I discovered Game Maker after a few semesters of Java programming classes. I've always coded, and I wanted to make playful, imaginative things. College wanted me to make piles of apps using JAVA Swing. I began to google for a faster way to play.

So GameMaker. Started by one college professor in the Netherlands to teach students game design. The software provides built-in event handling for common inputs and a 2D graphics system. Basically, you attach pictures to objects, drop objects into rooms, and you're playing a game. It's come a long way since those days, but is still a really fun way to prototype fast and to get into game-making.

You go along dropping graphical objects and event-driven logic into something like a game, but when it's time for text, you quickly realize you need text to “typewrite” itself, and to word-wrap, and to fit within boxes, and you need a character avatar to animate with it, and you need choice boxes on the screen to select the next dialog choice…

It's a problem that comes up on a weekly basis over on the Game Maker Forums. Game Maker leaves a large hole when it comes to pre-configured behaviors and object prototypes. If you just want to drop some working textboxes into your newly coded game…you're going to have to do a lot more coding.

There are other dialog/Visual Novel engines on the Game Maker Marketplace, but these all suffer from a host of difficult problems:

• Lack of flexibility in story structure (Details)
  VN tools usually have static links: you choose A, it goes to dialog A, choose B and it goes to B. Cut-Scenes are usually limited, too–what if I want the “end scene” of a game to be made from several sets of ending sequences, depending upon choices throughout a game? Most VN tools can't stitch together an ending scene like Mass Effect 2. Slide has these features.
• Lack of advanced text features (Details)
  There's a lot of expectations on text in modern games: Custom fonts, colors, emojis, “wiggling” animated words, text wrapping, and auto-pagination, for example. Text is often expected to drive in-game events, like changes in character expression, too!
• Lack of modular design to add features (Details)
  VN tools can get pretty complicated–Slidge certainly is! But some effort should be made to keep the dev-customize-able parts clear. Many of Slidge's parts are interchangeable and modable, and all data is JSON-based.
• Requiring tons of engine-specific functions (Details)
  Usually, implementing someone's VN engine requires learning a set of custom commands and parameters, and then diving into their code to discover ways to customize the other 90% of the features. Slidge certainly has self-contained custom functions, but launching the engine is simple, cleanup is automatic, and customization is visual.
• Inability to preview visuals while designing the game (Details)
  Adding dialog via code is a tough way to make custom scenes. Slidge places a visual editor over the top of your game (or an empty game) so you can set everything up visually, then import the resulting JSON into your final game
• Lack of data integration between the engine and the rest of a game (Details)
  Bringing data into a VN tool from a game shouldn't be hard for the dev! Suppose the player inputs a name into the game, and I want that name to be used in dialog? Suppose I want a choice selected in a dialog scene to affect a stored piece of data back in the rest of my game? Slidge uses a central Map data structure and a tag-based syntax to pull data in and send data out easily.

Sooooo. Using Game Maker? Adding VN elements? SLIDGE!