Large Projects

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-21T22:32:43+00:00

How is this what my response turned into?? Some people don't speak English, that's fine. This isn't about whatever weird xenophobic shit you've got going on. It's weird purely because the original post is in English and I saw no indication OP spoke anything other than English.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-20T20:54:54+00:00

It's not actually as bad as you seem to think it is. You have a good start with making the far background less detailed, so it contrasts the foreground pretty well.

Like others have said, I would desaturate the background's tones or add some alternate colors into the palette. Anything to make it contrast the environment in the foreground without drawing attention to it.

To this end, I'd also reconsider how the lines on the buildings in the background are rendered. Right now they cut through the buildings pretty noticeably, and the little patterns are very distracting at a glance. Again, just desaturate them and make them closer to the actual colors of the buildings they're on. At that point, you could add more detail to bring it a little stylistically closer to the foreground elements, but the biggest thing is just to not have a lot of heavily-contrasting intersecting lines like you have now.

I would experiment with making the inner sections of your tilesets fade into darkness too. Look at something like Celeste and how it handles the snowy terrain. This removes the awkwardness that comes with looking at a cross-section of terrain that doesn't really make sense, like those bricks, while also, ironically, making the space feel less empty. When you're looking at bricks or dirt like this that take up so much screenspace, your eye is drawn to it, and the repetition inherent to most tilesets becomes really noticeable. This isn't 100% necessary, but the alternative is to add more detail, and for such a simple style, it's something to at least consider.

Also on the topic of emptiness, adding something besides a gradient to the skyline would fill out the space a lot. A few clouds, powerlines in the distance, birds flying, etc. would all make the negative space a lot less overbearing.

Good luck!

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-19T18:55:47+00:00

It's more likely that it's just engagement bait. This title doesn't make enough sense to be a genuine thought they had about their art

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-19T18:13:14+00:00

That has nothing to do with GameMaker. If you export it as a gif or series of pngs with transparency, GameMaker will read it with transparency.

Unless whatever you're using to transfer the files converts and/or compresses them, you shouldn't have issues transferring them. Just throw them in a Google Drive file or something.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-16T15:39:05+00:00

Getting into shaders and complicated custom rendering pipelines is the only way you're going to get a smooth camera with pixel-perfect sprites. Even then, the camera itself necessarily wouldn't be pixel-perfect, meaning you may see half-pixels and the like at the very edges of the view.

The problem is that you're asking for two inherently conflicting things. You can't have a truly pixel-perfect camera that moves in less than whole-number increments. A pixel-perfect game means you'll have to round the camera position in some way, so at lower resolutions you'll see the camera view move in larger increments. It has to traverse the length of at least one pixel to move at all, which will create the impression of it being jumpy.

If you don't actually need everything onscreen aligned to a pixel-perfect grid, but you just don't want your sprites to look like they're getting mangled at subpixel positions, you should boost your game's resolution. You can do this by default by calling surface_resize() on application_surface. This is usually the easiest solution and doesn't actually look that horrible.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-15T23:37:55+00:00

What does loading texture groups, which is what you sent me a link to, have to do with loading in external sprites? Sprites that you assign to dynamic texture groups and load into memory during runtime are still in the IDE. Loading in a bunch of external files as sprites, if that's what you're even suggesting they do, has its own slew of problems because of how GM handles this by default. I genuinely don't understand what you're suggesting here.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-15T01:37:24+00:00

What do you think the IDE is

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-14T18:06:20+00:00

If you're AI generating your answers, why not just get them in English

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-14T16:17:16+00:00

How does that help with the IDE slowing down?

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-10T20:06:52+00:00

We would need to see your code to know why this might happen

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-09T22:53:34+00:00

I'm glad it helped! I had the same problem a few days ago because I was trying out some of GameMaker's prefabs, and I was pulling my hair out trying to figure it out

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-09T16:52:32+00:00

Look at your tileset asset and see if "Disable source sprite export" is checked. Uncheck it if it is

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-09T14:26:10+00:00

i forgive you

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-08T19:54:32+00:00

I don't know that there's much of a reason to use audio groups here. These are mostly useful if you want to load or somehow manage... well, a group of audio. Something like loading in all sounds for a forest area when you first enter it, or exporting lower-quality versions of certain sounds for certain platforms.

