In the mid-1960s the upstart Westport News challenged the established, staid Town Crier.

Earlier this decade WestportNow.com roared onto the scene, altering the speed and means by which Westporters got their news.

This week, Westport’s media landscape changes again.

Westport Patch is scheduled to launch Wednesday, the day after elections.  Like its sister sites in Wilton, Darien, New Canaan and Ridgefield — and Westport-type communities in New Jersey, including Maplewood, Scotch Plains and Westfield — Westport Patch is one answer to the undeniably decreasing (and fast fading) role newspapers play in American society.

It’s also a higher-tech, more interactive — and sexier — version of WestportNow, one of the 1st such sites in the nation, and at the time a pioneer of the community website genre.

The Westport News website is similar to Patch — though many news stories, editorials and police reports are posted after they appear in print.  The News site has not yet gained traction in town.

Westport Patch will include breaking news stories and photos.  It’s also got:

• Maps — so when you read about (I’m making this up) a rash of burglaries on Peaceful Lane, you’ll know exactly where it happened
• Videos — the Darien site includes a story on new lights for peewee football fields; the RTM rules committee going “off the record,” and a Darien High traffic campaign that students don’t like
• Announcements of coming events, births, even — hey, this is what hyper-local means — a mention that “Fred Gaston, 50, of Wilton finished in 8th place in Sunday’s New Canaan-to-Wilton Great Train Race”
• Sports results — this is pretty flexible; the Darien site recently noted “DHS Wizards Gear Up for Quidditch”
• Classifieds
• Police and Fire reports
• Restaurant reviews
• A townwide directory, with info on everything from beaches, businesses and doctors to the railroad station, town officials and movie theaters (a slim category in Westport, for sure)
• Comments by users

Interactivity is key.  Anyone can add events to the community calendar — and post announcements,  photos, even videos.

Each Patch has its own editor.  Westport’s is Liz Mitchell.  She’s completely new here, but spent the past several weeks learning the town.  She’s met with everyone from Staples principal John Dodig and police chief Al Fiore to First Selectman Gordon Joseloff — who just happens to be the founder of WestportNow.com.

Westport Patch is free.  It is not, however, a non-profit.  Patch Media Corporation is owned by AOL.  Word on the street is that AOL is pouring big bucks into the 12 existing Patches (with dozens more to be rolled out soon).

How will Patch make money?  A 2-tiered ad system allows business owners to create online ads.  Patch’s sales team works with individual businesses to “best satisfy their needs.”

Westport Patch’s influence on Westport could be profound.  It could alter the way we get information about our town, and discuss that info.

It could help spread news about activities and events in an unprecedented, unfathomable way — bringing folks together in a cyber version of the old town square.  For a good part of the 20th century, Westport’s main source of news was the Town Crier. A new town crier soon bursts on the scene.

Having said that, the jury is out.  I’ve spoken to people in several communities that already have Patch.  They like it a lot — but it hasn’t become a habit.  It has yet to generate a buzz, they say — they don’t hear friends and neighbors saying, “Oh, did you see on Patch today…?”

Perhaps that’s because those towns don’t have a WestportNow, so they haven’t gotten into the habit of turning to their computers for local news.  Or perhaps — like Betamax — it’s a great idea at the wrong time.

No one yet knows if this Patch will stick.  But one thing is for sure:  On Wednesday, the big news in town will be the news itself.

(“06880″ likes the idea of Westport Patch — and thinks there’s a place in town for a blog and another news source.  Time will tell.)

A screen shot from the Millburn (NJ) Patch

CompleteMember’s parent company, Powerful Design has joined with Detroit-based marketing consulting firm, Strategic Growth Concepts to develop and provide  a website to a non-profit animal rescue group that was recently victimized by thieves.

Detroit-based animal rescue group, HomeFur-ever, recently suffered the loss of thousands of dollars worth of food, medical supplies, crates, and other equipment when thieves stole their van and enclosed trailer in broad daylight (see news coverage HERE).  The van and trailer were eventually abandoned and recovered with extensive damage, but the items stored in both were either gone or destroyed.  Since HomeFur-ever does not currently have a building, the group stores all of its supplies and equipment within the vehicles, this makes the loss even more devastating and has seriously hindered their ability to care for the 90+ animals currently under their responsibility.

