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Add to SafariWhen comparing GameMaker Studio 2 vs Flax Engine, the Slant community recommends GameMaker Studio 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for point & click adventure games?” GameMaker Studio 2 is ranked 37th while Flax Engine is ranked 54th.
Question 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 Free
Can be used for free until you hit a rather high revenue cap, at which point you have to pay royalties.
Pro Powerful C# scripting
C# scripting is really well made, comparable to Unity, but without any of the legacy cruft.
Pro Multiplatform
Supports most platforms, including Windows, Linux, Android, Nintendo Switch, ...
Pro Modern rendering backend
Has a very modern, performant and beautiful rendering backend.
Pro C++ support
The entire core is written in C++ and it supports writing game code in C++. The interoperability between C# and C++ is also nothing to scoff at.
Pro Supports multiple IDEs
Works with any text editor and comes with proper support for Visual Studio, VSCode and Jetbrains Rider.
Pro Excellent documentation
The documentation is well written, up to date and accepts improvements from the community.
Pro Great and extensible editor
The editor is both powerful and simple. My favourite part is how easy it is to extend the editor with custom magic.
Pro Source code available
The entire source of the engine is available on Github, though not under an open source license.
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 New software
As is standard with new software, not all of the bugs have been ironed out yet.
Con Few plugins
Unlike more mature engines, there isn't a vibrant ecosystem of plugins yet.
Con Not open source
While the source code is available, it's not quite open source
Con Not latest C# version
It uses Mono and is still on some variant of C# 7.
Con No OpenGL support
It only supports modern APIs, namely Vulkan and DirectX. This means that it won't run on very old machines.
