OK, so I was sat there wondering just how easy is it to punt something up to the GameMaker Studio Workshop on Steam and I kinda figured that the best and easiest way to discover this was to upload something. So that’s exactly what I’ve done. The only thing I’ve got lying around in a state to be put through Studio’s wringer without too much work is DRM due to it being wrote in Studio and all that. So!
So yeah, I’ve thrown up a 12 stage demo of DEATH RAY MANTA to the Workshop. And you know what? It’s so simple to do. Throw in a screenshot, write a short description, pick your genre, name the game and click a button. That’s it. It couldn’t possibly be simpler to share your work via Steam and GameMaker if they tried. I spent half an hour stripping out all the commercial links from the build and stuff just leaving a link my twitter feed in there, I think it’s important to maintain a fairly safe space for sharing without MARKET STUFF interfering but aside from that, no tweaks at all required.
Playing it is a bit more fiddly but you know, not drastically so considering.
So if you want to play 12 stages of DEATH RAY MANTA now via Steam here’s what you’ll need to do:
Download GM:Studio’s free version via Steam.
This should take all of, oooh, 2 seconds or something.
Now go to the DEATH RAY MANTA workshop page and click subscribe.
Now nip over to your software library on Steam and run GM:Studio. When it loads up you’re given a choice between PLAY and MAKE. Choose PLAY and you’ll find your subscribed games listed there. Download DEATH RAY MANTA, assuming you really did bother to subscribe to it, and et voila, 12 levels of DRM in your Steams.
So yeah, for the sake of about 30 seconds uploading time and a bit of diddling to upload more screenshots, you can have a GM made game sitting in the Steam workshop ready to share. Then everyone who installs GM:Studio free can subscribe to and play that thing easily.
Did I mention that we truly are living in the future? Fabulous stuff. Get making things and once again, well played TeamYoYo. This all makes me very happy indeed.