very good community behind it. (mod: please edit if the link is not acceptable)

So why not showcase what the talented in the wip forums are doing with Game- Guru.

And perhaps the wisest thing any of us have said


LOL - so yeah just make it better.

Reliquia....

HOW? Did you sacrify a goat and the devil himself helped you out?



This. Asking the new owners of a house if they want shiny curtains or wood furniture next while the roof is missing and the plumbing leaks in every room is quite useless.
Especially the AI is extremely important regarding those first impression reviews. When users click something together hasty and it looks like crap, they might overlook that when their self-placed enemies are giving them a run for the money, chasing them around, acting like at least halfway smart human beings - and not like victims of lobotomy or automated gun turrets. Make them smart, not tough, and the impression is good.



As some of you know, 10 years ago I was in charge as Head of Community Management (leading 50 admins and mods holding the line against the fans, trolls and haters in 7 languages) on one of the biggest AAA releases in the European games industry - and it was a bug-infested desaster. The brass wanted to solve the problem with PR damage control, bribing / sweet-talking journalists, rewording of promises e.t.c. - and then moving on. Honestly, that would have been suicide. Instead, we did all we could to get the problems with the game itself fixed, while communicating those existing problems publically and without any sweet-talk. I was so open about the flaws that the CEO sometimes accused me of damaging the company - and excused himself for that when he saw the effect.

In such a situation you have one chance to get things right: Throw all ressources on fixing the product, and communicate those extreme efforts as open and frequently as possible. Every fixed major issue is worth a news, every IQ point the AI visibly gets is a reason for a video showing that.
Stop all other projects (except support for existing long-sellers), don't, I repeat, DON'T try to cash in with a new one. If necessary, go to the banks, extend credit lines, beg for a new loan, sell your house (I did that once), sell one kidney (didn't do that) and get all ressources you can possibly afford then fixing your product. You are on Steam now, releasing a new product with your previous Steam release being an unfinished construction site is suicide, in that case you can fill the benkruptcy papers right with the Steamworks content pages to save time.

Yes, you need good PR work, and perhaps some marketing re-phrasing, but all of that must be based on the message "We are fixing this product, we are making it great, we will show you every single week how well we are doing that!"

If you do, you will have surprisingly good sales figures along the way, and you will earn a huge additional boost once you have tackled all major issues, because then it's time to rename / rebrand to "GameGuru Gold Edition" or "GameGuru Enhanced" or whatever and shoot the press and wannebe-game-makers again.

The company i worked for ten years ago made MILLIONS with the constantly updated versions and subsequent GOLD Editions e.t.c.

A more recent example:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/237550/

When they released it against my very rough and unfriendly advice, it was a total mess. Full of bugs and non-existent features, it was some weeks long the worst-reviewed game on steam (6% positive( and sales stopped dwindling after some hundred copies.

What did they do?
They fixed it. No, HE fixed it, because at this time it was the coder alone left in the boat, he got the community involved and went into battle. More than a year of patches and communicating each single move, it is now at 52% positive and 90.000 Steam owners. It turned out well enough that the company holding the rights ordered the sequel to be made:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/288860/

This time Early Access, and again, every single move and effort clearly communicated.

And this combination of dedication and communication is the only way you can get the reviews up and the cashflow going in the end.

Aaah, Realms of Arkania, the one and only game i've ever requested a refund for, and at the time i had bought quite a lot of trash. Might buy it again and see what it's like now you say they've reworked it.

They have reworked it beyond anything I would have imagined.

And it's the only game i have ever sent my lawyer to get my name removed from the credits

I will make a short(ish) comment if I may.

There are a lot of posts with valuable and often different opinions which was inevitable and many respected points of view, too many to review.

The whole thing is a bit of a mess with GG bouncing along in the doldrums for far too long .

Easiest for me to say that the Ertlov post above about sums things up in general......

(not about what video to post to fix PR, but about what to do to fix GG)

I repeat my opinion. GG's has two main weaknesses.

1. Not enough performance.
2. Not enough control of the engine.

I don't know if / to what extend 1 can be fixed. There may be some fundamental weakness in the engine. And yes, many other engines have much better performance on weaker machines (I can give examples if needed).

About 2 I see two ways to go: either (a) make the source code publicly available or (b) make the entire Lua interface available to the user. I do not know the financial implications of (a). I believe (b) should be VERY EASY to do. In either case I expect the end result would be to effectively recruit a large number of volunteers ("advanced users"?) who will implement many of the features now on the voting board (and much more, I am sure). TGC could retain some copyright of the end results (e.g. retain the right to incorporate users' scripts in subsequent editions of GG).

