Whenever a program loads a file, it expects a specific file format for the type of file it is loading. For example, a bitmap (BMP) is literally a map of bits. It starts with a header section that declares file info like how big the image is, and then it goes into a list of RGB values for each pixel in the bitmap. If you have the size of the file and the pixel color data, you can reconstruct the entire image in any app that can read the file and understands how the data are arranged in the file. If the file data don’t match the expected format, the result may not work. This is why many other programs can read multiple file formats - Microsoft Word can read DOC files, but can also read XML files, HTML files, TXT files, RTF files, PDFs, and more. It’s because each of these file types has an established file format that the programmers decided to make Microsoft Word able to read and parse. 

Similarly, game engines also read asset data files. A 3D model from Maya is really just a collection of vertex and polygon information. A texture map is an image with some additional mapping data of pixels to vertices on a 3D mesh. An animation rig is mostly a collection of polygon-to-bone mapping data combined with bone movement constraints. An animation is mostly a series of bone positions at specific times. As long as our programmers know how those data are laid out in those specific files, we can make the game engine understand what those data mean. And... if we know how to make the game engine read files in that file format, we can also build other more lightweight tools like animation previewers to read those same file formats and manipulate them. 

I’ve worked with tools that allowed me to do more than just previewing animations - they allowed me to attach collision spheres on specific bones in specific animations on specific frames for purposes like the player attacking. We can then create a new file that stores which animation bones that collision spheres attach to on which specific animation frames, and then the game engine can read that data to know when to make attacks active based on animation data. We also made that tool mark which animations can be interrupted during which frames to create attack combo strings - Attack Animation A can branch to combo extender B between frame 35 and frame 60, which can then branch to combo finisher C or combo extender D between frame 24 and frame 56. This means that this tool can be used by combat designers like me to take the animation data from the animators and create and tune cool attacks and combos with the tool for use in game. This is just one example of things programmers can enable when they know how asset data get laid out in a file.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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I think there’s been a lot of really big changes to the industry over the past decade - it’s hard to detail the "biggest” change since they each have major effects on the industry, about game dev in general, and so on. But I have two things I think are most notable.

For game development in general, I think the biggest change is the opening up of game development tools. Off-the-shelf development tool suites like Unreal and Unity have vastly increased the number of game developers out there and made their skills much more transferable. These toolsets are powerful, flexible, well-supported, and (most importantly) inexpensive. It’s opened up game development to a lot more people, and that means more hobbyists, more indies, more AAA devs, and so on. It means more people are experimenting with the technology, which brings fresh new ideas to the industry in all sorts of different areas that operated on “conventional wisdom” before. It’s never been easier to get into game development. The bigger the talent pool, the more interesting things we can collectively make.

I think the biggest industry-wide change going from 2010 to 2020 for AAA games is the industry’s overall reduction of games released per publisher and their focus on making their big games “lifestyle games” - games that players will keep playing, rather than games they will finish. The biggest earners for some publishers aren’t even new releases for the year - Capcom is still riding Monster Hunter World (2018), Ubisoft is riding high on Rainbow Six Siege (2015), Blizzard is leaning heavily on World of Warcraft (2004), Overwatch (2016), and Hearthstone (2014), and so on. We have several high profile studios that survive on a single ongoing game like Riot (League), Epic (Fortnite), Digital Extremes (Warframe), and Bungie (Destiny). For many publishers, this is a major shift to keep supporting the older game with new content and expansions for years instead of making sequels. This focus has permanently changed the driving direction of AAA games, pushing gaming further toward things like gaming subscription services and microtransactions.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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A dev kit is a piece of hardware that we use to develop games for specific consoles. Here are the two currently on my desk:

As a general rule, dev kits cannot play retail video games. They exist only to work with games in development. They work like remote computers on the network - they have hard drive space, RAM, GPUs, and so on. My development computer connects to the dev kit via the local network and it sends my dev computer necessary data (like debugging info and such) while running the game and displaying on a separate monitor or TV. The console manufacturer also provides us with a suite of software tools to do stuff like monitoring the hardware performance, taking screenshots or video, remote controls, etc. The kits can also simulate latency, emulate Europe/Americas/Asia locale, connect to PSN/XBL/etc., reset achievements, apply patches, and so on. Basically, they do all of the things that home consoles can do while providing us debugging info and the ability to control and reset things as needed.

