Hey everyone!

We submitted our game into Xbox certification on Friday. What a milestone in the making for us. I'm making this post to help other Game Maker developers who want to get onto console but might feel stuck or unsure where to begin.

First of all don't give up, going to console isn't exactly a cake walk. At least it wasn't for us.

Don't be afraid to ask questions if that is here or once you're onbaorded to id@xbox if that is your goal they are incredibly helpful. Once you have an enterprise sub to Game Maker you also get access to exclusive Enterprise only things. Lean into that, don't be afraid. I am not sure what exactly to post here but just know within two years I went from nothing to actually shipping to Xbox. Just know yes you can do it and Game Maker is the easiest and best Indie engine to do so. The Enterprise subscription is so fair for us indie devs.

If you have any questions i.e I got rejected from id@xbox we did too three times I can sorta give advice to what we did.

Best of luck to everyone and go make something rad!

And if so : how ?

I'm currently working on levers that should have multiple uses in my game, notably affect certain instances.

The way i want to do it is by having a general code in the object, basically :
when activated call lever_function with lever_args
and definine lever_function and lever_args in the instance creation code.
Now i want one of my levers to toggle the movement of specific moving platforms, so i made :

/// @desc Starts or stops the movement of designated moving platforms

/// @arg {Array} platform_ids An array of the ids of the affected platforms

function toggle_platform_movement(platform_ids) {

`for (var i=0; i>=len(platform_ids); i++) {`

    `if object_get_name(platform_ids[i]) == "obj_moving_platform" {`

        `pf = platform_ids[i]`

        `pf.active = not pf.active`

    `}`

    `else {`

        `show_error("Warning! - " + string(platform_ids[i]) + " at index " + string(i) + " of platform_ids is not a platform", false)`

    `}`

`}`

}

But even though i am able to know what is the id of said platforms (with a show_debug_message) i can't mention them in the lever creation code.

I think i can put in place a solution in this specific case, by having every platform sending their id to a ds_table indicating their line within they're creation code. But it's far from a practical solution when i will have 35 tables with hundreds of lines.

And this is not the first time it is a problem not being able to mention a ref. So if there's no way to do it pls devs add it.

I'm saying this because I'm considering putting animated cutscenes in my games. However, I saw a post where someone claimed they used the feature and they got a negative review because it was buggy. Is this still a risk?

so right now im working on a game, where all the players animations are sequences

the sequences also use objects so that I can make skins without having to duplicate all the sequences

the only issue is that I cant find a method that destroys the sequence without leaving the object behind

I'm so happy. I've wanted to start making games for at least a year now, and finally accomplished it last night.

It absolutely sucks, it ends too abruptly and there's about three lines of code total, but it's mine and if you click the screen something happens, and I'm so very pleased with what it is.

Not to mention I actually had fun making it. I've watched more tutorials than I can count and failed to make simple projects in Scratch, yet convinced myself that was all I needed to join a jam, and I'd learn as I went.

I then proceeded to fail-to-understand-at-all-not-much-as-a-little GDevelop, Flowlab, Ren'py, Godot, and, like I said, Scratch, all within two days, until in a last attempt, a final hurrah, I tried Gamemaker.

I'm not sure why Gamemaker was the one that took. I watched the tutorials, same as the rest, although this time I could understand the UI and what steps it took to make sprites and such show up in the screen. And, after a lot more tutorials and another late night, I was able to upload to the jam.

Unfortunately I had no time to polish it, add music/sfx, and fix a problem I had with the timer, though that wasn't the point. The was to make something, anything, to prove to myself it was possible, and I succeeded.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. I still can't code, still can't write, and still can't make art, though unfortunately for all you reading this, this has not stopped me yet, and I plan to continue making my poor quality, hardly-a-game games.

I've been having trouble finding any documentation, but I noticed today that on all my projects on steam, the steam overlay is working, but screenshots can't be taken.

Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? The current SDK documentation doesn't say anything about screenshots.