In order to help the group obtain donations of cash and goods to facilitate their recovery from this ordeal, Powerful Design worked with the group’s pro-bono marketing group, Strategic Growth Concepts to provide a comprehensive website that will meet their current needs, as well as expanding with them as their organization begins to once again achieve growth.

The website, www.HomeFurever.com was built utilizing Powerful Design’s proprietary website management system, MYCE, a user-friendly system enabling the rescue group to offer a wide array of useful tools for visitors to the site, including:

• the ability to provide one-time donations OR monthly donations in increments of $10, $25, $50, or $100
• the opportunity to ’sponsor’ on-going animal care, treatment for major animal medical issues, or gifting an adoption
• a HomeFur-ever ‘Fundraising Kit’ for individuals or groups who want to develop fundraising events on behalf of HomeFur-ever
• photo galleries of the group’s animals which enlarge significantly when clicked on to enable better views of the available animals
• a HomeFur-ever video
• links to upcoming HomeFur-ever adoption & fundraising events (including links to maps of event locations)
• videos of, and links to, the news coverage received as a result of the recent robbery the group was subjected to
• resource links for pet owners, including:  pet emergency care, trainers, veterinarians, pet insurance, and many others
• an educational page about current animal-related issues
• access to the HomeFur-ever Twitter and Facebook sites
• online forms for those interested in:  fostering, adoption, volunteering, raising funds for the group, making food or other donations to the group, etc.
• a link to the website of an artist who does custom animal paintings; HomeFur-ever will obtain 10% of the revenue generated from every painting contracted via the link from the HomeFur-ever website
• links to national animal rescue related fundraising sites.

Powerful Design (www.PowerfulDesign.com) and it’s sister companies CompleteMember (www.CompleteMember.com)  and CompleteChamber (www.CompleteChamber.com) utilize the powerful MYCE Website Management System in the development of websites for their client firms, including:  chambers of commerce, membership organizations, cities/communities, and small businesses.

____________________________________________________________

CompleteMember offers an integrated web-based system that helps organizations spend less time on administration and more time on growitng and supporting their organization.  Our CompleteMember system brings together member management tools, website management, and Quickbooks-integrated accounting into a single, easy-to-use platform.  No more triple entries and lost revenue opportunities.  Visit CompleteMember’s Content, Invoicing, and Member Management System.

(Photoshop.VN) – Do you want to have a multi-user microblogging website with Joomla? Try Microblog Plazza.

Source: MIcroblog Plazza – Joomla Microblogging

Have you ever landed on a website, taken a quick glance, and immediately pressed the back button on your browser? You’re not alone!  In fact, your community or chamber of commerce website is likely losing 50-75% of first-time visitors in just the first few seconds.  And if they’re not staying on your website, they’re also not likely to visit your community!

Can you imagine a retail store where 100 people walked in, took a one-second glance, and then turned around and walked out?  That wouldn’t be acceptable at all – nor profitable!  Unfortunately, this is likely taking place on your website right now.  So the question is, how do you encourage visitors who have finally found your website, to stay on your website to see all the wonderful information and resources you provide there?

Whenever someone looks at a website, they make a split-second decision about whether or not to stay.  There are two factors that heavily influence whether a first-time visitor stays and looks around, or flees in panic:

• The design of your site
• The site’s ease of use

Design – If you think about it, one of the main reasons you instantly leave a website is because it doesn’t “look” professional.  Here are some common design mistakes:

• Your website still looks like it’s in 1995
• Bright colors that scare users
• Takes a long time to load
• Spelling and grammatical errors on the site
• The site doesn’t look professional enough for your community
• And the worst, programming errors on the page

Ease of Use – Another reason visitors frequently leave a website is difficulty using it; if they can’t find the information they’re seeking, or they have to go thru too many pages to find what they want, they’re likely to see it as too time-intensive and they’re likely to leave it without reviewing any content.  It’s imperative that there is a logical sequence to finding information on the site, and that it’s ‘intuitive’ in design so customers can easily identify sections they want to review.

Some of the items above can be easily fixed, others may require time and investment.

If you would like to see excellent examples of design that is inviting to visitors, look at the big companies you hear about every day such as: Amazon, Ebay and Google.  They all have different approaches, but they’ve each spent millions of dollars making that home page as perfect as possible to insure that it draws visitors in for an ‘extended visit’.  Another great example would be our demo page at www.ChamberDemo.org where you can get a sense of what keeps visitors exploring your website. In fact, our clients keep 80% of their first-time visitors instead of losing them.  Wouldn’t you like your website to achieve that level of success, and thereby increase tourism in your community?  Let us show you how!  Contact us at info@CompleteMember.com to set up a FREE consultation.