Sony sells Playstation dev kits, Microsoft sells Xbox dev kits, and Nintendo sells Switch dev kits. They come in different versions and hardware profiles - usually a lower-priced “test” kit (mostly used for QA to test stuff) and a higher-priced “dev” kit (that has beefier hardware and more development features). A test kit will usually cost around $1,000 USD. A dev kit is more expensive, starting at around $2,000 USD, with better models clocking in at $4,000 or more. You can also get older model dev kits at a discount. We’ve had several generations of dev kit hardware. This is actually a lot cheaper than it used to be! Back in the PS3/X360 days, dev kits were like $5k-10k apiece. You need a business relationship with the console manufacturer to buy dev kits, but that’s actually not too difficult to start up. If you want to obtain dev kits, you usually have to go to the corporate website and request them. You must submit a proposal for the kind of game you want to develop for the game alongside the request. Somebody from the console company will review your submission and, after approval, sell you some dev kits.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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Sure. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re a game designer working for Blizzard on the next expansion for World of Warcraft. Your job is to create, modify, and balance items for the expansion. What kind of information do you think is necessary to create an item?

Well, let’s think about it. First and foremost, the item will need a unique ID number, probably generated for you so you don’t accidentally duplicate the same ID for two different items. The item has to have a name. That name will also need to be localized into each of the languages the game supports, so it needs its name in each language. It has to have a rarity, which will affect its stat budget. It has to have an item level, which also factors into its stat budget. Most items one or two specific types of rating bonuses (e.g. haste, versatility, mastery, critical strike), some primary attack stat number (intellect, strength, agility), and a bonus stamina number. Every item has an equipment slot, even if the slot is “inventory-only”, or an item type that determines what sort of thing it is (weapon, armor, potion, etc.). These items might have class restrictions, be part of a set, have procs, or an on-use effect. The item must have an icon ID for inventory use, a level requirement, and (if equippable) a model reference ID so the game knows what visual to apply to the character wearing it. These are all qualities shared every item in World of Warcraft, and many of them have mathematical formulae that must be applied (such as using the item level to determine the exact value of a specific bonus).

Now consider… you want a tool that can automatically enforce certain mathematical rules for specific shared values across the hundreds of items you’ll be creating, and the thousands of items that already exist. You probably want to be able to sort and filter specific qualities, like only showing rare wrist armors, or legendary capes. You probably want to be able to look at multiple items at the same time, so that you can compare the ones you did to the old ones, or make the same change apply to many of them at the same time. You need a way to organize all these data at a glance. So how do you organize this all?

The magic comes when you realize that every attribute you need to track and/or edit can be treated as a column in a spreadsheet, and each individual item can be a row in that spreadsheet. If you do that, Excel can run the math for you. You can write macros to limit the cells in a specific column to choose from a specific set of possible choices. You can filter them and sort them by specific attribute. You can copy and paste as needed. You can set up formulas to automatically update when values are changed. You can use the built-in graphing and charting to look at curves and see if groups of items are behaving the way you expected. This is why excel is an awesome game design tool and why it is used in development studios all over the world. 

It isn’t limited to just itemization either. This is applicable to any type of content where you have a lot of unique attributes on each of a lot of different individual entries. This could mean spells, abilities, bonuses, modifiers, crafting recipes, experience level tables, treasure drop tables, enemy spawn rates, NPC attributes, or any of a hundred other types of content. It’s all about being able to edit data in a way that is less bug-prone and more visually intuitive. Excel has excellent macro documentation and support from Microsoft, and can even turn the data values into graphs so you can verify the growth rate looks like what you want.

How do you learn to do this stuff? You must learn how to write excel macros to pull data and apply math and formulas from other cells. Think about really big spreadsheets and what you need to pull the information you need out of them quickly. Then, go to any of the excel macro tutorial sites and start digging. Excel is just a tool like any other editor; it has a lot of documentation and support already.

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Of course. Game Maker isn’t the deepest or most robust or powerful developer tool - you’re never going to build the next Grand Theft Auto on it, after all - but it’s a tool that allows you to prototype something very quickly, and sometimes that’s what you need. 

An explanation only goes so far, especially when written in a document. You know the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Even concept art and still screenshots only do so much. When you want to convey a gameplay concept, then a few seconds of play will mean far more than paragraphs of text and pages of screenshots. Humans conceptually grasp things in a lot of different ways, but experiencing the concept firsthand is almost always far better than simply seeing pictures or reading text. 