A while ago the proposal was floated (by Lee?) to port GG on top of Unity. I was skeptical back then but now I think this may be an excellent solution to both 1 and 2. Yes, Unity has better performance than GG. If TGC could port the GG user interface and assets and retain Lua scripting (much extended, to give full access to internal variables), all of these being part of a Unity application, FPS and stability would get a lot better and, again, the problem of not enough features would be solved by the community. In this solution the main problem is time (i.e., how long would it take to implement the conversion).

As it stands today, the real & true representation is as many have already said use the WIP's that the community are working on I also have to agree on a 'Demo' version of Gameguru either time bombed or usage bombed I don't think it would be a good idea to do a 'restrictive in use' demo people need to see it in its full glory as it stands now there are prime features already missing like the save as standalone not being able to change menu screens setting quality levels or screen resolutions.

There are some very talented people on this Forum who have created some very useful tools that should be a part of the finished product like Bored Of The Rings with his Autowelder and Preben with his GGLoader why not have and 'Export to' menu option and include Preben's GGLoader so that games could be exported to IOS, HTML5 any mobile device, Autowelder is fast becoming EBE why not work with BOTR and implement it as a feature.

LOL I may be talking out of my Butt but I just wanted to express my thoughts

Here's a few ideas to think about.

Show GG's strengths where you can. Show some screenshots or videos of ALL the default media included for the purchase price. I can't think of any other game maker out there I have used that included so much as standard.

A video showing some of the WIP's out there in action, to show what GG can produce when time and effort is put in. There are some really nice looking games being worked on there.

I know you wanted to push GG as the easy game creator, but I have always felt this will only hinder progress. A lot of the criticism thrown at GG is based on peoples expectations of it being easy to use. When they find they can't just throw down a load of items and have a great game in minutes, they spit their dummy and give a bad review. Now, us here know that easy doesn't actually mean easy, just easier, but most people who see GG on Steam for the first time and have no background of games making in anything else, have a whole different expectation. So a little more honesty in this regard would be probably a good idea.

Having an interest in making games since the ZX Spectrum, actually no, the Atari 2600 (the Spectrum was just the first time I could actually do anything other than imagine), I've seen many Easy Game Makers over the years. I haven't seen one which could produce a game comparable to the commercial games around at the time, apart from some of the adventure making software for the 8-bits. Probably because they actually were used to produce a lot of commercial games themselves. There was always some cost to having a good portion of the game mechanics done for you, in a general purpose way, so as to work with all game types. I'm used to it really. This didn't stop me being disappointed at the time of course, so I can understand peoples reactions when the grand idea they have envisioned turns out to be nothing like they expected in reality.

Perhaps an "Easy to use, hard to master" slogan or similar would be more fitting and honest. Although now you are down the rabbit hole so to speak, might be hard to go back on that now without more complaints. As said above, if the basic performance was better and AI worked in a believable fashion, most of these complaints would vanish.

I'm just going to bow out - Rolfy and Ertlov put the points down far more succinctly than I could. Ertlov, in particular, has experience to boot in this respect. I will only convey my own experience now as one final footnote that hopefully Lee reads before burning his computer in a torrent of gasoline and hate.

I once wrote and lead the process for a 4 billion dollar company (a utilities company that does internet) in the US here specifically pertaining to 'online interactions with customers on forums and social media'. I created a small team that followed my own experiences when I'd worked at Earthlink Internet Inc that I modeled the processes after. This was because we had a terrible reputation online and it was felt we could help curb negative press. For approximately three months, this went exceptionally well. My first rule:

"Always be right. Never lie on the internet. If you don't know the answer, don't reply."

This is because everything is stored in perpetuity and WILL be used against you.

There came a situation with a specific customer who encountered an issue the company was ... doing. It wasn't good and I had to send my response up to the VP's. They sent it to legal. Legal himmed and hawwed on it. I was told NOT to answer the question with a real answer. To just bluster and let it go and give half answers. At this point though, I was committed to the customer - which was my second rule. And they refused resolution because they knew to do it would be to admit fault. So instead:

They kicked me, then subsequently my team, off the project.
They declared the project a success.
They then hired several completely unqualified people for far less money to do it.
I was blackballed in the company and returned to a previous position.

