TabularElf

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, you may scroll down to the bottom of the post. Otherwise…

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.