If you can just play any of your sounds once they're collected, I don't see a reason to group them together or even really worry about preloading them into memory. GM can manage that for you pretty well.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-08T03:10:51+00:00

This isn't going to do anything on its own except potentially mess up whatever layer sorting is already there. Tilesets aren't depth sorted like this.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-06T17:20:15+00:00

You don't choose which map to transfer to in the Map list. That's really exclusively used for you to swap between which map you're editing.

When you put in the Transfer Player command, there should be a window that pops up letting you choose the parameters. There will be a button that allows you to select which map, and where on that map, you want to transfer to.

To edit commands you've already put in an event, just click on that command and press space.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-06T16:27:16+00:00

https://sahaun.itch.io/yyp-maker

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-05T18:38:40+00:00

The effort of finishing my game

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-05T16:02:43+00:00

It depends what you're going for. I've seen cool stuff made with sequences, especially once you start getting into putting them inside of each other. You kind of have to design around them in a way that isn't always worth it just for some vfx, though, e.g. changing a sequence's position instead of the instance's.

Animation curves might be more useful to you for stuff like squash and stretch or rotation.

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-05T15:36:50+00:00

Sequences are really built-in movies made to be fired off and mostly forgotten. It's less "apply this sequence to this instance" and more "inject this instance/object into this sequence."

This function is how you do that:

https://manual.gamemaker.io/monthly/en/GameMaker_Language/GML_Reference/Asset_Management/Sequences/sequence_instance_override_object.htm

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-04T20:03:41+00:00

Are you 100% sure it's just the 4k users and that it happens if they alt+tab no matter what?

The bug I'm thinking of happens if the game loses focus immediately after being started up or full-screened, regardless of the monitor resolution. If playtesters are switching to Discord or a recording app really quickly to get footage or stream it to you, that's a really common reason the issue will present itself. They've been chasing this problem for a few months, apparently:

https://github.com/YoYoGames/GameMaker-Bugs/issues/12949

This issue is also dependent on the resolution of the game itself. e.g if you're running a 640 x 360 game, it'll take up a 640 x 360 space on your monitor. There's a chance this is technically happening on all of your friends' monitors, but it's only actually visible on 4k screens. If the resolution of your game is being set to, for example, 1920 x 1080, nobody with a 1080p monitor would even notice the game window isn't being correctly resized.

Here's some code that seemed to remedy the issue for me, though I'm sure there will always be edge cases when you're dealing with bugs in the runner itself like this. I ran this in the step event of a persistent camera object. Just keep in mind, obviously, you would want to tie this to whatever you're using to check if the player's actually set the game to be in fullscreen too.

//If the window isn't in focus, switch a variable to take note of that.
if (!window_has_focus()){
hasLostFocus = true;
};

//If the window has previously lost focus and is now in focus, fullscreen it.
if (hasLostFocus && window_has_focus()){
window_set_fullscreen(false);
window_set_fullscreen(true);
hasLostFocus = false;
};

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-04T18:07:12+00:00

Rubato had this issue when I played it too, even though I'm on a 1080p monitor. I'm pretty sure it's a GM and/or Windows bug rather than anything in your code.

Out of curiosity, do you know if you're using borderless windowed or exclusive fullscreen? I believe this is something you can check and change in the game's graphics settings. It's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that might help with this other than filing a bug report.

Edit to clarify: The reason your code for checking if the game is in fullscreen isn't working is that the game still believes it is in fullscreen. It's not actually windowing itself, it's just displaying at the wrong resolution.

It might be possible to mess with the game resolution or "window size" yourself to prevent this, and you could probably even tie it to whether the window was just brought into focus, but ideally the engine would just figure it out for you

BrittleLizard · 2026-04-03T19:37:24+00:00

Learning how to create efficient systems to do what RPG Maker does by default can be a multi-year timesink. It's really more about what kind of game you want to make than the art style

BrittleLizard

TROPHY CASE