The company ended up in court over it and settled several months later.

Bottom line - my experience is similar to Ertlov - only mine was the opposite. I recommend following his advice to the letter.

Goood morning!

It looks like you are reading my post instead of Ertlovs post. Click here to fix that.



-Wolf

In my opinion, it's still too difficult to make a completed game with GG.

Back in the day, FSPC could make some great interior games, very easily. (with effort, but not too much if you tried), GG seems to have lost some of the ease of use, possibly by trying to be something for everyone.

If we could make interior games, give any AI any weapon (as it used to be), add some AI improvements (Stair climbing for example), we'd be a lot closer to a decent product.

It's true that an x11 renderer will improve the look, but what the product really needs is the ability to make a playable, non-zombie fest shooter. (Nothing wrong with zombies though).

As for advertising, I think if is was made clear that this is IDEAL for FPS games and that other features will be added once that area has been finished, GG could turn around.

Just my thoughts.

SC

Agreed, I really wanted to make a game but have put it off (again and again), there's not much point when basic mechanics just isn't there. I have faffed around with this engine for too long. I'm looking at just programming one from scratch in c+ or AGK to be honest.

@ BOTR


Let me know when you're done because i will buy it.

As was said previously in this thread the only way to quell the negative reviews is to fix the problems
and be forthcoming publicly. Here is the main problem with the overall look for first time users
that prompts them to write bad reviews.

Real time lighting is not correctly lighting objects and first time users do not know how to change
the settings to get good baked lightmaps. Since realtime lighting is what they see it demonstrates a
really obvious bug.

A picture is worth a thousand words look at the pics attached.

I hope nobody takes offence at any of the following criticism, a lot of it has been said before anyway but I'll list the top three things which I think are affecting new users who leave the negative reviews. I think we all know what they are anyway. A new user gets GameGuru, puts together a map to test it, and is immediately hit by three big disappointments one after another...

1.
The number one thing stopping me, and probably a lot of us from making anything approaching a playable game is the AI, and its limitations on heights, indoors, stairs etc. We have waited for decent AI for ages while the EBE has been a higher priority. The EBE seems utterly pointless if it's released the AI can't go in the buildings or up and down the steps you build.... But that's the voting board, which is another can of worms.

A lot of the assets look very dated, and many textures don't stand up to scrutiny very well. Scale is all over the place. This just gives users more work to do, and makes maps that new users put together look rubbish and thrown together.

3.
Performance (FPS) is poor. Taking into account the dated looking assets and small size maps, FPS rates are very disappointing indeed.

Put these things together and you'll always get bad steam reviews, many of which are justified, and many of which are with half an hour using the software.

The fact that you can, apparently, throw together a FPS level in five minutes is a double edged sword. Because that is exactly what some negative reviewers have obviously done.

They shouldn't need to feel like they have to "delve in" to scripting or optimisation in their first hour, after all they have bought an "Easy Game Creator", and the price they paid and the vast amount of assets doesn't matter to them if the first level they make runs at 12 FPS and the enemy just stand there or run on the spot. They are frustrated and annoyed already.

So how to counter negative Steam reviews?
I don't think you can unless you fix the store description to reflect that GameGuru is very much work in progress and should really be regarded as early access, with a lot of limitations.

On a positive note I think there is a trick or two that TGC have missed, GameGuru is a pretty good educational tool from which aspiring game makers can learn an awful lot about the principles of optimising, level design, lighting and Lua scripting.
It's a fun "sandbox" for testing out scenes and scenarios, or scripts. [b]

After more than 500 steam hours plus probably more running it from the .exe I have not been able to make anything approaching a playable game due to the limitations, but I have learned a lot, and some transferable skills.

I'm in my late 50s. I don't think I will see GameGuru finished in my lifetime. Which is a shame.
Young reviewers are impatient and won't wait for features. Old people like me don't have the time left to wait

The only thing I can suggest is to take GG back to Early Access, show videos and images only of the editor and levels designed in GameGuru using the assets comes with GameGuru. Do not show any gameplay and levels designed by the community using custom assets and in the description try NOT to convince anyone it is a complete product for making a complete game.
Also make a demo version available with limited number of assets and no export option included so people can play around with it before buy.
An then, maybe you can avoid more negative feedbacks.


