TabularElf

Is it really that time again? Another blog? Yes. I've decided that I wanted to blog again, so I've put in some elbow grease and put together a new blog.

I figured it would be nice if once a month, I could make some kind of blog post. To keep up with the engagement of some kind! Now I don't know if I'll actually achieve a consistent schedule like that, but it wouldn't hurt to try. For this first blog post on the new site, I figured I would do a life update. Give people some insight into my life and more about me, considering that I've come to realise over the past couple of months that I've been boxing myself really badly. And I'm not really liking any of this. So, you my dear reader, get to know some details I have never bothered to speak up about!

But first and foremost, there is an RSS feed if you wish to follow along the news without visiting the website every time. You can fetch them from this page here.

Note: This is specifically for versions GameMaker 2022.5.0.8 and above, due to the following code relying on Time Sources.

I’ll admit, I have personally never needed a frame counter in my projects, especially given that I mostly focus on library-related work. That said, the thought does cross my mind from time to time. In the past, frame counters I’ve made only check for the current frames that have already been processed within the game. However I was at one point asked for a method to compare frames against the current step. While that particular use case was to make a simple alarm, it did spark my interest. So today, I want to introduce to you current_step. The rest of the blog post covers the whole process and how I handled it specifically. If you just want the full snippet, y...

I’m writing this guide as I’ve noticed that there’s not a lot of up-to-date reading material that covers a good way of saving/loading important data. You can find videos of it online, but I prefer to scroll through webpages myself and study the material. The main topic we’re covering of course is saving/loading data from JSON. But, there’s a few things that we need to cover before we can get to that.

GameMaker offers a lot of powerful functions and flexibility for many of our needs. However, some of these functions are done in a sort of black box state. While many of GameMakers own functions/systems are genuinely fine, the problem becomes very apparent in the long run. More so when you start to build a very complex game, and let GameMaker handle more of the work than you. game_restart, being one of them.