YoYo Games Marketplace

Recently, YoYo Games has published its own Marketplace, where Pro Game Maker Studio users (implies having a PRO version or higher) may acquire all kinds of resources, such as images, sounds, fonts, backgrounds and even objects or scripts which may be useful for any application. Likewise, we can publish our own resources so others can benefit from them. We’ve taken a look at it and this is what we have found.

Our experience on the marketplace

The marketplace home page is quite clear. Some resources have been classified into groups like “our favorite”, “shaders” or “mobile integrations”. We also have a side menu with all the categories we might find in a Game Maker Studio project. Keep in mind that not all the resources we can get are compatible with every GMS export. For example, we can find an extension to activate the mobile vibration, but it only works on iOS and Android, although it will be available for Windows Phone and HTML5 in the future.

If we look at one of these resources, we see they include several preview images and even a gameplay video with the applied resource. This is very useful, especially if you want to acquire complete projects with some specific functionalities. A description, a license link (seems common to all resources), version changes and age ratio are also provided.

Ratings and reviews written by users who have acquired a certain resource can be found as well. You’ll find previews of the projects, shown as a tree of elements (as we are used within Game Maker Studio). Similar resources are linked together on the marketplace and you have the option to report incidences to the publisher.

Interesting resources

The truth is that it is very easy to see all the data in a resource file, and the categories index allows a quick positioning and browsing each section to look for something specific. Without having tested any of them, let’s see some of the resources that seemed interesting to us so far:

1. Complete YoYo Games RPG

Although its price is one of the highest you can find in the Marketplace, it offers all the functionality for a RPG project, from the menu engine to character movement, attacks, conversations, lives system, money, inventory, etc. It is one of the most complete assets in the marketplace and if you intend to make this kind of game, we believe the investment is more than justified.

2. ElSato’s traditional platformer

If you want to make a platformer, here’s everything you need to implement it. It also offers sprites, both retro and HD. Some things should be implemented, like bosses, optional weapons, power-ups, etc, but what else could you ask for less than 5$?

3. Xyqthop3′s free shaders

A set of almost 20 high quality shaders, which can be used in both Windows and HTML5. It seems more shaders are going to be added in the future.

4. Gamelogic’s Grids

If you are interested in making a game where the grid is not square or isometric, you’d probably need these scripts in order to use different types of grids –hexagonal grids, for example–. It includes a PDF with all the settings explanation.

If you are interested in saving development time, we believe you should consider the benefits of the marketplace as it offers from entire projects to useful development scripts. It’s been online for only a few weeks but you can find a fair variety of resources already, so let’s see how it evolves in a few months and if it’s still interesting for both customers and developers.