Because the features are incomplete and unpolished. As I have mentioned many times before, there is NO feature in GameGuru that can be considered as complete and polished but that's ok just try not to sell it as a complete product for making a complete game.
Call it Alpha, Beta, Early Access, be honest in the description and things should be better with the reviews on Steam.

Good luck.

I know this is going a little off topic but a couple of people have mentioned performance, now I agree that performance isn't what it could be, but I've just played a demo from another player with a huge map containing hundreds of entities and hes done an amazing job optimizing it, I was getting on average 150 fps, with drops to at the most 90fps, and spikes up to 230 fps. So while I agree performance could be better, I've also got to say its not as bad as people are saying it is, you just have to know what you're doing to optimize your levels.

In my opinion, if GG truly trying to be "The Easy Game Maker" I would expect common optimization techniques done out of the box so people need to set only if they want Low, Medium, High or Ultra settings. Of course advanced features and customization is always welcome so advanced users can go and change staff if necessary but in most cases it should be not necessary to make a playable game with "The Easy Game Maker"

But really, since I have upgraded my GPU personally I don't really have performance problems but now GG runs my GPU really hot even if I set everything to Low. I'm just running GTA V and Subnautica and many others at High settings with no such problem so it is really not my config to blame this time....

@AceRimmer

Good lord... people keep telling me 60 the new 40. but yes we will not see GameGuru finished because all this stress may kill Lee first

I wasn't going to say anything, the audience here is far superior to anything I may have to say, I am your market place, just a end user that enjoys making games, not AAA or AA or any rating system type. Just games. Please if you can do as Teabone suggests, you will have the market share your heart desires.

At my age 70ish, I have the proven knowledge of how hard it is to focus on one and only one project, I believe it is in our DNA, to flit around, work on this and that and nothing ever gets completed.

TheGameCreators are genius, you build amazing programs that spark excitement and wonder. The on going issue is that you have never to my knowledge actually Finished One. FPSC is the closest, but it fell by the way side when the AGK and others came to life.

I am not pointing fingers. I have the very same problem, and it almost killed me with I had to spend 3 months working on just one project to get it finished so I could get paid. You have the best creation you have ever made here with GameGuru, get the core finished, then and only then add the bling. In fact you have people here that have been with TheGameCreators since you started. Finish the core add hooks and let us add the bling.

The core:
the list::
Some ideas that are sound from

hey guys...
I might not be the brightest start in the sky...
but...IF I was to speak to a new person or on interested in Game guru for the first time
I'd probably says something like this to them....

The results with GAME GURU
are a direct reflection of the imagination and abilities of the individual to understand and use some basic concepts to build a simple game...at first.........the amount of added stuff that comes for free with it,,,that you can actually USE and release a game with,,,in the end,.,,,is enormous.
For example...try getting a CHARACTER in to UNREAL and programming it to work in a game ........ it comes with NONE that you can release a game with,,,you have to get your own in to it,,.
I have MANY of the other game engines in here and more,,,LEADWERKS...UNREAL,,,,,,,CRYENGINE.......GODOT.....GAME STUDIO,,,and more,,,,and none allow me to do what GAME GURU can do OVERALL and with SUCH ...EASE.......IT still takes some effort and learning,,,all worthy things do,,,so be fair,,,,give it a try......IF you put the same effort into a relationship,,as MOST do ,the first little time in GAME GURU...your'e gonna be a HAPPILY DIVORCED MAN.......OFTEN.....go for it give it a try have funGAME GURU that is NOT DIVORCE

UNIRD12B

I thought it was just me, lol! Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone!

Belidos you have a 960 graphics card lol of course your FPS will do well

I also just got one myself, will be installing soon. Been using a 700 series with 8GB of RAM for quite sometime and its helped me understand what the average user experience would be like with any game created in GG.

@Lee

i think you of all people knows best what to do, yes a lot of us here give advice and some is good and some not so good.
Take what you need out of it all and then make your decision.

from my side: , Maybe instead of having a voting board, we can have a : suggesting board.. were every one can say what would be nice for them to have, and maybe have their name next to it, then you can see if it is just a fly by night person or someone that is here on a regular basics , but the suggesting board must not determent the order of the work that you want to do. you then can decide. yes some things is more important than other, but by now you know what it is.

We have some awesome talented people here each with different skills. i for one is not one of them.
just a suggestion, maybe a board were who ever wants to contribute, can put there skills on the board and with what skills they can contribute, Out of that you can then decide if you want to use some of the users to help you to make GG better and to take some of the load off from yourself. If in the future things go well with GG these users can then be Compensated in what ever means necessary.

