Made a very simple but infinitely extendible debug menu for my game that's already helped me squish some tough bugs 😄 I highly recommend adding something like this early when making a game - The time it'll save later is well worth the effort. What sort of debug commands do you add to your games?

https://monkeyboxstudios.itch.io/the-new-owner
The New Owner — Demo

A psychological horror visual novel about a quiet house, an unexpected visitor, and a past that refuses to stay buried.

Doc wanted a quieter life. He got one.

After leaving his old job in the city, Doc moves into a house on a hill and tries to start over. Then Dave arrives with an unusual request: he wants to buy a painting Doc has kept on the wall.

The visit should be simple. It isn’t.

A hidden note, a strange remark about the house, and a set of stairs beneath Doc’s laboratory lead to a place that feels uncomfortably familiar. The deeper Doc and his unexpected companion go, the harder it becomes to believe that his old workplace was only an office.

About the game

The New Owner is a psychological horror visual novel that begins with an awkward, sometimes funny story about starting over. As the characters uncover clues, the tone shifts into mystery and dread.

You play as Doc’s friend and confidant. Your choices shape conversations and how Doc responds to the people and events around him. Some choices seem small when you make them. Their meaning may become clearer later.

The demo follows Doc from his former life in the city to his countryside home, Dave’s unsettling visit, and the discovery waiting beneath the house.

The demo includes

• A story-driven visual novel demo
• Hand-drawn scenes and original music.
• A gradual shift from dark comedy into psychological horror.

i used ai for help with coding

Estimated playtime: about 20–30 minutes.
Language: English.
Controls: Mouse or click to advance dialogue and select choices.
Platform: Play in your browser.

Hi everyone I’m new to game development and I’ve been trying to make a Rhythm Game for my school project via game maker. I’ve been trying everything to make an actual chart for my games but it doesn’t really match up to the song. I’m getting pretty upset about it as my group members are depending on me. Can anyone help me out?

Hi!

I'm developing an educational puzzle game aimed at children. The main goal is to teach concepts such as shopping, budget planning, and analyzing shopping lists in an intuitive way.

I had to take a few weeks off from development because of my college exams, and now I'm getting back to the project. I'd like to share how I've structured my system so far and ask for suggestions on the most recommended next steps in terms of architecture and code, since GML is still pretty new to me.

First, I need to explain the idea behind the kits. Basically, they all contain the same products and brands, but the quantities, prices, and discounts vary. The idea is to add replayability by giving children different shopping experiences when they replay the same mission.

For example, Kit 1 would be the balanced option, with reasonable market prices and no discounts. Kit 2 would have higher prices for dairy products but discounts on meat. The other kits would follow the same logic, varying prices and discounts to make each shopping experience a little different.

What I'd like to do is make the game switch to a different kit whenever the game restarts or the child decides to replay the level. For now, I plan to implement four kits, but I'd like to add more in the future.

My question is how to structure this system in a GameMaker script. I need to store the data for each kit and make the game select the appropriate kit whenever a new run starts.

Initially, I thought about choosing a kit randomly, but I'm worried that with only four kits, the child might play with Kit 1, restart the level, and end up getting the same kit again. So, I was wondering if it would be better to implement a system that cycles through the kits or otherwise prevents consecutive repeats.

How would you recommend implementing this system? Would it be better to use random selection with no consecutive repeats or rotate through the kits in order? And how could I organize each kit's data in a script to make it easier to add new kits in the future?

(Sorry for the wall of text! I'm not sure which tutorial would help me with this...)

I’ve been wanting to experiment with a cutscene style similar to mewgenics, but the only sprite animation I could find was frame-by-frame. I’m aware tweening is possible in the program, as i already use it for intractable functions for the player to use.

My question is if I can use out-of-program tweening softwares (eg toonsquid, procreate dreams, etc) to import videos or gifs to save time and sprite space rather than animating in the program itself. Any help is appreciated!!

Hi,

I'm working on my first project in GameMaker, but I have some previous programming experience.

I'm working on a shoot em up game, and after adding all the sound effects I noticed that sometimes when I tried to play through what I have so far, the sound effects would start cutting out. I did my research and found that the likely cause was number of sound effects being played exceeding the default number of audio channels, so I increased the number of audio channels but later decided I would find a better solution.

