Developer and tools company YoYo Games has warned against the current push towards browser-based 3D gaming, questioning its value when compared to less asset-heavy 2D games.
“I’m personally bamboozled by why anyone would be excited about playing a big 3D experience in a browser, because why not just do it as a standalone game?” YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan tells us during an interview.
YoYo Games recently released a beta version of GameMaker that supports HTML5 and allows for the creation of games that run in-browser without the need for a plugin.
“There’s not much to delineate between a browser and something that runs on your desktop,” he explains. “Having amazing 3D in the browser is interesting, but I don’t see it changing games.”
Head of development Mike Dailly, former senior programmer at DMA Design, agrees.
“The downloads for every level are going to be silly; you’re going to be sitting there for ages waiting on stuff,” he says. “I don’t quite follow what they’re playing at. If you [try to play an] Unreal Engine game [through a browser] and start your level up, it‘s going to be horrible.
“You really want to get a game all downloaded, installed and then get that nice full-screen experience rather than sitting on a browser.”
YoYo Games’ development environment GameMaker allows users to build games without writing code using a drag-and-drop interface. While it supports limited 3D, the majority of developers using it produce 2D titles such as Jesse Venbrux's They Need To Be Fed. Duncan doesn’t see this as a limitation, however.
“As long as Nintendo keep making money out of Pokémon, we’ve probably still got half a chance!” he says with a smile. “That’s a little bit facetious of me, but we see plenty of opportunity for people to make money for the foreseeable future with fantastic 2D games; look at Angry Birds!
“Games don’t have to [include] clever 3D to be entertaining.”
Excessive power
With Adobe now supporting 3D in Flash, and powerful alternatives like Unity available to developers, does YoYo games not feel any pressure to make such tools available to its users?
“We could definitely improve the 3D tools in [GameMaker],” Dailly admits, “but I wouldn’t like to take focus away from the 2D.”
”I struggle with some of the things other people are doing, and I don’t necessarily mean Unity, but just giving away your tools for free in the hope that people might use them,” Duncan adds. “You’ve got to think about what’s the purpose of you tool? If it’s been purposed to make big, fat console games - which are lovely - that’s a complicated tool. But do you really think that’s right for ten-year-olds?
“GameMaker comes from the other direction, and you might say to me, ‘Does that make sense for 28-year-olds?’ And the answer is yes, I think so. We have no problem spanning everybody’s development abilities upwards. 3D vs 2D is a big leap, for anybody.”
While GameMaker might not offer the ever more complex toolsets needed to create ‘console-quality graphics’ in-browser, YoYo is content, believing that the real money remains in 2D games.
“You’re not going to write Crysis or Unreal 3 in GameMaker, but the vast majority of the biggest selling games are all 2D, and you could easily do those in GameMaker,” Dailly says. "A lot of these tools are really nice, but unless you’re doing a big 3D game, I just don’t see the point in them – it’s like trying to open a bottle with a sledgehammer.”
Last week Facebook director of platform marketing Ethan Beard told us why he believes the social platform has nothing to fear from the next generation of browser games.
The full interview with YoYo Games can be read here.