The Raspberry Pi sure is a versatile device and thanks to GameMaker Studio 2 from YoYo Games , it might even end up as more of a gaming unit with newly added support for exported games.

In the version 2.3.1.542 release of GameMaker Studio 2 that went live on December 16 ( details ), it mentioned in the release notes how it now supports "Ubuntu ARMv7" as an output type for their editor. We discovered this thanks to the developer of Shield Cat mentioning on their Patreon post how they've been updating their game to hit higher performance on the Raspberry Pi.

Curious about more details on this, we reached out to YoYo Games to clarify some details of this new feature. Their CTO, Russell Kay, mentioned this in reply to why they started supporting Linux ARM devices:

We are big fans of the Raspberry Pi and have been looking to support the device in a cost effective way with the release of the OpenGL driver and the higher power (CPU and GPU). It became viable for us to release and support the Raspberry Pi target, since it was generic we expanded it to include devices that support the armeabihf architecture, assuming the device has the correct libraries that we require, but our primary target is the Raspberry Pi running raspbian.

With that all now in place they said this in reply to future upgrades to their Linux support in GameMaker Studio 2:

We will improve our Linux offering over future versions, but we are not able to announce specific changes at this stage.

Game Maker Studio powers some really popular games, and it continues to be a very popular game engine for indie developers. Released titles like Hyper Light Drifter, Minit, The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED], The Swords of Ditto, Stoneshard, Nuclear Throne and a great many more were all built with it.

Will be fun to see if many developers decide to put out more Linux builds of their games when using GMS2, both on the desktop and for the fantastic Raspberry Pi device family.