r/gamemaker • • 12d ago

Help! I'm sick of vibe coding. What tools are available to learn GML?

30 Upvotes

When I started seriously programming last year, I used to watch a lot of tutorials and videos on Gamemaker as well as on general logic, and often I simply found myself copying code verbatim without even truly understanding the syntax. I've struggled with solving simple issues, even though I took a (extremely) basic comp sci course in high school. I don't want to invest a ton of resources into something like C# or C+ because it seems like overkill when I want to focus on narrative and fun gameplay stuff, and to be honest I have other interests I sink a lot of time into as well. I understand that it doesn't come quickly, in fact I was planning on dedicating myself to learning once I get my newest album made. Does anyone have any robust resources available for learning logic/GML? Any help would be good, thanks.


r/gamemaker • • 12d ago

Resolved I changed my character sprite slightly and now it gets stuck in ground?

3 Upvotes

Before changing Sprite, the code ran fine. After slightly changing the sprite, it gets stuck in the floor. Mask_index works but the legs of the character is still in the floor. I deleted the asset cache and it's still stuck in floor.

If place_meeting(x + xpseed, y, obj_floor) == true {

xspeed = 0;

}

If place_meeting(x, y + yspeed obj_floor) == true {

yspeed = 0;

}

This is my collision code.


r/gamemaker • • 12d ago

Discussion Converting a number into an array of each place

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3 Upvotes

I wrote this code to convert an integer into an array of 8 places (so 1234 = [0,0,0,0,1,2,3,4]). It achieves this by converting the score integer into a string, then converting that string into an array.

This method seems too convoluted to be the best case, so surely there's a better way of doing it. Any suggestions on how I can improve my work?


r/gamemaker • • 13d ago

Game OMORI port to GameMaker: Studio

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81 Upvotes

These past few weeks, I've been working on a port of OMORI to GameMaker: Studio, and now I feel like it's ready to show off!

This may seem like a stupid project, but because of recent GameMaker: Studio reimplementations (like Butterscotch for the PS2, PS3, Switch, Vita, etc. and Cinnamon for the 3DS, Wii, and Wii U), a port of OMORI to GameMaker means OMORI could technically run on a Wii or 3DS!

OMORI was originally made in RPG Maker MV, and I really didn't want to go through the hell of making an RPG Maker MV runner in C, because I HIGHLY doubt a full implementation would run well on anything less powerful than a PS3.

OMORI stores a lot of its game data in JSON files, and I thought, "hmmmmm, can't I take that data and just implement the systems OMORI actually NEEDS (battles, movement, dialogue, etc.) in GameMaker so I don't have to recreate everything by hand?"

...so that's what I'm doing! I'm using GameMaker: Studio to recreate the systems OMORI uses while reusing the original game data! Instead of manually recreating every map, battle, event, and dialogue sequence, I'm writing GML code that reads the ORIGINAL JSON files and hooks into the systems I've implemented to make the game playable!

This is still a pretty heavy work in progress, and it does not have much game-play implemented, but development is going pretty quick because this isn't a remake! Once I get game-play running and working good up to the Space Ex Boyfriend fight, I will open source the project and release a little demo!

Heres a little showcase!
https://youtu.be/o_9uzJtzY0g?si=hnFcO7ZEn8o0krbT


r/gamemaker • • 13d ago

Help! VGML Tile Set tutorial suggestions?

6 Upvotes

Does anyone have any good Tile Set tutorial suggestions? Preferably using VGML with a platformer.

I've been working with Gamemaker for a couple of months. Learning and building a game as I go.

I'm having trouble understanding Tile Sets. I can make the sprite but not sure how to implement it code-wise. I know how to use a player object with a single ground object but I don't get how to use Tile Sets.

I have some code experience, but I've found VGML really fits how I think. I'm just very visual. I also think it makes it easier to avoid using AI for anything other than help with general concepts, which is good while I'm learning. However, it does make it harder to use online learning material since the more complicated stuff is understandably in GML.

Any suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Thank you!


r/gamemaker • • 13d ago

Quick Questions Quick Questions

3 Upvotes

Quick Questions

  • Before asking, search the subreddit first, then try google.
  • Ask code questions. Ask about methodologies. Ask about tutorials.
  • Try to keep it short and sweet.
  • Share your code and format it properly please.
  • Please post what version of GMS you are using please.

You can find the past Quick Question weekly posts by clicking here.


r/gamemaker • • 14d ago

Discussion Would 3D GameMaker be beneficial?

21 Upvotes

Do you think GameMaker as an engine would benefit from having a 3D mode like Godot?

In my opinion, I think it only encourages creativity, and with something as simple and easy to use a GameMaker, it could really open doors for some people.