After some tweaking and testing, I am very much at a loss. I first used the audio window in the debug overlay to see all the audio sources being called, and I saw that two specific sound effects that played very frequently were being played, but then the audio channel would stay magenta in the debug menu, leaving it unable to be used and causing more and more channels to be needed until eventually there weren't enough channels and the audio starts cutting out. I tried using audio_is_playing conditions to reduce the amount these sound effects are played, but I still occasionally get the issue of the audio channel staying magenta and not being usable, and once one audio channel gets stuck like that more channels usually do the same. One of these sound effects, the sound for the player shooting, works fine until for whatever reason the audio channel stays magenta and the internal logic considers the audio to still be playing despite it being long past the duration of the sound effect, so with a is_playing condition the sound effect will no longer play. This problem seems to affect most of the sounds in the project, but mainly the sound for player shooting and enemies taking damage because they play the most often. I tried cleaning my project and updating to the newest version of GameMaker in hopes that it might help, but no luck. All my sound files are currently in .ogg format, uncompressed and not streamed for the short sound effects.

I guess I could kind of brute force it with more audio channels, but it just doesn't feel right to do it that way. I'm sure there's some dumb thing I'm missing and I'm going to be looking through the project for any mistake I've made that's causing this, but I thought maybe someone here would have some idea what might be going wrong and how to fix it. Thank you!

ROG Xbox Ally controller detected but doesn't work in GameMaker 8 fangames or Super Smash Flash 2

​

I'm having a weird controller issue on my ROG Xbox Ally (RC73YA).

The problems:

it was working for 1 day then it suddenly jsut stopped

\- GameMaker 8 games: The built-in controller is detected, but none of the inputs work. I've experienced this with Sonic Boll 2.1.6,Undertale and Redux

\- Super Smash Flash 2: The controller doesn't appear to be detected at all.

\- The built-in controller works in other games.

\- JoyToKey works as a workaround, but I want the controller to work natively without having to use a remapping program.

What I've tried / noticed:

\- The controller appears in Windows as ROG Xbox Ally Device Gamepad.

\- Driver version shown in Device Manager: 2.0.9999.0.

\- I checked the device's hardware IDs, which include "USB\\VID_0B05&PID_1B4C".

\- The issue seems to affect older GameMaker fangames more than modern games.

\- Updating the MCU firmware to V335 did not resolve the issue.

Does anyone know how to get the built-in controller working natively with older GameMaker 8 games and Super Smash Flash 2 on the ROG Xbox Ally? Could this be an XInput/DirectInput compatibility issue, or is there another way to make these games recognize the controller properly?

I'm specifically looking for a solution that doesn't require JoyToKey if possible. Thanks!

I accidentally deleted half the sprites in the game and SAVED what do I do now? I really can't remake all the sprites that would take weeks can somebody help?

Im making a game thats taking place in a vhs mainly, but theres a crt effect i want for it, its used in hotline miami, both games, if you wanna see wanna see what im talking about. im mainly speaking about the scanlines.

Just a small project I've been working on, I want another person's opinion so I know if it's worth continuing. (The GIF made the textures look slightly weird)

I'm working on a game with big enemy swarms, and I had a custom draw pass that renders every visible enemy and obstacle to a mask surface, sorted far → near by depth. I used a ds_priority for the sorting: add every instance with its depth as priority, then pop them with ds_priority_delete_max in a loop.

At ~1000 enemies on screen, this pass alone cost me 5-9 ms per frame. So I set up a reproducible benchmark: game paused (Draw keeps running), camera frozen, 1295 enemies + 550 obstacles = 1845 objects.

Results for the whole pass:

- Original (ds_priority): 9.57 ms

- Same loop without the actual draw calls: 9.48 ms

- Removing other suspects (ancestor checks, scoping, while vs repeat): no difference

- Plain array, unsorted: 1.18 ms

- Array + counting sort on depth: 1.40 ms

So 8.2 of the 9.6 ms was spent inside ds_priority_delete_max. All 1820 draw calls together cost only 0.16 ms.

In my measurements, delete_max behaves like a linear scan over the whole queue. Call it once per element and your loop becomes O(n²). It doesn't show up with a few hundred instances, but it explodes when you scale up.

The fix: two parallel arrays (ids + depths) and a counting sort on floor(depth), then loop backwards for far → near. Counting sort is stable within a bucket, so I could drop my tie-breaker too. Same image, ~8 ms saved per frame.

If you're popping a ds_priority in a loop with hundreds of entries, it might be worth measuring.

Cheers! hopefully helpful for someone out there.