That said, I wouldn’t really look at Game Maker as a legitimate release platform for a commercial product, especially with packages like Lumberyard, Unity, and Unreal providing more power, more usability, and more affordability right out of the box. Game Maker’s limitations are pretty well-defined and clear, and I don’t really see it as a viable platform for  commercially viable games. Not when it’s compared to the heftier options available. I prefer to think of Game Maker as a prototyping tool - similar to how SketchUp is a quick 3D planner and visualization tool, but would never seriously replace 3D Studio Max or Maya for 3D modeling. With Game Maker, you can get whatever it is you’re prototyping up and running quickly, to prove that a concept is fun. If it proves out, great! Use those principles to create the system in more detail. Or, if it doesn’t work out, you can scrap it and try something new without wasting weeks or months building infrastructure, assets, and systems to reach the same conclusion.

The short answer is “A lot”.

So here’s how it works. We, the devs, need tools and map editors to create the game content. It is how the actual game content gets made - we’re using the very tools that get released to modders and such. The trouble comes from the assumptions made during development, and the difficulty in releasing tools to the community is directly proportional to how much engineering is required to correct for those assumptions. That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s try to break it down more simply.

It depends on how hard it is for you to learn new tools. Do you tend to get bogged down in the details and specifics of things, or is it usually more conceptual for you? With new hires, we almost always expect a certain amount of ramp-up time. If you go to work for any of EA’s Frostbite teams, for example, you will probably end up working with their proprietary animation tools much more often than you will with Blender or Max. If you go work for Telltale, you’ll need to learn their proprietary animation tool in order to make things work. Unreal has their own editors, Valve uses their own editors, and so on and so forth.

If you understand how the data works and is arranged, you can usually make the transition from tool to tool (since they usually do approximately the same tasks, just in slightly different ways) by simply remapping your preferred hotkeys in each suite. Several artists I know will simply use the same hotkeys in all of the tools they use for familiarity and speed.

The important thing is always about learning the universal concepts - how to apply them to any tool you’re using. Once you understand how the tool behaves with your asset pipeline and what specifics your particular tool does and doesn’t do, then you can make specific adjustments as needed.  While it helps to know the tools already, hiring managers almost always choose someone with a stronger conceptual grasp and no tool knowledge over someone with excellent tool knowledge and shaky fundamentals. It’s because we can always teach somebody how to use tools, but it’s a lot harder to teach fundamentals.

This is a good mention I really should have said something about. Unity 3D (which includes 2D tools) is an excellent and inexpensive platform for professional game development. There is a free version that lets you develop for Windows, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and licenses that you can purchase for other platform (both current consoles and last gen) support for a nominal price. Just remember that it is a fully featured platform, which means it's got a lot more power (and complexity) than something as simple as GameMaker. 

I believe the cost of a single user license is $1,500 USD (which seems like it is pretty steep) but I should remind you that the cost of licensing other engines is usually in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, so $1,500 is a very small amount comparatively speaking. If you’re thinking about it, you can always get the free version to start with and play around with, and only get the license if you plan on actually publishing and selling. Unity has been used for several actual published games. 

You can learn more about Unity 3D at their website here.

To be honest, 2D game development is not a very good way to go through the future. The biggest reason for this is mostly because it’s way easier to create 3D game animations and assets. You can play an animation on a 3D model and view it from multiple camera angles by doing some mathematical transforms without needing to redraw every frame of animation, whereas traditional 2D lacks this ability. It’s been one of the biggest time savings in the move to 3D. 

If you want to learn something that will actually be directly transferrable to a professional setting and stay with 2D game development, I would suggest trying to pick up Flash (and, by extension, Actionscript). Adobe began supporting Object-Oriented programming with Actionscript 3.0, which means that the sort of things you can do with it are much bigger and broader, and you can build games and applications that can easily be run and playtested with just a browser. Learning how object-oriented programming works would also help push you toward a career in software engineering, if that’s something you’re interested in. While it is sometimes looked down upon by the hardcore gamer audience, Flash is a great way to make your own games and make them interesting.

A second option I would suggest is trying to remake your game (I believe I recall you saying before that it was a Tower Defense game?) in the Starcraft 2 editor. You'd make the transition to 3D (which I assume you'd want to do eventually), and you'd have a new tool to learn and play with. I know for certain that the Starcraft 2 editor is pretty robust, and a 2D game can be built pretty easily on a 3D game - you just fix the camera at a specific height and angle, and you're good. The Starcraft 2 editor was the tool the designers used to create the campaign for the game, so it should provide a lot of options you might not have available in GameMaker.

These suggestions are mostly a shoot-from-the-hip attempt, though. I can't really tell what your expertise level is or what your goals really are, so I'm just sort of putting these out there for you. I do encourage you to look them over. At some point, I think I'll try to build a list of free and cheap game development tools and kits available for people to use. It seems like it might be useful.