GameMaker makes a few more open source moves with extensions

Well, I have to admit I am surprised that the takeover of YoYo Games (who develop GameMaker) by Opera has been largely positive with them making more moves towards open source.

Back in November, they open sourced the HTML5 runtime for GameMaker, which was quite a nice step for developers building web games. They also made big improvements to their Linux support back in April.

Now they're back again with a fresh announcement, as they're open sourcing a whole bunch of extensions and they have more on the way. It's still baby steps in terms of the overall project being open but still a lot better than certain other companies. Some of what they've opened up includes the Google H5 Games Ads extension, Steamworks, Epic Online Services, Microsoft GDK, Google Play Services, GOG, Firebase, WebView, GameJolt etc and they have plans to do more.

Some of the advantages they list with them being open source include:

1. It lets you look behind the curtain, and understand how the code you’re using works. This allows you to use a library in a more efficient manner as you understand its inner workings.
2. The team at GameMaker is always working to improve extensions. In addition to that, having access to the source allows you to make your own fixes and updates to an extension.
3. You can build your own version of an extension with custom changes to suit your project’s needs. Later, you can submit these changes as pull requests, so other developers can benefit from your work.

A bunch of them were actually open sourced earlier this year pretty quietly on their forum, with the full announcement only being made today.

Hopefully this trend over at YoYo Games will continue, and eventually we might see the GameMaker editor as open source too. They're clearly becoming more friendly to the idea of open source so I wouldn't rule it out. It's a very popular game engine for developers and would be amazing to see happen.