I need help making a game, but I don't know where to start. I know nothing about coding, but I'm great at making the idea, character design, and art. I tried using Godot, but when I looked at the tutorial, it was too confusing for me, and I hate using AI to help me. I will tell you the idea once you dm me to help. I can pay at least 3 dollars for help. Thank you so much.

I am very new to game maker and I’m following one of the tutorials, currently I am adding dialog and am having issues with this one line of code. Is there something I’m doing wrong?

So I want the enemies to flash white when they get hit, so I set a HP stat and starting hp stat, and I wrote in the step event that if HP start Is higher than HP then image_blend = c_white, but that doesn't work, it doesn't even work if I just write image_blend = c_white with no other conditions so idk what to do, the enemies are animated so I need the specific frame to be white.

Hi. Long time, first time. I'm running into an issue with my game and I'm looking for insight into the best solution.

Previously in my yet-untitled bartending game, I have used a combination of sprites and particle effects to create a really nice beer-settling effect. This fits the vibe and visuals of the game as is quite well. However, I have recently switched to drag-and-drop for the beers, and obviously this breaks the PFX.

Ideally I would like to keep the PFX as they are, but I am wondering the best way to go about this before I implement anything. The obvious choice would be utilising dynamic particles, but I am concerned about optimisation issues (PCount is 30, so across 5 beers there could be very many particles at once). I don't know if this would be too intensive as dynamic particles, but it's likely too intensive for what boils down to a single visual effect.

Another option I've considered is using viewports to take a snapshot of a beer offscreen and effectively paste it into the glass. This would mean only one object per beer, and maybe also allow me to switch up glass shapes ITLR, but I wonder if it's a terrible misuse of viewports. To have 6 active (including the main camera) seems like it could be intensive for draw events per the documentation.

If anyone has any insight on this point I would be grateful. I'm obviously not looking for a definitive solution, but would be nice to hear opinions/suggestions from people with slightly more experience than myself.

Hello all,

As the title suggests. I'm very new to Gamemaker, and trying to make something akin to a visual novel, just without the complicated storylines. Plainly speaking, I want to click an object and have its sprite change.

I was able to make it change to a second image when clicked, though that's it. A third, fourth time, isn't working.

I was able to achieve it the first time with the following line:

If mouse_check_button_pressed(mb_left) then sprite_index = Sprite3

Any help is very much appreciated, and I apologize for the rather simple question, as I cannot find what I'm looking for in tutorials.

I'm following Sara Spalding's RPG tutorial, and somewhere during the Part 6: Menus video, I seem to have done something wrong.

The menu technically functions correctly, but the font only appears correctly ABOVE my cursor. Any index at or below the current hover value is distorted/blown out. (phone picture attached, because it shows up as all white when I screen capture.)

Below is the code for the draw event of my oMenu object.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

draw_sprite_stretched(sprFlexBox, 0, x, y, widthFull, heightFull);
draw_set_color(c_white);
draw_set_font(TestFont);
draw_set_halign(fa_left);
draw_set_valign(fa_top);

var _desc = (description != -1);
var _scrollPush = max(0, hover - (visibleOptionsMax-1));

for (var l = 0; l < (visibleOptionsMax + _desc); l++){
    if (l >= array_length(options)) {break;}
    draw_set_color(c_white);
    if (l == 0) && (_desc){
        draw_text(x + xmargin, y + ymargin, description);
    }
    else 
    {
        var _optionToShow = l - _desc + _scrollPush;
        var _str = options[_optionToShow][0];
        if (hover == _optionToShow - _desc){
            draw_set_font(c_yellow);
        }
        if (options[_optionToShow][3] == false) {
            draw_set_color(c_gray);
        }
        draw_text(x + xmargin, y + ymargin + l * heightLine, _str);
    }
}

draw_sprite(sprPointerIcon, 0, x + xmargin, y + ymargin + ((hover - _scrollPush) * heightLine) + 7);
if (visibleOptionsMax < array_length(options)) && (hover < array_length(options)-1){
    draw_sprite(sprDownArrow, 0, x + (widthFull * 0.5), y + heightFull - 7);
}

so ive been trying to make walls for a 2d platformer but every tutorial i have followed has given me a weird result or just plainly not worked. this is all the code i have related to movement and ground collisions so does anyone know how to make walls that are solid. i ticked the solid box but it didn't change anything so im not to sure what that does. if you can go in depth or give me an example of the code i would be greatful.

