Game Maker Studio may seem to be multi-platform export compatible and Windows 8, Windows Phone and Steam versions are the next. But for Windows 8, it is going to be a confusing mix when it comes to games and apps used on it. There may be games that will work on tablet only which is one bullshit factor as they are supposed to have support for multiple controls such as touch, mouse and keyboard, not touch only. Suppose that there’s a racing game to be run on Windows 8, the control concept should support keyboard, game controller and tablet controls which may involve touch and device tilting. That’s how the fairness should be when it comes to Metro games on Windows 8. If that’s the case for Game Maker Studio, games made for tablets and smartphones should have exact controls when ported to these platforms but Windows 8 is going to be an exception, they should support other controls besides touch because it is going to be a waste of people’s money if the games support like one control type only and not the others so what’s the point of getting those anyway? For Windows Phone 8 devices, the resolutions can be identical to certain Android devices but not all Windows Phone 8 devices support that high resolution so the development may be less difficult with common resolutions and less time consuming. But for IOS devices, it is obvious that porting from IOS to Android may take you more time due to different resolutions between the two OSes. For Windows 8 games ported from Android or Windows Phone 8 with 720P as the target resolution, you may expect the graphics to be kind of blur because the tablet resolutions may be somewhat higher than 720P. At least porting HD games from Ipad to Windows 8 may be a little bit challenging due to the fact that Windows 8 tablets are in widescreen. It’s the same deal for Android tablets when porting games from Ipad to Android.
However, how about the games that are going to be developed for all of these mentioned tablet and smartphone platforms? This can make the simultaneous development more challenging and time consuming because you may have to divide the same game into multiple versions. On the computer, the resolution doesn’t matter as much but you may have to tell the resolution requirement under System Requirements for whatever games you have made. If the computer is running the game at lower resolution than the game’s resolution, I can guess that there will be signs of pixel loss but I don’t know if this can pose more problems for running the Game Maker games like that. It’s kind of worse when running in Window Mode because you’re not able to see other parts of the game screen unless the screen resolution is set to the one higher than the game’s resolution.
Even better with Game Maker Studio is that the games can also be made for HTML5 in which games can be played online just like playing Adobe Flash games on the net.
So, you’ve known that Windows 8 had hit RTM stage but the development tool for Windows 8 will soon be out on the Windows Store under Desktop Store. The best platform for developing games with Game Maker Studio will be on the computers and if you want to test your creations that are simply made for tablets, smartphones or both, you can simply export to those platforms and then test it from there.
