YoYo Games announces Sequences for GameMaker 2, allowing artists to ‘lead the way’ without technical knowledge GameMaker creator YoYo Games has started demoing its new Sequences feature, which will allow even more people to make games without having to be too technical. Marie Dealessandri reports YOYO GAMES has been showcasing GameMaker 2’s new features behind closed doors at gamescom, including one called Sequences, to be launched in 2019. It will allow artists to manipulate pixel graphics to add motion, without needing any expertise. “The thing that we like about [Sequences] is for a lot of engines the programmer has to lead the way. With GameMaker, with the drag-and-drop, designers can lead the way as well. Now when we get [Sequences] added, it would mean an artist could be in the engine leading the way,” general manager James Cox (pictured bottom right) said. ”So it gives people the options and the choices. We hope that, down at the lower level, it means more people will be able to make the games they want to make and learn and start, and then at the higher level, it means more autonomy and power to all the people in the teams.” Showing MCV@gamescom a demo of Sequences, CTO Russell Kay (pictured right)
explained the new feature in more details: “In GameMaker traditionally all the graphics and all the things that we see on screen all come from pixel art. And that’s great, it allowed for so many fantastic games to be made. But it is tricky actually manipulating these things, you need quite skilled people. What we added here is the ability to take graphics and add extra life to them without having to go and change every pixel. You can put together motions and animations and you can actually animate anything. The whole point is it’s easy to use, it’s a tool that artists can use, you don’t have to be very technical to do this. It should be familiar to a lot people, people that we show it to immediately go ‘Oh yeah it’s like Premiere’ or other different tools. It gives a very powerful tool for being able to layer different things on top of each other.” Mentioning its release window of 2019, Kay continued: “It’s still got quite a way to go. We want to do a lot of testing with our user
base, get it into the hands of real artists and designers so they can feedback to us before we release it. But we’re very excited about this and I think it’s going to be a shift in terms of what GameMaker can actually do and starts to show the power of the things that we’ve been adding to GamerMaker 2.”
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22/08/2018 16:58