Again i am also just one more person who try to help or to say what would work, Take what you need out of all of this.

Thanks

@Teabone

Sorry I forgot to mention, its true i get high fps because of my card, but in similar sized levels that aren't optimized as well im not getting anyway near that, still decent but not even half of that at most. I still stand by my statement that its not as bad as people think if you know how to optimize your levels, I'm not denying its not as good as it could be, just not as bad as some are saying. I definitely think gg needs some auto optimization features to help those with less knowledge get better performance out of the box so it doesn't look as bad for first time users.

Teabone - it's not the card so much as the CPU because of the DX9 pipelining. I have a 960 GTX and I get a miserable 30-50fps on high with reshade.

Also - the trees themselves aren't the issue. It's the collision boxes that are. Disabling them as objects which are used for AI detection helps a lot, I hear.

Firts all trees should be collisionOff, and just when player is nearest, so becames collisionOn, working distance base only.
GG just caring about the items into the scene, might help a lot with perfomance.
Just my thoughts.

3com

Personally I have rather spiffy machine specs (AMD Nano, skylake i5) and easily hit 400+ FPS in many games, usually GG flies but earlier today I made a simple Lua error with VSynch off and dropped to 12 FPS! It's not all about models, shaders and physics, a simple script error can kill performance.

I have re-written all the AI scripts on my development rig with performance in mind and even before Lee's latest fix was getting 40-50 FPS on MMS, with his latest fix I'm getting over 100 FPS on MMS.

Some of the improvements I made were to extract all the duplicated bits out into standalone subroutines, replace globals with locals wherever possible, eradicated repeated calls to the same function, made AI logic parts execute at a set rate of ten times a second instead of every frame (for example the path following logic, if every soldier is checking every frame to see if they have got to the next waypoint that is a huge amount of wasted processing, just check every 10th of a second or so).

As the author of the demo Belidos mentioned, I can say that it is very, very unlikely that most of my optimisations will ever be automatic in GG. Some may, but most just won't, it will never happen - do not hope for it. I'm not saying the engine won't get faster, it will, I am quite sure it will have some decent improvements over time. However, making the adjustments I have will always give you more speed and no, I'm not talking a few sliders or some simple settings, I had to put in a lot of work with other programs to get GG running slick. I'm still not happy with it yet, so I'll be continuing my quest to speed it up again soon. Just taking a break from it again, as too much work on one project, especially work I don't much enjoy, can drive me nuts. I do like the result however That's what keeps me going.

Here's the WIP.
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216180
I'm considering releasing the demo I sent Belidos into the wild for a broader test, but it is still a little rough in places. I'm not sure if I should or not :/

Most people would not even consider spending as much time as I have done simply optimising a level. Most people would have finished the level and done 3 or 4 more in the same time I've spent so far on this level. I haven't even got started on the gameplay yet, I haven't even finished the level itself and know I will probably spend another intense week or two finalising it and getting speed as fast as I can in preparation for AI to slow it down again :0

The reviewers mentioned here are really quite casual, wanting to make a game really easily, with little or no effort. I'm not one of them, I have been playing about making games for many, many years. As said I'm quite used to the limitations Easy Game Makers normally impose and trying to work around them. Anyone who thinks there is a game maker out there where you click a few times and get a quality game pop out is living in deluded crazy land. Even Unreal can't offer that, in fact unless you have lot's of cash to spend on it, is the exact opposite. Until computers get so fast that games are no longer a struggle for the best of them, Game making systems that are simple to use, will always fall below commercial releases.

Some of these Steam reviewers could do with a bit of history of "Easy Game Makers" over the years, so they can see just what has been available and how they ALL were pretty much useless compared to commercial games of the time. Of course those same Steam users would say they shouldn't have to. Fine, but over the coming years, they too will learn, as they keep buying game maker after game maker, that they are all the same. Unless you have total control of everything you are always going to struggle to compete with others who have total control over their game. No easy game maker will ever compare with a top commercial game or even an average one in general.

Game Guru does however, give you a lot more options than other easy game makers of the past. Because of my past with other programming languages and other game makers I've learn't all the tricks (or most of them). Someone picking up GG today as their first foray into games making, quite possibly won't get too far, I had many similar products back in the day which ended up dusty and unloved. To keep em interested as said countless times, AI needs to work without effort, speed needs to be at least smooth enough to shoot people. If someone jumps in and makes something quite fun, if limited graphically, they may well have more inclination to stay and put more effort in.

