The 3D Gamemaker is a computer application developed by The Game Creators

The Game Creators

The Game Creators, Ltd. is a British game development software company formed through a partnership between programmer Lee Bamber and Richard Vanner in 1999, located in Lancashire, England, United Kingdom. The company was formerly known as DarkBASIC Software Limited.The company primarily develops...

  that allows users to make basic shooter/adventure games for Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. Programming and art skills are not required to develop Gamemaker games, but developers may optionally add custom media to their games using the DarkBASIC

DarkBASIC

DarkBASIC is a commercial game creation programming language released by The Game Creators. The language is a structured form of BASIC and is similar to AMOS on the Amiga. The purpose of the language is game creation using Microsoft's DirectX from a BASIC programming language. It is faster and...

 programming language.

The 3D Gamemaker does not encourage one-theme game making, but encourages mixing different themes to make a game that's unique and fun to play.

Games developed with 3D Gamemaker require at least 400 MHz Pentium processor, 64 MB of RAM and DirectX

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

7.0b to run.

Features

The 3D Gamemaker has a built in placement editor that allows the user to indicate where enemies, items, and obstacles go. This is not available in beginner mode or the lite edition. There is also, amongst other things, a simple level creator. It also includes the ability to upload your own media.

Lite Edition

The 3D Gamemaker was also released with a Lite edition that had less possibilities. These options included only Shooter, Space, Driving and Silly. All players, items, and enemies were kept, and the missing scenes were marked with an 'H' in the full edition. The jungle theme only used the cavern and tomb scenes, with no level maker or placement editor.
Both versions of the game cannot be downloaded onto your computer without a disk and there is currently no free trial out.

Criticism

The 3D Gamemaker is known by The Game Creators Community as a bad choice for most users, as it has poor-quality models, and is not very customizable. It is recommended for children that just want to see something work. Its successors, FPS Creator and FPS Creator X10, are much like it, considering that in The 3D Gamemaker, you can only shoot or jump on an enemy, which is similar to an FPS.

There is also criticism over (mainly in the lite version, due to it being more limited) the idea of the games made with the program being made from a series of readily fabricated material, and not made by the user of the program.

External links

• Official site