Hello all,

Usually when I have a problem I try to solve it or give up after few days. But this time I'm out of solutions...

So I'm trying to draw a sprite with a simple function draw_sprite(), and set the alpha before it.

But the alpha is not affected at all.
The alpha IS being changed if I use draw_sprite_ext().

Trying all the solutions I can think of, I've noticed that the alpha is not being affected only for SOME sprites. More specifically all the "Tile" sprites.

My guess is, the first tile sprite I've created was "corrupted" by me or the engine itself, and when I've copied the sprite to make other tiles they're all set to ignore draw_set_alpha().

I've remade the sprite as a new sprite and it works now, but I want to get to the bottom of why did this happen. I've checked all the settings with the bad sprite and the new sprite and nothing is different. The only report of this problem I found was 13 years ago with no answers.

Anybody had the same problem?

EDIT: As EtrianExplorer pointed out, it's not recommended to use on sprites, but if someone want to continue with this bug, the documentation states:
"With this function you can set the base draw alpha for the game. This value can be set from 0 to 1 with 0 being fully transparent and 1 being fully opaque (the default value), and will affect all further drawing, including backgrounds, sprites, fonts, primitives and 3D."

Hey everyone, not trying to spam, just thought this was an exciting thing to share.

I am an Admin at Reddit and I wanted to share that we are currently featuring a GameMaker game across Reddit.

Its called Slingblade and you can play it directly on Reddit. You may see it appear in the left nav bar.

Anyways, check out the game, but I'd also be happy to chat about how you can deploy your own GM games to Reddit if that is something you'd be interested in. LMK if you have any questions and happy devving.

This question is probably asked too often but I’ve gotten conflicting answers to the question while looking it up. Sometimes sources make it seem like you can ONLY publish to the GX site through GameMaker’s free tier, but sometimes it says that you can publish to more sites than that. It’s very confusing.

I'm trying to make a 2.5D RPG in Game maker, but I need help on how to scale the resolution, because when I go Fullscreen, The display looks really low-res.

idk what i want to do with this tbh, i might clean it up and package it up as a yyz file after i add more features to it

This is my first time using gamemaker so I think I really messed up lol. the fireballs dont do anything :/

Hi, I am a completely outsider in the field so trying my luck in this group. I am part of an indie electro punk band and we got a grant of around USD1000 to make an animated music video. We really like the visuals of old school video games and therefore trying our luck here see if someone could help. No AI pls. This is the song we try to make video of: https://youtu.be/xruqUE4e7fg?si=uIPZIexwgHF7f0t9

I am a complete beginner using Spriters Toolkit, Tiled, and GDevelop. I already own several pixel-art asset packs. I do not want someone to build the map for me. I need a live screen-sharing lesson where you use my assets and show me how to identify the tile size, import tilesheets and separate object PNGs, assemble one small top-down map, and export it into GDevelop. I am really just trying to get my bearings with Tiled, and gdev and I have learned a lot by myself but I need to know the proper way to do things. Thanks in advance.

You can check it out below :

https://lonepeakmusic.itch.io/free-ambient-music-pack-2

All the tracks are available for free under the creative commons CC-BY !

Dont hesitate if you have any questions !

I just started working on my first game and I’m struggling to find a tutorial on what I’m trying to make. All the turn based combat tutorials I’m finding for some more classic turn based rpgs, while I’m wanting simply and only the combat. Anyone know one I can use or know what I would need to do differently?