____________________________________________________________

CompleteMember offers an integrated web-based system that helps organizations spend less time on administration and more time on growitng and supporting their organization.  Our CompleteMember system brings together member management tools, website management, and Quickbooks-integrated accounting into a single, easy-to-use platform.  No more triple entries and lost revenue opportunities.  Visit CompleteMember’s Content, Invoicing, and Member Management System.

I recently read an article about a city website that had been awarded a Pinnacle Award from the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) for its community website.  This award recognized the content, organization, design, function, accessibility, standards, interactivity, and team size responsible for the website.

This community had completed a total re-design on its website in order to offer such features as online agenda packets, crime statistic mapping, online permit applications, email update subscriptions, live streaming video and video archives, and an interactive feature that allowed users to input their address and receive customized data informing them about all things related to that address such as polling places, nearby parks, elected officials and more.

While reading the article, it was obvious to me that the leaders of this community saw the investment in a new website as an investment in the community itself.  They understood that the more community members were able to get what they needed from the site, the more satisfied they would be and the more efficient and cost-effective city operations would be.

So now I’ll ask you, do YOU have an award-worthy community website?  If not, there’s no time like the present to start considering the changes you should make to provide the best customer service to your constituents, while also using the site to increase city efficiency and decrease costs.

CompleteMember is here to help you achieve those goals.  We offer a Web-based Management System designed for:

• cities,
• towns,
• municipalities,
• networking groups,
• BNI groups,
• professional groups,
• fraternities/sororities,
• chambers of commerce,
• trade associations,
• and professional organizations.

CompleteMember seeks to assist membership-based organizations and communities to better leverage their limited resources in order to allow them to better serve their constituencies.  If you would like to schedule a FREE initial consultation regarding your community’s website, please contact us via our website or via email at info@CompleteMember.com.

____________________________________________________________

CompleteMember offers an integrated web-based system that helps organizations spend less time on administration and more time on growitng and supporting their organization.  Our CompleteMember system brings together member management tools, website management, and Quickbooks-integrated accounting into a single, easy-to-use platform.  No more triple entries and lost revenue opportunities.  Visit CompleteMember’s Content, Invoicing, and Member Management System.

Huch.com is changing the way social media and advertising relate to one another.  Using decision trees to make decisions, users can interact with hunch and its community in a fresh way that emphasizes the social side of the media.  In short the site helps users make decisions by asking questions.  What has me excited about this innovation is the chance for marketers to finally relate with social media in a way that isn’t so obvertly obvious regarding info gathering tactics.  The brilliance of it all is that the user is volunteering very relevant information that can be used to create a deep user profile, which marketers will love.  I’m not sure how Huch will use its info gatherings but as the site grows it may find itself as the new model for interactive strategy.  Co-founded by Flickr’s co-founder, Patricia Fake, the site has huge potential and uses a simple/clean interface which is very attractive.  It is still in beta, invitation-only, so it takes a few days to sign up, but it is defiantely worth trying out.  Lots of fun too!  Check out this article for more details at ReadWriteWeb.

For the last few months, 64Digits has been down due to switching their server. 

Now, it seems as if someone has hacked the site and replaced the index.php file with one from the gay shock site Meatspin.       It seems as if its back to the normal outdated message from FSX, but this also happened a few times during this hack.   

Until updated, don’t visit 64Digits. It is recording IP addresses and other information.

< This is my day job

The Media FX Group is quickly establishing itself as one of Canada’s top event production houses and website development firms. Our clients leverage the talents of our team to bring their visions to life through many different media formats including video and audio production, interactive development, promotional DVDs, creating and managing delivery for digital signage networks, e-learning and rich media web 2.0-styled community/social networking websites.

Call or email for more info: Office: (604) 639-7380, info@mediafxgroup.com

James Rhodes from roket-games.com has released a Firefox-only “InstantPlay” plugin much like Yoyogames.com’s InstantPlay. This one has the capability to run any Windows application (not just Game Maker games) and allows you to embed a play button on any web page.

Installation is quick and smooth, and the progress indicator on ‘buffering’ games far less obnoxious than YYG’s, but one still has to wonder about the security implications of a plugin that allows arbitrary binaries to run with a single click.

