With the recent surfacing of the Game Maker 8 open beta, I felt duty-bound to download the tool and give it a whirl to see what's improved over previous versions.

It turns out that there're quite a lot of tweaks in the new release: some of them are purely aesthetic, while others shake the system to its very core and sprout random slices of chocolate cake when you enter the secret code. It's quite clear already that Game Maker 8 has made a considerable jump over its predecessors in a way that will benefit just about any user out there.

While the program is still in beta (and carries its fair share of bugs), it's still very possible to take a look at a few cool things:

New bits and pieces

The first thing that I noticed upon firing up my copy of the beta was the presence of one or two new windows. First of all, there was the snazzy little tutorial tab on the right: a basic walkthrough to help you make your first GM game. Not particularly useful for most converts, but it's a lovely touch to draw in newbies and, quite frankly, even the best tutorials will pale in comparison to a guide that holds your hand while you're in the program itself.

Game Maker is also increasing its ties to the online world (a move that was started in GM7) with a news window that updates itself regularly with GM community announcements, competition details, tutorial links and anything else that could possibly interest a user. It's yet to be seen how comprehensive this service will be – for the beta, it's mostly been restricted to bug-fix announcements and other test-related malarkey.

Aside from this, the first impressions of version 8 should be quite familiar to GM veterans: your standard dev space on the right, your resource tree on the left and the standard array of options lining the top.

Game Maker 8 sprite editor

The sprite editor

Something that I've heard about for a while already (and have actually tested prior to this release) is the new sprite editor in GM 8. Most users will recall a very basic – and even frustrating – method of sprite generation supported in older versions of GM, and if you're anything like me, you'll be accustomed to firing up the GIMP to get your drawing needs out of the way rather than resorting to the painful pixel-by-pixel process of the built-in editor.

The new sprite editor has improved by a country mile (I've never understood exactly what a "country mile" is, but I'm using the term anyway) and it's truly a pleasure to fiddle about with random drawings now. Sure, it's still not as sophisticated as most pixel-pushing suites out there, but at least it can now hold its own against MS Paint. That, and it has dropped the infuriatingly roundabout method of text insertion as well as – dun dun duuuuun – "bloody-bottom-left-corner-transparency" syndrome.

For those of you who are unaware: the alpha value of a sprite's pixels in older versions of GM was always determined by the colour present in the bottom left corner of the sprite (an icky dark green by default). This became a problem if, say, your elected colour turned up inside the sprite itself, or if you somehow wanted to paint over that bottom left pixel with a part of the sprite. Royal pain in the buttocks.

GM's sprites now have full alpha channel support, a huge leap forward. There's also a flexible and very useful new system for tweaking with a sprite's collision mask, based on a variety of parameters.