Well, Enterbrain's new game maker is finally here. What were originally referred to as Action Game Maker has been renamed for its English release and is now Indie Game Maker.

The English website (on a Japanese domain?) is open and contains a few interesting pages: http://tkool.jp/products/IGMAKER/

CNET also has a demo/trial up for download.


I downloaded the demo this morning before work, but I did not get a chance to use it yet. Has anyone here used Action/Indie Game Maker yet? Basically, what's like? How user friendly is it?

I've lost most of my interest in RPG Maker, though I still care about an support the RPG Maker community at GW. I'd rather tinker with other things, and the idea of making a platformer really appeals to me after spending so much time with my Mario World level hacks.

So yeah, I intend on giving this a try after work today and am just wondering if anyone here already has (or will)?


And just for the hell of it so this post doesn't look so small..

There's something about proprietary software that doesn't feel very 'independent' to me.

Yeah, I'm not too big on the name either. I'm just more interested in what the capabilities of the maker may or may not be.

It's allright, but the engine is pretty confusing to use at first, I would have liked that some easy concepts like showing messages was just as easy as in RPGmaker, too bad it's more complicated to do it now.

They probably changed the name for the same reason Microsoft changed their "community games" to "indie games".  They are just trying to cash in on the current hype that indie games draw. It is really kind of self serving, but whatever.

I took a peek at this a few minutes ago and there's a lot to it in terms of, well, just learning how to use it. I'm pretty tired today and my brain isn't all there, so I'm not going to pick at the program today.

Saturday sounds like a good day to dive into it extensively.

yea i tried an early english patch of the japanese version and i had absolutely no idea of what was going on.

Me too. That was way back and everything was so confusing with tons of design screens and weird symbols, and I had no idea how to even make a map. This program isn't very user friendly at all.

It's in English Skarik. I'm still debating on using this or Game Maker. The price and size doesn't help much either but the whole Xbox Live thing really appeals to me.

I already know how to use gamemaker, so unless "indie" game maker shows that it can do something that gamemaker can't, or can do it MUCH easier, I'll keep using gamemaker for now...

I've been keeping an eye on upcoming programs and although this seems interesting and will probably appeal more to the RPG Maker crowd, Scirra's Construct (http://www.scirra.com/) is an open-source 2d game making software with a directx9 rendering engine--this allows for many interesting graphical features and exceeds the capabilities of GameMaker. It is free, has full drag and drop functionality, as well as using Python as a scripting language for more advanced users. It's still in the beta phase, but it's looking extremely promising.

Tau if you want to start making games right now just get gamemaker. It has loads of tutorials made for it and a huge community that can help you understand everything (gmc.yoyogames.com). Indie Game maker is still pretty new and there isn't much of a one stop  place to get help and tuts. but who knows maybe this will surpass gamemaker.

Actually gamemaker does have DLL support if you're implying it doesn't.

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/?showforum=6

And their are currently some projects with decent 3D engines made using gamemaker (not 3D gamemaker)