Category Archives: GameMaker

GameMaker: Checking whether a string is a valid number


Some things are numbers, some aren't

GameMaker Studio 2.2.2 released few days ago, bringing, among improvements, "GML consistency", which changes how automatic type conversion works in corner cases.

A little less known thing, together with that it also changed how GameMaker's string-to-number conversion function (real) works, having it throw an error if your string is definitely not a number.

A slight inconvenience, given that there is not a function to check if a string is a number before attempting conversion.

But, of course, that can be fixed.

Continue reading →

A yellow accent skin for GameMaker Studio 2 (and how to make your own)


(click for full-window version)

As it becomes increasingly more apparent that many people are completely unware of GameMaker Studio 2 having a light skin and fail to recognize it as being GameMaker as such, I have decided to stop using it for screenshots in my assets/blog posts.

However, the default dark skin is a little boring, so I decided to make a custom one with a familiar yellow tone for accents. This also doubles as a general explanation on how to make skins.

Continue reading →

GameMaker: sprite_add_sprite in Studio / Studio 2

On this fine day[1], we're[2] proud to announce that we're bringing back everyone's[3] favourite GameMaker 8.x function!

That's right, we're bringing back sprite_add_sprite! 🎉

Now, you might be thinking either "this is not what I've expected" or "this is exactly what I expected [after reading the title] and I only have more questions now". You see, there's not always justification for things happening, sometimes they just do.

Should you actually need this function or if this introduction got you curious, take a seat and let me tell you a story (and some code),

Continue reading →

GameMaker: draw_sprite_ext_skew

(click to interact) (mouseover/click to play GIF) Drag sliders and click things (if JS is enabled)

This post is about a slightly fancier version of draw_sprite_ext - maybe you want to apply skewing/shearing to the sprite, or scale it after rotating it, or use a 2d matrix transformation.

The built-in function isn't made for that, but, with a little bit of math and draw_sprite_pos, you can have a script for this.

Continue reading →

GameMaker: Formatted date output

(click to interact)

This is a small post about a replica of the strftime function seen in PHP, C standard library, and a handful of other APIs. Such a function takes a date-time and prints it according to the given format string.

The script supports the common formats and those that mapped reasonably to GML functions.

Continue reading →

GameMaker: Microtester

Performance tester/comparator for GameMaker
And other reasons to avoid overusing reflection

On this fine day I have published the project that I use to compare relative performance of different approaches to algorithms. It aims to get a few things right with this:

  • Tested scripts are re-shuffled between runs to lower execution order/CPU cache bias.
  • Script call time can be excluded if you are comparing approaches rather than actual scripts.
  • Easy to use - you add scripts that you want tested to the project, specify how you want them to be called, and that's it.

The project can be found on GitHub.

GameMaker: Simplest possible instance methods

A tutorial about implementing instance methods in GameMaker.

After seeing series of increasingly strange uses of "user events" in GameMaker games for object-bound actions, it came to my attention that most people are only vaguely aware of other ways of doing things, so I decided to write a small blog post on the matter.

There are many uses for these - for example, you might want to have a "take X damage" method on your enemy objects so that it can be varied depending on requirements - some enemies might just take damage, some should retaliate on being hit, some might have a fancy damage reduction formula. Being able to comfortably define/redefine methods on per-object-type basis can help a lot.

Continue reading →