GameMaker 25th Anniversary

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On 25th Anniversary they created a game which starts great but after repetitive loop it gets boring, being a game dev i didn't understand why multiple people are working on the same feature?

Too repetitive, quite the dull experience. Art and game dev references are cute tho

It's really good for a free time-management and a good demonstration of what the engine can do. But... It also shows that you need to be a good game designer to make it cool. It's playable and fun but in the same time feels very unbalanced. And makes me feel that I'm probably not ready to do this kind of game myself. I keep stumbling upon games directly 1:1 ported from mobile and I mostly can compare with those. There's no actual plot but the game shows development of Game Maker app, with new features as quests, limited by time but also characters will just keep going after missing deadline. You'll have missing deadline in statistics but no real penalty. There are no energy/lives, no in-apps, no events and all that MMO stuff. There's limited amount of levels, too. Every few levels you upgrade your office by adding QoL items - garbage bin, plants, fridge, etc. and then you fix them during the quest. Fixing is various mini-games that take very different amount of time to pass. Also some imitate an actual fixing (leaking pipes, getting rid of garbage, fixing cables) and some are, like, just there. Broken bookshelf is getting fixed by arranging books by size. And then you can't skip few seconds animation in the end. Also, there are bugs. Like, characters produce a lot of them, and some materialize as red insects running around. You may click them to kill but it has any sense only on first levels, then you just won't have time. Every quest ends with whack-a-bug game anyway. Visuals are pleasant and stylish. I'm not sure about office not fitting screen horizontally. Scrolling starts with cursor near screen edge and since I played with tablet and stylus it was annoying sometimes. Especially since there's a single thing to check on right. In the end, I could use more interesting dialogues, not just repeating the same things over. Kudos for quests having fun names though.

Super boring

Boring. Uninstalled after 15 minues spent clicking on bugs crawling in a floor and water/food baloons. Zero strategy, zero challenge, zero rewrd.

"GameMaker 25th Anniversary" is a self indulgent look at the second-worst game engine ever to enable non-developers to flood Steam with garbage 2D shovelware. And which has facilitated a *huge* number of Russian asset flip scams. I'm pretty sure no truly successful game was ever made with GameMaker Studio. Hotline Miami maybe? But seriously, even Hotline Miami is stupidly overrated pixelcrap. 3D graphics cards became mainstream around 1995, so there's no excuse for this mediocrity. 25 years and these guys still couldn't work out 3D graphics that have been around for decades. Too complicated for them, I guess. This barely-a-game shovelware is largely a love letter written by YoYo Games to YoYo Games about how awesome they think they are. This is cringier than the people who make fake Twitter accounts to post flowery posts about how awesome their real account is. This is just a couple of minigames to teach you how awesome YoYo Games thinks GameMaker Studio is, and I can tell you with over 14,000 reviews and counting, every time I see a game made with GameMaker Studio, it's a godawful crapfest. And hey, what do you know, so is this! It doesn't even have 3D graphics. At least it's not pixelcrap. And, in fairness, GameMaker Studio is not quite as bad as RPG Maker... but that's like comparing a lunch of broken glass to a lunch of rusty nails. Certainly, this looks more like a mobile app than a PC game. It's got all the same qualities as a mobile app, and yeah, that's because the godawful game engine this was made with isn't capable of anything better. You can't make a silk purse with a sow's butt. Trying to take this seriously as a game, the poor 2D graphics and immediately stale gameplay would make you wish you were doing pretty much anything else right away. Like, even watching already dry paint dry more is more interesting than sitting in and office and learning all about why YoYo Games is so awesome (they are, just ask them). So, in terms of visuals (yes, gaming is a visual medium) this has some really mediocre looking graphics that will understandably be a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Because gaming is a primarily visual medium, if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises like pushing 2D games in the 3D era of gaming, just because "3D is too hard". You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. Let's talk about pricing, value, and public reception. This is "free" enough, at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 13 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.