I recently had to dig this up because someone asked about it, and perhaps someone else might want it too. Also featuring some notes on themes in GM:S.
Continue readingTag Archives: gamemaker
Running GM2024.11+ games on Windows 7
If you try to run a game compiled in GameMaker≥2024.11 on Windows 7, you'll be met with the following error message:
![An error message reads [originally in Spanish]: The procedure entry point MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager could not be located in the dynamic link library MFPlat.dll](/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/mfplat_error.png)
Or, in English,
The procedure entry point MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager could not be located in the dynamic link library MFPlat.dll.And that is an inconvenience, but it is a fixable one. Continue reading
screen_redraw in GameMaker: Studio
(mouseover/click to play GIF)
Featuring more tricks that you probably haven't heard about, and not just for old GameMaker versions!
Continue readingGameMaker: Custom pseudorandom number generators!
I wrote a bunch of PRNGs for GameMaker!
This is a large-ish post about what these are, how they work, when you might want to use them, and performance comparisons.
Continue readingGameMaker: Radial health/progress bars
This is a post about turning this
into this:
(click to interact)Click/drag to adjust %
Continue readingGameMaker: debugging random generation
Have you ever been working on procedural generation, deterministic netcode, or anything else where the order of operations is important?
This is a post about how to debug order of execution for random number generation functions or built-in functions in general.
Continue readingGameMaker: Statics and method overriding
This is a post about how to call a function from a parent constructor in a same-named function in a child constructor and how static works in GameMaker Language in general.
GameMaker: trace/log function with position information
Have you ever wanted to automatically show file+line in your debug output so that you don't have to guess which of three places did a line reading "oh no" come out?
Continue readingGameMaker: DIY closures
GameMaker Language currently doesn't have closures.
It might in GMRT (proposal), but for now you cannot do something like this
function get_enemies_below_hp(_enemies, _threshold) { return array_filter(_enemies, function(_enemy) { return _enemy.hp < _threshold; }); }
because _threshold is not visible inside the inner function.
But there are some ways around that.
Continue readingGameMaker: Homing missiles
(mouseover/click to play GIF)
This is a post about doing homing missiles in GameMaker!
Continue reading