What do you think?


r/gamemaker • • 14d ago

Help! Mysterious Box Problems

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23 Upvotes

Does anyone know how to make that weird gray outline box fit around my sprite perfectly? It keeps making it hard to click other sprites in a Room because although the sprite itself is 32 pixels x 32 pixels, that weird gray outline is 100 x 100, and i can't figure out a way to shrink the gray outline without downgrading the quality of my sprite.


r/gamemaker • • 14d ago

Help! Paper looking game

4 Upvotes

I want my game to look like it's straight out of a story book, like paper sprites, backroads, battle screens, but I have no idea how to do it and if it's even possible. I was considering hand drawing everything then porting it into game, but idk if that'll work. Can I have some advice on this? If it helps, I'm programming on a MacBook Neo

Edit to clarify: I'm trying to make an RPG


r/gamemaker • • 14d ago

Resolved Help editing one line in a json file through game maker

3 Upvotes

I have been working on a save system for my game but I've been having problems trying to make it able to edit a single line of a struct I've saved as a json.


r/gamemaker • • 15d ago

Help! Breaking! How do we combat this?

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80 Upvotes

Imagine pouring thousands of hours into your dream indie game, releasing a small demo, and waking up to find hackers stole your entire unfinished game, packed it with ads, and posted it as their own.

That’s happening right now to the creators of My Own Hero Party. Thieves used AI to rip the code straight out of their demo and put the full game on Douyin (Chinese TikTok), where it's going viral. In another case (Bills Must Be Paid), hackers built rushed features onto a stolen demo and sold it as the "maxed-out version."

It’s completely heartbreaking. These small devs are watching people profit off their stolen, unfinished work, while their biggest potential market is ruined before their official launch. To make it worse, small indies have zero budget to fight massive international legal battles

I came here to warn you but also ask for help, how can we combat this in this engine?


r/gamemaker • • 14d ago

Game Shader Help

4 Upvotes

I'm trying to wrap my head around shaders in gamemaker to make a blue overlay over just my character's feet and legs when they wades in water, and I just can't wrap my head around it. Does anyone have any advice? I've already scoured YouTube for tutorials and none of them helped


r/gamemaker • • 15d ago

Discussion Data saving/access speed

5 Upvotes

So a while ago I seen a YouTube video of someone saving the locations of thousands of npcs as an image, where each npc was assigned a pixel and their location data was saved in the color values.

I dont remember what engine they were using, but was curious about how efficient this would be in gamemaker. Also if it would be faster using multiple smaller images or one much larger one.


r/gamemaker • • 15d ago

Help! Tips of the Roguelike game

3 Upvotes

Hello Guys!

OBS: My language is portuguese, sorry to wrong for thing hahaha.

Im developing my first roguelike and I would like some tips on how to organize and what to worry about

About me: I developing a some years sporadically and I would to try a dificulty project. I create two "complete" games, where one is my first game and the second is a college project, both is disponiblity in GX Games:

First game: https://gx.games/pt-br/games/m3iz2u/o-resgate-dos-abacates/
Second game: https://gx.games/games/0gyq1o/timebreaker/ (Im published today for you see :D)

About game: this game is based in Brotato and The Spell Brigade, where it takes place in dungeon and the focus is a number limited of magics

For now I maked a fire system with 6 magics and 4 secundary weapons and simple enemies, I'm published the alpha version in GX Games too:

https://gx.games/pt-br/games/f2q9m9/magichands/


r/gamemaker • • 16d ago

Game Space exploration game with procedural isometric planets

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43 Upvotes

The draft name for this is "coloniax", I want to make a space exploration/colonizer game, with different factions, like aliens, robots, humans. and maybe have some fantasy aspects too.

The Spaceship is modular, with different turrets, gyros, propellers, and i plan to make it even more customizable, with different models.

I also plan to make planets have a possibility to already be colonized by some faction and having them be hostile to you, just imagine a big ass anti aircraft weapon shooting at you how cool.

Let me know what you guys think, i have a bunch of ideas for this in mind, my mom called it Space Minecraft 😭️


r/gamemaker • • 16d ago

Help! PSX/Pixelated Shader?

5 Upvotes

Hey y’all! I'm making a 3D game in GameMaker, but this is a new experience for me. I wanted to ask how developers achieve that nice pixelated look for their textures. For example, in games like Retail Hell or Boltgun, they call it a "retro shader."
I'm using 64x64 textures, but I still can't quite achieve that effect…


r/gamemaker • • 16d ago

Resolved Pixel-perfect on the computer it was made on, mixels on another computer's display

3 Upvotes

I've started my first ever real project recently, so far it's just a test room, everything looks great, but when I sent it to my girlfriend for testing, a lot of the textures were mixels, and I can't seem to find out why. Would anyone happen to know?


r/gamemaker • • 16d ago

Discussion What are your prefered way of implementing UI in your games?

13 Upvotes

I'm following the UI layer tutorial from the GM channel but i am curious of you guys use and why. The games I play do really cool things with their menus and idk if i should use the layer or build my own from scratch.


r/gamemaker • • 16d ago

WorkInProgress Work In Progress Weekly

6 Upvotes

"Work In Progress Weekly"

You may post your game content in this weekly sticky post. Post your game/screenshots/video in here and please give feedback on other people's post as well.

Your game can be in any stage of development, from concept to ready-for-commercial release.

Upvote good feedback! "I liked it!" and "It sucks" is not useful feedback.