Edit - Oh, as I said I haven't even started with scripts and such, I'm pretty sure I can get some optimisations in that area as well once it is underway

I remember talking about Cells here a couple years ago. Map Cells and LOD generation that the Creation Kit (GECK) engines use. At the time he was quite curious about that. The engines that made Fallout and Skyrim. I help out with all the world and location mods you see with Skyrim and Fallout, as I think I have perfected the workflow for how to generate outdoor worlds very similar to how Bethesda does, in a way that works perfectly for performance and detail. Also a workflow that allows for easy modification from other supporting environmental designers.

In the Creation Kit each map is a Cell and the Cells stitch to one another to create the open world environment you see. Indoor cells don't use stitched Cells. AI does not run in a Cell the player is not actively in. Also there is no active collision data in a cell the player is not in. Also when you have finished your open world map you can generate an LOD of the terrain, static objects and trees. This scans the entire game you have made and generates the LODs of what you have constructed.

I may put together a video completely from scratch from how Bethesda uses their engine to achieve the results you see in their games. In the attachment is a couple cells from one large open world map of the city of Toronto. Started completely from scratch with just a water plain and a terrain plain and started building up from there. Each cell has a limitation of how much stuff can go in it, so you really have to be creative and have a good understanding of optimization. On top of the that the Bethesda tools do a remarkable job with having things well optimized out of the box for you for an Open World game. They are pretty much the frontiers in that technology.

I noticed Infinite Terrain on the feature voting board. So I guess methods like these might be explored at some point.

Game Gur will continue to get bad reviews, unfortunately deservedly so.....Lee said there are a gazillion settings the user needs to address. (Problem pointed out)

Until GAME GRU can:

CREATE - Working Game Start --------->to Finish on a Mid range PC as of 2017. (Use % Passmak Gauge at the end of speed/performance scores with world averages for example.) Maybe - 5-10 % slower worldwide range for PC.

Finished means:

Simple built in MENU Editor/Game Icon/Splash-screen also editable (No excuses when you say "Make your own Game".)
Building Editor (Finished and works flawlessly)
Character Editor (100% working)
Save (100% working and not looking strange as hell)
Working/better AI/terrain/steps (I know in line for 2017)
More modern engine.
STAND ALONE 100% distributed working - Including dependency files in exported build (DirectX, THIS IS BIG ...proper C++ Redistributables) NO EXCUSES.

Like we need to know the last one by OSMOSIS some how and figure out why its not working when someone reports back "IT' Does not work on their system."

OFF-COURSE YOU GET BAD REVIEWS. It does not work when you give your game to someone. (FRIEND/TEACHER HUM. I really like this NON WORKING game my friend/student gave me. I think I should look into this NON WORKING software because I really love suffering.)

When I make a game I put all DEPENDENCY files in the build and an inslall instruction file/ Help File/Folders. WHY DON'T YOU. This is good game design.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Like some one said here: MAKE IT WORK!

Example 1

Example 2

Don't forget... GG is a GameMaker, not a GameIsReadyOutOfTheBox Maker.
Some things you mentioned are really good additions to GG. But Making Games and give them away, is possible. Otherwise there would be no GG Game on Steam.
But if you break it so that it don't runs, it is the thing of the person in front of the GameMaker.

Ok, perhaps the "EASY Game Maker" is the wrong slogan.

Some bad reviews are not surprising and i agree with some, because games lighting or effects looks like 10 years old games.You would need to make GG better before making some new promotionnal video.
Add a particles editor and show a game with explosions and weather effects, make terrain with new shaders (bump, specular , emissive) and lot of layers and showcase a game with it. Try some global lighting using reflection probes for better looking environment and materials.
About low frame rate i agree with some reviews, because i tried some popular demos on my rig , i expected some 60fps about graphics for games level looking like some old 10 years ago , but it was around 30fps only.
Adressing these essential issues and propose a GG demo people would have better reviews. I think it's better to fix what need to be fixed before showcasing GG, and make a new video that keeps also focus on GG strenght that is the ability to make FPS or TPS games very quickly without coding.
Just my opinion.

