When comparing GameMaker Studio 2 vs Blacksmith 2D, the Slant community recommends Blacksmith 2D for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Blacksmith 2D is ranked 48th while GameMaker Studio 2 is ranked 67th. The most important reason people chose Blacksmith 2D is:
Automatically detects changes and updates bitmap cache. Allows to gain even more performance on heavy scenes and runs smoothly on old devices.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick prototyping
Pro Good user interface
Pro Well-optimized engine
Pro Has a trial version (but limited functions, can't export)
Pro Many unofficial tutorials
Most GMS1 tutorials are fine for GMS2
Pro Highly customizable IDE
Although users must work within the IDE and editor, GMS2 has many options to customize the look and feel
Pro Good documentation
Pro Huge, generous community
Pro Cache as bitmap
Automatically detects changes and updates bitmap cache. Allows to gain even more performance on heavy scenes and runs smoothly on old devices.
Pro Most valuable when size matters
All engine code is written in ES6, fully GCC typed, allowing to eliminate all dead code from your app.
Pro Advanced scene graph and rendering pipeline
Dirty flag tracks scene changes and avoids unnecessary calculations and context calls. If no changes were made to the scene since last frame, no rendering will be done. Battery efficient.
Pro Good performance
According to the tests on the Github page, the performance is better than in Phaser!
Pro Good and clear source code
The source code is well commented and easy to understand.
Pro Super small build size
Super small build size through dead code elimination. The best for playable ads and Facebook Instant Games.
Cons
Con Not the best scripting language out there
GML is just weird; if you want to learn programming, it is not the best because it teaches bad habits and has many odd shortcuts and shortcomings that won't transfer to a real language
Con HTML5 export is buggy, doesn't "just work"
Con Quite expensive
Windows ($100) + HTML5 ($140) + Mobile ($400) + UWP ($400) is $1,050, plus $800 anually for each console export separately. But doesn't do anything any of the free engines can't do, and the stability and tech support aren't great.
Con Unstable
Users frequently report crashes and hangs, particularly when working with assets, and the software uses a complicated underlying meta-file structure that may become corrupted and cannot be rebuilt
Con Limited support for OOP
Con Small development team
The core programming team is only 5-10 people, with about 30 employees total, so bug fixes can take a long time to be addressed, and there aren't many official tutorials
Con Small community
The project is young, so the community is extremely small.
