Game Maker: Studio is great. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing dev tool, and I love it. But the end of life has been announced for 1.4, and I don’t have the money to buy the Mobile version of 2.0, and I’m concerned that, if I stick with 1.4, I could run into a situation where an app released on the Play Store might get blocked untul certain updates to the IDE happen. It’s happened before, and if that happens after 1.4 support ends, my app is dead, unless I can find the time and money to update to 2.0.
So, I’ve been looking for an alternate option for mobile development. My criteria are pretty simple: Cheap enough I can afford it, as powerful as GM:S, and something I can learn fairly easily. Two programs instantly came to mind: Clickteam Fusion and Godot.
I already own a copy of Fusion, thanks to Humble Bundle, and it’s got integrated support for Spriter, which I really like, so I gave it a go first. I still can’t wrap my head around it though; its workflow and mine just don’t mesh.
So next, I tried Godot. I’ve seen some pretty good reviews of it, and it’s free and open source, so nothing to lose, right? Turns out, I love it. It suits my learning and programming styles to a T, and there are even things that I had to force Game Maker to do the way I wanted that Godot does that way by default.
So, I’m doing Godot tutorials by the dozen in every spare minute I’ve got, and I expect to be using it for at least one project I’m planning. Will I continue to use GM:S? I hope so. But it’s no longer going to be my sole language.
And maybe one if these days I’ll get around to figuring out Fusion.