I’m making a rhythm game and sometimes lag spikes desync the song from the cues and inputs, my first thought was to slow down the music if the frame rate drops but I can’t find a function that changes the speed of a sound, if there it or there’s another way to fix this please let me know

I have these about 20 specific cards in the game each with their own specific properties and sprite, so I guess this means they each should be their own object, but I need to spread them into two defined decks that each share some of the same cards and have some specific one of the 20 that exist. So, does this mean I have to define two lists of Card object instances at launch, but then when visual representations of some cards appear on the screen as part of the HUD are they supposed to be other instances of the Card objects or instances of a different Card Slot object that only borrows he sprite of a given card? Sorry, I'm new to GameMaker.

I have 2 objects: obj_flour_box and obj_flour. I want to create obj_flour within a controll object whose event is inherited by obj_flour_box.

They way I am currently doing it is by creating a string of object_index and removing the "_box" part and then converting it back to a number so that an instance can be created from it. Why I am doing this is because I don't know any other way and I need to be able to create many items which follow the same logic so I only need to use the same naming system rather than copy pasting all the code in each invidivual object.

The current code I have is:

e_item = instance_create_layer(x,y,"Instances",asset_get_index(string_delete(string(object_index),string_length(object_index),-4)));
with (e_item) {
  obj_player.item = id;
  selected = 1;
}

However I get the following error message: Creating instance for non-existing object: -1.

Does anyone know how to resolve this error, or a more effective way of doing what I want to do?

As in, are there any tutorials for making such a game in Gamemaker? I tried looking on this sub and it led to 8/9 year old posts with the solutions since deleted and I've quite frankly no idea where to start. I figure asking for help before jumping in would be for the best, because jumping in feet first and getting nowhere will kill my motivation.

So, I was wondering how I would make a 2.5D style game in gamemaker where there are 2D sprites interacting and moving in a 3D world, similar to games like Grandia or Octopath traveler. Would Gamemake1/2 be a good engine for this in the first place or should I use something different entirely?

I have an assignment due tomorrow morning but this code keeps popping up and idk how to fix it

ERROR in action number 1

of Step Event0 for object Obj_player:

Variable Obj_player.obj_node_t(100026, -2147483648) not set before reading it.

at gml_Object_Obj_player_Step_0 (line 5) - var hitting_t = collision_rectangle(bbox_left,bbox_right,bbox_top,bbox_bottom,obj_node_t,0,0)

############################################################################################

gml_Object_Obj_player_Step_0 (line 5)

Pls help

Procedural/code generated art is really useful for smooth animation, visual tricks, and is tiny compared to image files.

The only issue is it's really annoying to transfer your art into GML, so I made a tool that lets you design or import art, and then convert it into a script that renders it in the game.

All the shapes are converted into structs and all of their values can be changed at runtime.

Git > https://github.com/ploondev/vectorgml
Online > https://vectorgml.netlify.app

[AI usage: The idea and design was not influenced by AI. The code was assisted with AI to speed up development.]

My projectiles have no collisions with the soul. And I know that this is because of surface, because with no surface such thing doesn't happen. What I can understand is that the coordinates of projectiles on the surface don't collide with the coordinates of the soul on the screen.

But I have no idea why. With the other attacks the surface worked normally.

here's the code:

in obj_deck_diamonds (the projectile) create:

surface = surface_create(146, 96)

in obj_deck_diamonds draw

draw_surface(surface,obj_battle_controller.x-71,obj_battle_controller.y-46)

if surface_exists(surface){

`surface_set_target(surface)`   

`draw_clear_alpha(c_black, 0)`

`draw_self()`

`surface_reset_target()`

}

The surface sets free when the object destroys

The coordinates of the projectile when it creates.

if dir_proj == 1{

`instance_create_depth(-20, random_range(0, 100), obj_soul.depth-5, obj_deck_diamonds)`

} else {

`instance_create_depth(180, random_range(0, 100), obj_soul.depth-5, obj_deck_diamonds)`

}

If someone can help me, please. Because I genuenly don't know what is happening, and how to fix this.

I’m making a rhythm game in gamemaker and I’ve just found out that (because of the frame rate) my game won’t sync properly with the music leaving some cues and inputs off beat, is there a way to change my games frame rate using code (as I would need it to be different for each level). From what I’ve seen you can only change the frame rate in options

So, I am decently new to Gamemaker but I now have a problem with my project

The idea is simple, you press the button, enemies spawn until there are no more enemies to spawn

However, when I press the button, the game stops completely, no inputs or anything of the sort is registered and I cant even close it. Only with Task Manager or by starting the project again.

Anyone can help with that?

I've made this shader for tree-leaf movement.

Here is a short "tutorial" on how I made it.