Game creation engine GameMaker is 25 years old today, and to celebrate, the software suite's developers have released a free game that you can play on Steam right now.
As you might expect, GameMaker 25th Anniversary is a management sim in which you must manage the development house creating GameMaker. Whoa, recursive.
You'll have to keep your employees happy, choose which features to add to your game creation engine, and upgrade your office in order to keep worker productivity at a maximum. Along the way, you'll also collect "posters based on the history of GameMaker".
Creator YoYo Games (which is, believe it or not, also the company responsible for making GameMaker) describes GameMaker 25th Anniversary as a "minigame-filled, top-down management and strategy game".
The game has a lot in common with the likes of Game Dev Story and Game Dev Tycoon, although this one's based more around creating creation software itself rather than the games made with said software.
Of course, GameMaker 25th Anniversary was also made in GameMaker, and YoYo Games says it intends to make the source code assets and project files free to GameMaker users soon in the form of a template for the software kit.
It's all part of celebrating GameMaker's 25th year on our storied planet. You can read a blog post detailing what else YoYo has in the pipeline for GameMaker as part of these anniversary celebrations right here if you're interested.
If you're wondering exactly what GameMaker is, it's a game creation toolkit that specializes in creating 2D games across all current major platforms.
Some of the games that have been made using GameMaker include all-time classic Undertale, cozy farming sim Fields of Mistria, and ultra-violent arcade action game Hotline Miami, to name but a few.
GameMaker is free to use on a non-commercial basis; the transition from paid to free was made last year, at which point YoYo also seemingly took a swipe at Unity, which was, at the time, going through a major controversy surrounding a runtime fee for developers.
You can download GameMaker and get started with it via the tool's official website. GameMaker 25th Anniversary is currently available to play for free on PC via Steam.