A previous InstantPlay alternative is the Java-based GMBed (v2.0 beta released July ‘08). Covac Software also published GmX, an ActiveX-based system, which has had no apparent activity since ‘07.

Tom Russel released the 4th issue of his well known GM Magazine today. Compared to previous editions, this release is visually friendly, but don’t be fooled – it is still heavy on the text. With an almost unbelieveable 90 pages of a content, the magazine is almost like a book.. so you will likely need to schedule some time off if you want to read through the whole thing.

Nevertheless, the magazine is still interesting and even includes an interview with former GMNews writer, Mark Carroll. The PDF of the magazine can be downloaded here. In my opinion, it is quite amazing how just one person is able to put together something of this magnitude and quality and I think Russell deserves a pat on the back for that.

-

Also in the news (although slightly dated news); YoYo Games has announced that it will merge its Wiki with the more content full GMPedia operated by the GMKing team. This will no doubt improve the exising Wiki which is almost hanging on by a thread and until now hasn’t had many updates since its first appearance.

For a third time in three days, the YoYo Games glog has been updated with yet another post.

It reads,

The deadline for the third YoYo Games competition is quickly approaching. You have only four more days to submit your entries. We hope that we will see a number of interesting additional submissions. Checkout the Competition page for details. Please realize that the deadline is strict. Last time we extended the deadline because of the problems caused by the server move, but that is not the plan this time.

So there you have it, your last chance to submit a game so don’t miss out. For everyone else, click here for a list of participating games for you to check out and rate.

-

In other news, GMSchool, a community forum to help Game Maker users is starting to take a turn for the worse. The previously popular message board, is becoming increasingly bare with some forums having no posts in months. Due to the lack of recent support, the owner of the forum is unable to continue funding the community and therefore will not be able to make the required annual payments for forum licensing and hosting costs to maintain the site.

As a result, the community is going to be moved back to Invision Free (a free forum hosting service) where ShadePlay23, the owner of the board, hopes the forum will gain some attention and pick-up it’s popularity once again.

The YoYo Games Glog received an official update today. Boasting an updated version of WordPress, the blog will open up to a broader range of topics including those previously reserved for Mark Overmars’ (no longer in use) personal blog.

Records of user registrations have been wiped clean, so all users will have to re-register for posting however for the time being users can post after having their comment approved by a moderator of the glog.

-

Gm Weekly is a new Game Maker magazine start-up which promises hopes to release a new edition every Friday of each week. The magazine is more like a small newsletter, with only 2 1/2 pages of content, it is no wonder DPoole, the author, is able to keep up with the weekly schedule. This first issue contains various recent GM news items as well as a small tutorial on creating a simple ‘pause game’ function. The publication has mixed reviews, but for a first release – who’s complaining?

-

GmMkr, a user on the YoYo Games forums, has posted a topic called ‘Josh’s Amazing Codes‘ which essentially is a challenge for Game Makers to decipher an encrypted string of characters. The prize is not too note-worthy, but I know a lot of Game Makers who enjoy a good thinking challenge, and I thought I might pass it on.

P.S. Josh has rated his puzzle with a difficulty of ‘EVIL’, so be warned

The much anticipated revision three release of Enigma has just been made publicly available.

The Enigma project is an effort to make Game Maker project files compilable into native executables which can run on the end user’s operating system without the need of a runner to interpret higher level coding.

Native executables also bring many other advantages/benefits to the table that would otherwise not be possible with Game Maker. To name a few:
- Reduced file sizes
- Significantly increased speed
- Easier to port to other platforms
- Much less processor/resource use
- High protection from decompilation

Enigma is an open source project and can be downloaded directly from SourceForge or the official Enigma forum (with release notes) here.

For a full list of Game Maker functions Enigma can work with, please see this page on the official Enigma development website.

GMTech sent out an e-mail update to its subscribers today to give updates on Issue 13 of the popular Game Maker magazine. The next issue is due to be released shortly and will include articles on a variety of topics such as casual game development, website design, comics and interviews.

The team has also announced that they will be doing a special on YoYo Games in issue 14 which will include an exclusive interview with a YYG spokesperson. GMTech is encouraging users to submit questions that they would like answered on their forum.

Lastly, the GMTech website has had some recent updates and now features a blue design.

