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(1 edit) (+1)

From their license statement, it appears that the free trial period license does not permit you to make a final executable (which is a requirement of participating in the GMTK game jam). So no, you would need to purchase a full version of the editor in order to use it, to my understanding.

As an alternative, you could try out Godot Engine. It's completely free and open source, is honestly a lot better than GMS2 (and gradually approaching the quality of Unity/Unreal, though still has a lot of work to do to get there), and even includes visual scripting if you wanna go that route (though the official step-by-step tutorial series uses GDScript, a C++-Python hybrid that is tightly integrated with the engine and *extremely* easy to use and build content with. Like GMS2, it has a dedicated 2D editor, but is also a lot more flexible and powerful. Supports GDScript, VisualScript, C#, and, if you know what you are doing, at least a dozen other languages.

Full Disclosure: I'm a Godot contributor.

Thanks for the in-depth input. I also appreciate the disclaimer at the end. 

I’ll take a look into it this weekend. Fiddle around and read the documentation. 

Hopefully I’ll find it perfect for this gamejam, and for fiddling with ideas in the future. 

Just to make sure, are their any money based licenses around Godot?

> Just to make sure, are their any money based licenses around Godot?

Nope! The engine is completely free and open source, following a FOSS philosophy. There is a Patreon for donations, and users who donate get credits they can use to vote on new features and documentation in monthly polls. Godot Engine is managed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit dedicated to free and open source software, so you can rest easy knowing that there are no commercial incentives behind its development. The developers' are purely devoted to building the best engine possible for the community.

Thanks a lot for the heads up! Godot was a pleasure to work with!

I'm glad you enjoyed it! :-D