I come across games all the time that are made using GameMaker. I just want to know why people use it? There are much better options out there, which are free and in some cases easier to use. GameMaker is also very inefficient, and lacks a physics engine. The scripting language is also clunky, and there are bugs in the engine itself.
GMS arguably provides the fastest playable 2D prototypes of a game when compared to any other engine. This in itself is a huge advantage as you can try out wacky ideas and see how it plays out in practice.
Another big advantage is its accessibility. GML is designed to be very newbie friendly and it even goes as far as to be forgiving of a lot of coding's "bad habits".
Very true. You can get used to some things that are terrible coding practices and later on have issues with that. However, being able to move forward with your project and not linger on a small (and ultimately unimportant) mistake is paramount, especially if you're new and just want to make something. As long as you get the end result you wanted, none of that "clean code" matters.
game maker is great for teaching problem solving. you can code games in game maker extremely easily and any 2d game can be made in game maker provided you look online to figure out how to solve a particular problem. with game maker especially the old versions of game maker code can be power inefficient however because game maker makes doing everything in it extremely easy. Even easier than say something like dreams for ps4. You can make efficient solutions that don't waste a lot of power despite game maker being a very high level language depending on how much drag and drop you use. Starting in game maker made me frustrated with other programming languages mainly because doing simple things in other programming languages could take days while simply doing things in game maker takes hours. However depending on what your doing you can spend a lot of time doing tedious things in game maker. Ive made a lot of game maker games that use lots of objects and global variables so they can be more memory intensive than they need to be. However theyve always been power efficient. the only metric I really judge my games on is if the game uses low wattage in a utility like intel xtreme tuning utility or throttlestop. I doubt anyone will follow these instructions but just in case you don't need to do that. intel extreme tuning utility and throttlestop are both overclocking software but they also measure power consumption.
*if you just want to measure wattage for performance and are just starting out programming in game maker like when I was in middle school or something you can use core temp. Ive heard of other ways of measuring code efficiency but it all inevitably comes down to the power consumption although if you use too much ram you prevent some mobile devices from being able to play your game.*
what it comes down to really is do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond. In game maker its easy to do a lot of things but youre constantly having to do creative workarounds for things that aren't possible in the language while other programming languages allow you to do much more but make it much harder.