GMTech is looking for new writers for their popular Game Maker based magazine. Although they are not paid jobs (as the magazine is distributed freely), the teams hopes that some compensation may be available in the future through full-page advertising in each magazine issue.

The current positions up for grabs are:

Writer
Contrary to what the job title suggests, you’ll probably end up doing more researching than writing. This job expects that you will take charge by researching various different games and delegating writing tasks to other team members. It’s not all research though, you’ll also be expected to contribute some writing pieces yourself.
Edit: gamez93 points out that writers won’t actually be expected to delegate tasks but according to the original post may be expected to provide research to other team members to help them with their writing tasks.

Reviewer
The job is almost self-explanatory, you’ll be expected to write game reviews from a large selection of games as well as exclusive previews.

Issue Checker
Essentially quality control, this job requires you to proof-read and make edits to the magazine’s content as needed to keep spelling and grammatical errors to an absolute zero.

Check the blog post out here

To make up for time lost in our venture to improve our other Scorptek services, we have compiled a list of news items to cover the past couple of weeks.

GM Tech Magazine Issue 12

Issue 12 of this popular magazine was released earlier this month. It includes 50 pages of content covering all aspects of Game Maker, including quality articles, exclusive interviews, game reviews and more. It’s a great read, and is visually appealing. We highly recommend the magazine to any Game Maker user.

For those who don’t know, Wyatt (bendodge), one of the principle writers for GMNews also contributes to some of the magazine’s content.

You can visit GM Tech site and download the issue from here.

GMHC – The GM Hacker Challenge

uuf6429, a well known user of the GMC forums has posted a new challenge for all Game Maker developers to take part in. It is an effort to help improve the security of Game Maker games so that hacking games (for example with the use of a decompiler) becomes very difficult.

While this is potentially a good idea, it also means further security exploits could be exposed in the software, and until YoYo Games fixes them in the next release of Game Maker, it could result in exactly what the project hopes to avoid, easily hackable games.

Unfortunately the challenge was not as successful as previously anticipated. Uuf6429 was taken by surprise when Smarty (former GMC Administrator) was able to recover a script from the game yesterday without “even [starting to decompile] either the game or the DLL.”

Game Maker Games – This Game is Art Competition

Game Maker Games has come out with a new competition just a few days ago called ‘This Game is Art’.

Unlike many other competitions, this one has no pre-defined theme or picky requirements. In fact, it is just the opposite. The competition encourages expressing yourself in an artistic form through your game either as an individual or a team.

For more details and entry requirements for the competition, see this page.

C++ Runner Almost Ready

According to an interview conducted by GM Fetch earlier this month, the C++ runner for Game Maker is nearing completion. This will help to enable Game Maker to run on different computer platforms (e.g. Mac) and should improve the overall performance of Game Maker game executables.

See their website for more information, and for the full interview.

A build of ENIGMA was released to the public for the first time today. It is a project by JoshDreamland and others designed to be open-source, cross-platform competition to Game Maker.

ENIGMA uses LateralGM (by IsmAvatar and others) as its IDE, but it is currently only an alpha release that doesn’t do much of anything. LGM opens and edits Game Maker files, and they can then be compiled with ENIGMA. ENIGMA parses GML into C++, which will supposedly allow it to be a drop-in replacement for GM.

Currently only scripts, objects and rooms have any functionality, but even this seems to have caused considerable buzz among the project’s rabid fans over at 64Digits. Note that we’ve talked about both ENIGMA and LGM in the past.

It has been a well known fact that YoYo Games is constantly looking for ways to expand their community of amateur game developers. The company already acquired the large and well known Game Maker Showcase community last year; now it looks like their new target is 64Digits.

We have reliable inside sources who have informed us of some recent negotiations between YoYo Games and 64Digits which have now come to a conclusion. The 64Digits staff have quietly agreed to accept shared portions of the private take-over bid put forth by YoYo Games. Much like Game Maker Showcase’s takeover, the 64Digits website is expected to disappear into thin air and redirect users to the YoYo Games homepage.

The planned date for the takeover to occur is on the 5th of April, but the website will start shutting down game and blog post submissions as early as Thursday.

Users who have their games submitted on 64Digits need not worry as YoYo Games will be transferring all game submissions over to their website and hosting them free of charge. The games will be uploaded under the username “64Digits_Games,” and an online form will be set-up for users to submit an application to transfer ownership over from the temporary username (this may take a few days).