Yes, maybe, "The EASIER Game Maker" would be a more appropriate label.

the biggest problem, was and is, spending a year cutting out parts for notebooks etc. now this is good for speed ups etc, but they took away the better things that made a more slick and nicer design, which got lost when removing filters for a few more fps. i am not against any of this to be honest fps is and was important and needed doing, however they left it looking dated and basic settings were to make the entire world look like 2004 graphics, cutting out all efx. what could of done is worked on the engine but letting it remain decent looking, highest settings etc. and find a graphics workaround while working on fps. this was a pander to the very unable to play top end games. which at the time were very vocal about it. i think it needed doing though as i said. but they made it look cheap. and it was after all the lower end pcs got their wish, bur gg was looking remarkably bland and cheap. the grass was almost lime green with obvious patterns etc. it has changed a bit and i am sure it will again, but if they want people to review it most will work on a basic 5 mins mess about, steamers are extremely spoilt and overly impatient and very negative because they can be. this software gets your inner creative ideas into a reality, however most will have an idea and then when it is done, it is a botch of what is available, most models are of different standards, and style. and so no matter what it will look disjointed and slung together.

best way to change reviews is get it functional and intelligent, why you even humored EBE i have no idea, but as i believe was the worst move completely and it seems i am right.

the world needs to function.

lighting your biggest bug bear nomad and the world of man knows this and it needs sorting before a building novelty.

ai and extras. you are getting sleighted for this as well there is no game out there as bad for ai?? (not sure) surely again more important than a novelty builder.

water ,swimming, and physics for this would add more game play ideas

night and days can totally immerse the kids. ( this wont take a year and is more ideal to get praise ) and can with lighting sorted create ninja games of stealth, rpgs, other ideas can be if you use the world for videos can add a touch of realism etc etc.

weather well not the most important but still adds the feel for a game..... you added animated veg why is weather not as important??


my use of ebe as a bad call. basically says that you listened to the voters and now its come to bite you. we dont know everything in game developent but the reaction now shows what and why. if you had worked on any of the above first then your reviews would of been half the damage. they would find it harder as in graphics, and setting it to max first will help the impatient people and the world would immerse and impress the 5 minute kings of steam. swimming and submerging would also add more game ideas, shark games, like depth etc. sea exploration. submarine battles swimming contests etc etc. this could add dynamics but no making basic buildings was top. skr rims lighting you can see it change every so often so it does not have to be every second. skyrim changes ligthing and shadows every minute or so, on a cycle. that creates the idea of realtime lighting.

my view is to remove the voting board or plan loosely or something. and work on what matters.

you asked for reviews etc this is it. hope food for thought

In my opinion:

I backed Game Guru, I wanted to invest in the product and support the dev team. Personally, I never expected to product AAA titles. Working 48hrs + a week and trying to single handed produce a game or asset to monitize is a pipe dream of mine, but GG is not a quit your job and make a game system.

At this stage, I use GG as a hobby, if I happen to create something good, so be it. I have lots of .fpm files that have test in the naming. I have never thought of GG as the easy game maker, as since launch, I have not created a game. Compare to other game engines, ie: Unity, GG is base point, it has helped me understand what can be achieved in terms of level design, story building, story flow eg. You cannot put down a barrel, a soldier and a winzone and expect people to play it. You can however, put down a barrel, use a script to create, Huds, atmosphere and many many other variables that override the global to things going in the right direction. You can add soldier, and give him a back story, he is fighting for his country etc and thats why he is attacking you as he thinks you are a threat, you can use the winzone to say you have killed the enemy, you have won the game, you can teleport the player to another level where you can reuse all of the above, with different variables to get different results.

I applaud the community, there are some fantastic assets, scripts, showcases all up for grabs on the forum, and many more on the store. You are all passionate about what you believe in and have paid to invest in. Investment for me means if I can help progress the development I would, as the end result would ultimately benefit me.

I understand how Lee feels like this sometimes, he cares, he is passionate and he wants to deliver.



This is a very important part of it, I agree 100%. remove the voting board, listen to what people are saying both Negative and Positive and use that feedback to formulate a plan.

Easy Game Maker, personally, I think this broadens your market too much, I understand as a business you want to reach as big an audience as possible, but making what we have currently work well, will allow the community users to push the system and product games that people will sit up and take notice of, which in turn will drive them to find the engine used.

Again, this in not meant to stir an argument, It's my opinion and what I am comfortable using the engine to do.

I believe in Game Guru, I believe in Lee and I trust this community.

