Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou

Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

Use GameMaker Studio 2 Trial at Home

You can live with the limitations!

The GameMaker Studio 2 Trial licence is designed to let you explore the IDE and learn how to use the product, permitting you to make small test projects and prototypes.

However it has certain limitations, the most important of which is that in this version of the product you can test game projects on your machine, but you cannot create final executable packages for any target platform.

You are also constrained as to how big your test projects can be, up to the following limits:

  • Objects – 15
  • Sprites – 20 (SWF and Spine sprites are not allowed in Trial)
  • Sounds – 10 (no audio buffers permitted)
  • Tilesets – 2
  • Scripts – 10
  • Paths – 5 (In-game path-creation functions are not allowed in Trial)
  • Timelines – 2 (In-game timeline-creation functions are not allowed in Trial)
  • Fonts – 5 (In-game font-creation functions are not allowed in Trial)
  • Rooms – 5 (In-game room-creation functions are not allowed in Trial)
  • Shaders – Not allowed in Trial
  • Included files – Not allowed in Trial
  • Extensions – Not allowed in Trial
  • Configurations – Not allowed in Trial

Accordingly, in-game functions that create or change available resources, e.g., sprite_add(), sound_add(), timeline_add() or sprite_create_from_surface(), are not available in the Trial.

Other than those resource limits, there are a few other elements missing from the IDE:

  • You cannot set the size of Texture Pages
  • You cannot create Texture Groups
  • You cannot create Audio Groups
  • You cannot import or use SWF or Spine format sprites
  • You cannot create Extensions
  • You cannot purchase or download assets from the Marketplace
  • You cannot sell or publish assets on the Marketplace
  • You cannot use the built-in Source Control
  • You cannot import any projects (GMS2 and GameMaker: Studio 1.4) other than our official demos and tutorials
  • You cannot change the Splash Screen shown at the start of your game
  • You cannot disable anonymous IDE analytics
  • You cannot opt-in to the Beta Channel to get IDE and runtime updates sooner

If you have further questions about these limitations or anything related to the GameMaker Studio 2 Trial Licence, please see the GameMaker Studio 2 FAQ.