@DarkRonin That is because there were 2 reasons. The first is that there were no free alternatives to GameMaker at the time, and I had no capability of online payment to get a paid engine. The second reason is that I wanted to compete with Crimelife 2 on the yoyogames website but to submit to that site required that the game be made with Gamemaker.

I used a 3rd party collision detection extension for GameMaker that caused glitchiness and lag for the first game. I tried to improve the situation on the second game but realized it was not enough improvement. It was by this point that I decided to drop that demon of an extension for good but it was too late, Crimelife 2 was miles ahead with 500,000 downloads. 'Gangs of New York' was slowly catching up but reached 10,000 downloads until the yoyogames website got shut down.

Looking back at it now, I wish I hadn't used that extension and stuck to GameMaker's native collision system. I shouldn't have overdone it to make it much bigger than crimelife 2, should have made it only a bit bigger or better. Next thing I know, crimelife 3 came out, followed by a few other short but quality games. Sakis, the developer had effectively run away with it and dominated the yoyogames community.

47 minutes ago, DarkRonin said:

 

• Ogre3d
• DirectX
• OpenGL
• Panda3d
• Irrilict
• SDL

Those were compiler based, had no visual editors. Most needed Microsoft Visual c++ which had a cost. OpenGL was too bare bones needing me to build an engine first. I was a programming and game dev novice, it was hard for me to use them, I was a teen at that time. I used to practice on 3DRad 3.0 whose free version could not create executables. I overlooked Blender, didn't realize it had a game engine.

Literally none of the options mentioned required Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Express had been freely available for a couple of years at that point.

You're right that they were programmed rather than using a visual editor though, that requirement would have cut down your options significantly to the various ClickTeam products, Adventure Game Studio, scratch, RPG Maker, and a couple of other options.

Blender Game Engine was not yet available at that time.

3 hours ago, sprotz said:

Those were compiler based, had no visual editors. Most needed Microsoft Visual c++ which had a cost. OpenGL was too bare bones needing me to build an engine first. I was a programming and game dev novice, it was hard for me to use them, I was a teen at that time. I used to practice on 3DRad 3.0 whose free version could not create executables. I overlooked Blender, didn't realize it had a game engine.

Yep, the VC compiler has been free since 2003. IDE since 2005.

3 hours ago, sprotz said:

Those were compiler based, had no visual editors. 

GameMaker has never had a 3D visual editor. All 3D in GM is done through pure code.

You keep talking about 'free'. GameMaker 8.1 (which you say you used for your projects) has never been free either.

Are you saying that you just couldn't find torrents for the other game engines?

@DarkRonin I knew nothing about torrents until around 2010, I knew nothing about other file sharing sites like projectw until around 2007 and then I couldn't find anything suitable on projectw.

At this point I'm just going to gently remind people that admitting to or encouraging piracy is a bannable offence in this community: many members here make a living selling games, game making software, or books and other educational materials, and as such we don't allow discussion that encourages theft from your peers.

All this discussion of sprotz' history is getting off topic, let's get back to the topic of discussion or split off a new topic if you want to continue.

Not really sure if it counts as 'as indie'. Anyway, I was working with a title that's going to show off in Tokyo Game Show (wow!) a few years back. We just had a new senior developer in the team. This guy completely ignore the regulation we have:- he showed up in the office at noon, and work until midnight. Also sometime he decided to lock the file in our MS Visual Source Safe over night, everyone that needs to work on the same file will have to wait for him until he arrived at noon. (we used to have file locking in VCS. Modern day VCS does not have this as the basic concept behind has changed drastically since then). 

Also, our game were designed to be a sidescroll shooter. One day he came up with a code that the protagonist wield a whip (similar to Castlevania), out of the blue. No one know this was coming. 

Well it was kept until the game was released one year later (I had left the company before the release date). I don't know how it turned out in an actual game though. 

The worst time is always the start of a new project...  As many times as i've said to myself to prepare the skeleton blueprints for the stuff i have to do again uhh..  While the content and expansion part i enjoy the most, early stages of the core prototype development is a grinding work.