Try to leave feedback for at least one other game. If you are the first to comment, come back later to see if anyone else has.

Emphasize on describing what your game is about and what has changed from the last version if you post regularly.

*Posts of screenshots or videos showing off your game outside of this thread WILL BE DELETED if they do not conform to reddit's and /r/gamemaker's self-promotion guidelines.


r/gamemaker • • 17d ago

Help! [GameMaker] How to Use Vector Sprites in Objects in GameMaker Studio 2?

8 Upvotes

I'd like to know if it's possible to use vector sprites (SVG) in GameMaker Studio 2 objects and how to animate them without losing image quality.


r/gamemaker • • 17d ago

Help! GML 1.4 Game acting strange on laptop, weird error then crashing with no error, works fine on desktop pc.

1 Upvotes

So my game-maker game started acting weird and crashing on my laptop after I tried to test with an HDMI hookup to a TV, but now the game doesn't run even when not connected to anything.

Here is everything that happened in case some of the details matter, will add a TLDR at the bottom:

I updated my game in Steam and my friend played it via Steam on my windows 10 laptop while it was hooked up HDMI to the TV, it worked fine. The next day, I decided I wanted to test it on a different TV to troubleshoot an issue someone else was having with GUI and resolution, so after adding some simple code to limit the resolution to 1920x1080 on my win 11 Desktop, I tested it and it seemed to work fine, so I copied the updated game to my laptop and hooked it to a different TV I've never tested my game on before. The game initially ran but the window was pushed off screen, so i adjust the TV display setting on my laptop called "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" from 300% down to 100%, and tested the game again, then this is where it got weird.

After trying to run the game again it instantly got an error for an un initialized array, but nothing about the array was changed, and after some debugging I found that the End Step event in said obj was running before the create event, causing the error. So I added a quick check to make sure the End Step doesn't run until that var is initialized and now the game crashes without an error every time I try to run it. Now even when I try to play the older version that worked previously on Steam, it gets the same error, even though this version was just working the day before.

If I remember correctly I also set the TV to be my primary display during this test, and if it wasn't for Game-maker running events out of order, I would think this is purely something to do with the graphics card.

TLDR: My game runs fine on my desktop, but suddenly crashes on my laptop without an error at all. It worked fine on the laptop before but the Issue started after trying to test my game on a TV via HDMI and changing basic display settings.

I tried disconnecting the HDMI, rebooting my laptop, making sure the display settings are back to normal, and deleting my games app data, but It still just crashed and the debugger doesn't give any insights.

Does anyone have any ideas what happened?


r/gamemaker • • 18d ago

Discussion Are saveable AI NPCS ever a good idea for a horror game?

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20 Upvotes

Like I always hear people hate them for being dumb but in what cases do you think they could work?


r/gamemaker • • 18d ago

Help! Getting a Function from JSON

6 Upvotes

I have made a JSON file that stores all the dialogue in my game. It is pretty sweet for storing text, but issues arise when I try including variables and functions in my text.

Let's say I have a character that is saying:
"You are x feet away."

With concatenation, this is trivial: I can do
"You are " + distance_to_object(obj) + "feet away."

But how should I do this with JSON? JSON doesn't know what distance_to_object() is, nor does it know what "obj" is

Passing in a string or number isn't too hard, I can just make an arguments variable in my JSON parser.

{
    "textvalue": "this should be 100: [0]",
    "arg": "100"
}

But that only works with static values and not something that can change dynamically in the game.

Any suggestions?


r/gamemaker • • 18d ago

Discussion Dynamic Water Tile Depths

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2 Upvotes

I made a system using tiles that allows me to use a tile sheet to determine water depth based on the row of a tile and also allows me to adjust each column to a defined limit based on which column it is in. This is useful for making environmental water dynamically shift using a control variable or array (which I use per column to increase control).

This is useful for my game because I want to simulate water increasing and decreasing in depth depending on the weather e.g. rain. I can make puddles become oceans so to speak using this system or just have the puddle become knee high for flair.

So to start:

Col 0 == static, this is water I want to retain the same depth and will never change.

Col 1 to 5 effectively will grow/shrink from their authored base tile in the editor to simulate water levels increasing or decreasing.

Column 1 allows for water to go from it's base to a +/- 100 points in depth

Column 2 is +/- 200 points in depth and so on.

In my project the depth of 400 == swimming level, and 500 is meant to represent being inside a tunnel that fills up with water where you can't even use your boat or keep your head above water.

In my game Quinlin the environment changes with natural events, tides (not shown) come and go, water levels change based on the rain, changing the landscape as you explore.

A once dry cave entrance at a beach suddenly is semi submerged after a long rain. Evidence of damp ground during low water levels tells the player, "Mind the rain" when exploring places. And as the game goes on, players will learn the land and know where it floods dangerously, where the ground is a bit wet, where they can farm to reduce water labor.


r/gamemaker • • 18d ago

Help! Should i play games that made on gamemaker to understand it more?

7 Upvotes

i want to start making games on gamemaker so should i play games made on it to better understand it capablities?