The successor to Pixel Game Maker MV has been revealed and it’s called Action Game Maker. The newest title in the long-running Maker series is built on the Godot Engine, which got a lot of attention last year after Unity revealed some controversial runtime fees. The fast-growing engine offers many attractive features for Action Game Maker, which will continue the tradition of allowing creators to make games using a visual scripting system. The developers are working towards providing essentially unrestricted access to all of Godot’s 2D functionality through its scripting system.
In the six years since Pixel Game Maker MV was released, the developers have been receiving plenty of feedback on the features that Pixel Game Maker MV lacks. Many of these improvements would be very difficult to implement, and instead of continuing to delay major updates, the team decided to build a brand new Maker title with a new framework. Still, the team will continue to provide updates, fixes, and support for Pixel Game Maker MV for some time. The bad news for many of those developers is that projects in Pixel Game Maker MV will not be directly compatible with Action Game Maker. Game logic will need to be re-implemented from scratch, although assets can naturally be reused.
No official release date for Action Game Maker has been announced, but developer Gotcha Gotcha Games plans to share more as it heads towards release. You can read the entire first producer’s letter below:
Hello everyone, my name is Morino and I am the producer for ACTION GAME MAKER.
I’m planning to do a series of these letters as we move towards ACTION GAME MAKER’s release, and I’d like to start off by providing some information about our thoughts regarding this process and how it effects our existing tools.
This new title is indeed part of our long-running Maker series, and is designed to be the successor to Pixel Game Maker MV. That predecessor was successful in implementing a visual scripting system inspired by the RPG Maker series and make it work for 2D action games. And people were able to use the tools we provided to also make puzzle, shooting, fighting, and many other types of games! As of the start of July 2024, we’ve managed to release more than 50 user created titles on the Nintendo Switch. We really thank you all for your hard work!
However, we must also admit that it has been more than 6 years since Pixel Game Maker MV released, and we’ve been getting a lot of comments for improvements: users who want to make bigger games, want more improvements in the work flow, and features that Pixel Game Maker MV currently lacks. Taking those requests for improvements to our development team made us realize that issues present in the code base for Pixel Game Maker MV make those improvements particularly difficult. Some are fundamental limitations in how the scripting system was originally architectured, and some are due to the age of the underlying framework. Instead of continuing to delay major updates as we struggle to implement fixes and requests, we have decided that it is in the best long-term interests of our users to build a brand new Maker title, created from the ground up with a new framework.
Now let me take a moment to discuss our thinking for the new title. The great appeal of Pixel Game Maker was how flexible our visual scripting was and how much you could create without any coding. It started with the basic idea of building on RPG Maker’s Event Command concept and layering in Common Events, which does allow you to create a large variety of RPGs, and even some action experiences if you apply some creativity. However, a lot of plug-ins are needed to really create something that is uniquely yours in RPG Maker, and some knowledge of scripting or full programming becomes necessary. We felt that a lot of our users have run into this hurdle (though we know some of you lovely tinkerers out there enjoy making the RPG Maker system work for you).
So Pixel Game Maker MV was created to give those users a step forward: a way to create something more expressive with their creativity while having a lower threshold of entry that doesn’t require coding. Indeed, I’m one of those users myself!
To further achieve that original vision, we’ve selected Godot Engine to be our new engine base. Godot Engine is a fast growing engine with a lot of really attractive features for us(which I’ll go over in my future letters). However, despite all the attention Godot has been receiving, the switch from Godot 3 to Godot 4 called for the removal of Godot’s visual scripting system. This presented us with an amazing opportunity. We knew we needed to provide more to our users, and now Godot was lacking in a function that we know really well! And that’s how the current plan was kicked off.
As an example, one of the big issues with Pixel Game Maker MV was the base engine, cocos2D-x, made it very difficult for us to extend our API and make more functions available for you, our users, to access. By selecting Godot Engine, we are working towards providing basically unrestricted access to all of Godot’s 2D functionality through our scripting system.
Additionally, we are sure that you will think of use cases or functions that we haven’t! After all, it takes a lot of imagination and passion to make a game! And so we’re making sure that ACTION GAME MAKER’s editor functions are more extensible and flexible than before, so we can be more agile in addressing your feedback.
For all of our dear Pixel Game Maker MV users who have given us so much passion, for all the Maker community members who have been waiting for a new challenge, and to all of those who struggle with programming, we’re hard at work to make ACTION GAME MAKER something worth your time. It’ll be a little bit before we’re ready to release, but we hope you will join with us as we move ever closer to release!
Special Note for Current Users of Pixel Game Maker MV:We are fully aware that it takes years to make games, and especially so for indie developers. Accordingly, we will continue to provide updates, fixes, and support for Pixel Game Maker MV for some time. We will do our best to provide all we can given our company size, but we know there will be limits and some issues will not be addressed in a fully satisfactory manner. As such, it is our hope that PGMMV users will take more advantage of the open source Player component we released last year.
Additionally, due to the change in the base engine, PGMMV projects are not directly compatible with ACTION GAME MAKER. While assets such as graphics and sounds can be reused, game logic will need to be re-implemented from scratch. It is our hope that users to who decide to make the switch will be able to use their existing knowledge to quickly recreate with the similar-yet-improved systems provided in ACTION GAME MAKER.
