Pixel Game Maker MV

The development of Pixel Game Maker MV was directed by Takuya Hatakeyama for Kadokawa Corporation in Tokyo. The development team included people who had worked on console games for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 3DS. The software was intendend to facilitate indie game development without the need for programming. Pixel Game Maker MV was developed with indie developers in mind, and its features were gradually introduced through making reference to traditional 2D action games. During development the team attempted to recreate classic action games such as Super Mario Bros and Mega Man to ascertain that most of the important features required to develop such games were included.[6]

Takuya Hatakeyama reports that during development some issues, such as the software being resource heavy or object clipping, had to be severely troubleshooted. These issues were fixed as much as possible but he stated that they may still occur to some degree. To circumvent such issues, Pixel Game Maker MV was incorporated with various tweaking functions for several parameters so that such issues may be addressed by the users during their process of developing a game.[6]

The software was shipped with the inclusion of a series of quality-of-life functionalities, such as tutorials[2] and the “execute object action” function which not only allows users to initiate the action of an object by bypassing other links and conditionals, but also allows them to apply the action of one object to another so they can use the same action for multiple objects. Other parameters, such as gravity and frame-by-frame animation adjustments, can be incorporated to specific designs. The early access version of PGMMV was newly released by Kadokawa Corporation as a beta version on July 24, 2018. It was released on Steam on 19 September 2019.[6]

Pixel Game Maker MV is reputed to have sold more than 2,000,000 copies worldwide.[7] During the time of its release the software has been considered as a success within the independent developer community but has been criticized for being a relatively new and undocumented product, and lacking features such as drag-and-drop functionality.[8] Other reviews of Pixel Game Maker MV state that despite its potential, the engine is overshadowed by competitors such as Unreal Engine and Unity, as these have been constantly improved for various decades whilst Pixel Game Maker MV is comparatively younger.[2] In 2020, it was praised by IGN for allowing developers to apply for worldwide publishing of games developed through PGMMV on the Nintendo eShop.[9] The periodic game development contests organized by the team behind PGMMV and called the Pixel Game Maker MV Game Development Challenge have generally been well received.[10][3] Other reviews indicated that Pixel Game Maker MV is a flexible program with a decent resource library and a relatively easy user interface.[1]