I don't want to sound negative but isn't that just another variation of the voting board ..We will still get the " This should be next " etc and different views from different users depending on how they feel GG should proceed.... And of course you could end up with the same results

Then what do we do .... Vote on it ..
If you see where I'm coming from

Agreed, hence, Lee should decide himself -apart from the features on top of the voting board- what is important for Game Guru to go forward.
One thing we all want and i'm sure that it is not only the community but TGC as well, is core improvement.

Perhaps discussing the next feature individually as and when each is finished maybe more sensible ..
Right now I would finish the EBE ( its already nearly there ) and not annoy those already promised this feature
Then I think most agree the AI overhaul would be a sensible next move .. Long awaited and a main source of complaints and reviews ..

After that We should open a discussion on the next feature so its all fresh and no old dormant votes could get in the way ...
Sounds pretty workable to me ?

I want a big robot hand that comes out of my screen and massages my temples while I create games!

I second that!

After EBE and the AI overhaul, the 'menu editing' is next on the voting board, i think it is certainly good to open a discussion on this subject to discuss it, share opinions and so on.

I think we should vote on it ... DOH !!

I new to GG and I never read the reviews, my main concern was how easy it was going to be to get a model from Sketchup into a game and it was a doddle also I can do it multiple ways so I'm a happy bunny

After nearly 18 years messing with game engines I've never found an "easy" one specially 3D, and the "no coding required" engines, well you can do something with them but a commercially viable game? nah!

I think the trolls that used to want to create a team have now progressed to being review experts because no one is willing to help them these days.

I tend to look at what can be done, and how easy it is to do something without the manual, I have no idea how far I can get with GG but it looks like it goin to be interesting trying

I'm not sure I can add anything further than that which has been said above, but I'm certainly supportive of Nomad Soul's post. FPSC was a bit of an unstable mess before the community was allowed to pop the bonnet (or hood, if I was speaking in American) and solve some of the performance and functionality issues. Five or six heads are better than one.
Certainly, and whilst I'm all for democracy, I would ignore the community vote board. Talking characters, quests and an XP/levelling up system are all interesting features but they're all very much non-core aspects of the engine.
Implementing a robust and challenging AI system, a beautiful lighting/rendering system and being ruthless in resolving performance issues are going to make great headway in popularising the software.
I would never adduce Blender as an easy-to-use product but open it up, drop in a primitive with a basic shader, a couple of lights and a sky and you already have a scene which is far more attractive than most scenes in GG. It's got properly calculated shadows and bounce lighting right out of the box.
Looks make bucks, I'm afraid.
I think it would also assuage some of the concerns of the community if a proper roadmap for the next 12 months was made public, split up into months.
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Actually now I think about it a bit more, sod what the Steam reviewers think. You don't put out a fire by dousing the smoke. Just make a good game engine.
I'm one of a large number of (far better known and more talented) people who have been around here for a very long time - 10 years today, in fact - who will support the product through thick or thin as we always have done. Just make it good and draw support from the actual community who make the effort to be here rather than a Steam reviewer who will be gone again in a few months' time. I know that's not particularly good business practice but the hive mind on this forum knows far more about creating a good, simple game engine than someone who's tapped out a Steam review.

Colin Chapman once said that Lotus' philosophy was to "simplify, then add lightness". We should be doing something similar.

On a positive note for the coming year, I don't think that GameGuru is actually not too far off what a lot of us with reasonable expectations want.
Just wants some decent AI and you'll see a lot of us cracking on with games and ideas we've got on the back burner.
Once the EBE is out of the way I'm sure we'll see the core improvements that have been held up by it.
It may be just steam users, but a lot seem obsessed with the EBE, and some of us can't see the point of it. The voting board is the culprit. So I've made a voting board suggestion: retire the voting board
And I agree, it's not really that important or relevant what steam users with 0.5 hrs use say in reviews.

Implementing a robust and challenging AI system, a beautiful lighting/rendering system and being ruthless in resolving performance issues are going to make great headway in popularising the software.
I agree, also GG would get more users helps if it had a C++ SDK with source code available like Unreal 4.
Because 5 or 10 coders working on rendering, navigation, physics or editor is way better. Instead of one man work that will take years to perhaps accomplish the same amount of work.
This is CryEngine and Unreal 4 philosophy to let users make the editor better and bring features to the engine with an SDK and source code.

Well I for one think a few more people writing scripts instead of moaning all the time would go a long way to making reviews more positive. Stop going on about what GG can't do and make the most of what it can do!