There have also been some staff changes as a result of the imminent site closure. To be more specific, Flashback and Ludamad have resigned from their position and some of the administration staff will be given moderator positions at the YoYo Games website and forum as of April 6.

It was only a matter of time before this happened, but it’s quite sad to lose such a great community so suddenly.

Edit: Sandy has informed us that the acquisition of 64Digits will be more like a ‘merger’ than a takeover, offering existing members the option to transfer their 64Digits account (along with all submissions) to the YoYo Games website. Sandy also mentioned an interest in integrating a blog feature into YoYo Games user profiles similar to that found on 64Digit’s current website.

In keeping with the current trend of late publications, Game Maker TV Issue 3 has been released, at long last. This comes along with a new site, which is a relief to many Cute-News haters.

The issue centers around reviews of 10 games from the YoyoGames Winter Contest that the GMTV staff rated the best. With almost 30 minutes total running time, Eggers does a thorough job of critiquing each game, and the gameplay footage is actually fun to watch, although the sound levels could be better. The rest of the show features Yours Truly mumbling his way through GMTV’s first interview.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth your while to watch the show. The quality of the issues has been improving drastically with every release, and this one is no exception. The music is far better, the on-screen dialogs are good, and the flow is an improvement, although there is room for a lot more.

(But personally, I enjoyed the credits more than the whole show.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, Chronic released a screenshot of the new prototype GMC skin. It has been received enthusiastically at the GMC, which is probably quite a relief to the much-bashed YoYo Games staff. At the moment, Chronic is focusing his efforts on re-working the header banner image of the new design and is considering a couple of user created designs, one of which is Scorptek’s own (see screenshot here).

Also, xot posted an interesting topic linking to Jason Rohrer’s Game Design Sketchbook blog, where he speaks very highly of Game Maker’s RAD abilities.

“Perfectionism was supposed to be a 1-week prototype. To implement the game, I used Game Maker, and this was my first experience with the tool (I programmed all of my previous games in C++ and used OpenGL or SDL for graphical displays). I was shocked at how much I accomplished in a mere 16-hours of logged development time, and I’ll just state it flat out: Game Maker is an astounding piece of software.”

In the PR flap following the release of Game Maker 7, several independent projects were started as Game Maker replacements. Despite a considerable amount of skepticism, some of them have made noticeable progress. Here’s a report on their status.

G-Creator

The current incarnation of the abandoned G-Java project, G-Creator plans to allow users to make Java games through an easy function set similar to Game Maker’s. Written in Java by TGMG and some others, it plans to support nearly every platform imaginable. Although it is not currently possible to compile a game with it, the IDE is nearly complete. It is currently at “Milestone 1″, which is a buggy demonstration of the new interface.

Screenshot of G-Creator Aurora Release

ENIGMA

Much fuss was generated on 64Digits about this project by JoshDreamland, DFortun81 and others. It has the distinction of having actually compiling a game, which, although it was non-interactive, executed at a very respectable clip. It’s development seems rather chaotic, but it currently has objects, variable classes and a GML parser. A release of some sort is expected in late March.

ENIGMA is modeled closely after GM with an almost identical Win32 interface (which will most likely be replaced with a GTK interface) and GML support. Its biggest feature is that it translates GML to C++, so it can produce compiled games and users can edit their games directly in C++. ENIGMA plans to have Linux support.

ENIGMA Game Screenshot (No interface screenshot because the current GUI uses GM’s icons, which are copyrighted.)

Azíel

Not much is known about this project by GearGod, codenamed Azíel. It will probably be XNA-based, which would make it Windows-only, unlike the other projects discussed here.

Screenshot of Azíel

Lateral Game Maker (LGM)

Although this isn’t exactly a competitor to GM, IsmAvatar and TGMG’s cross-platform IDE supports reading and writing of Game Maker’s editable files. Most of the work on this to date has been focused on the file formats, and other projects have been built largely upon IsmAvatar’s documentation of GM’s file formats. This is not the only attempt at a third-party IDE, but it is the only one with a chance of being released anytime soon.

The GUI is mostly done, the file formats are completely done, and the program is very usable (the sprite editor is the most noticeable exception). The creators “do not believe in a release date.”

Screenshot of LateralGM 1.5.7.1

Although these projects are infants compared to Game Maker, they will certainly make for an interesting year.