Game Maker 0.12

🗃️ Game Maker Editor & File Management

These features directly impact how you set up, navigate, and manage your projects within the Game Maker editor.

User Interface Upgrades

Much of our interface has gotten a fresh look while keeping tools and menus in familiar places and adding ultrawide monitor support.

Login screen reflects new minimalist design.

Home screen shows helpful information like tutorials and announcements of seasons events and game jams.

You can now quickly report Game Maker bugs from the Home screen by clicking on your user icon or from the top left corner menu "Help" section while editing.

New Game Type Templates

Three new templates have been added to help you get started quickly on your next project, FPS Shooter, Action RPG, and Business Tycoon! Keep an eye on The Sandbox Blog for tutorials on how to use each of these.

New Experience Flow

When you start new projects, you will now be asked to select if they are Singleplayer or Multiplayer from the start. This will determine what kinds of mechanics can be implemented in your experience, improving stability and reducing bugs do to mixing SP and MP behaviors.

Asset Library Revamp

More asset kits are being regularly released, featuring themes and partner models that can be used for free in any experience. New thumbnails let you preview an asset kit before it is dynamically loaded into your library.

The search is now more powerful, allowing you to find assets not only by their name, but by tag, category, and description.

Autosave

Never lose more than a few minutes of work again! From the program settings you can turn on Autosave to activate every 5 to 30 minutes.

🦸 New Abilities: Dash and Glide!

Two new Abilities will let you expand how players navigate your world.

Dash shoots players forward, even in mid-air, to cover greater distances and clear gaps. Glide allows players to coast down from higher areas. This can greatly expand level navigation possibilities without making players overpowered with Flight too early in a game.

You’ll also notice smoother animation blending across actions like sitting, sprinting, and jumping. Subtle camera effects enhance each movement, making every leap and landing feel more responsive and impactful.

⚒️ Building & Level Design

These features relate to constructing your environments, placing objects, and defining player movement within your experiences.

Four New Asset Kits

Enhance your builds and explore new possibilities with four new collections of assets and blocks in the Asset Library Workspaces.

Partner - The British Museum

Terrain - Colors

Pack - Architecture

Pack - Interior Design

Block Outlines

Blocks now display yellow outlines when being placed like when assets are selected. Sections of blocks that are behind other blocks or assets will also have a red outline like assets. This makes it a lot easier to see what you're editing in a scene, especially when using shift to add or remove blocks vertically.

Custom Colliders for Precise Control

There are new options on the Properties Panel for assets placed on the map. Click the eyeball to display an accurate collision box for the currently selected asset.

Switch the Type from Default to Box and see a bunch of new controls appear! You can now set the position, rotation, and scale of the collision box with full freedom! Each field can be typed in for decimal accuracy, or you can click and drag up or down on the XYZ icons to quickly adjust them.

Best of all, when you have the collision visible, you can click the Position, Rotation, and Scale icons to switch the Gizmo type and drag the collision box the same way you control assets.

Position Gizmo

Rotation Gizmo

Scale Gizmo

With a Sphere collision type, and “Collisions + Gravity” turned on, you can make any object roll smoothly like a ball.

And with the Plane type you can make big collision walls to prevent players from escaping areas without needing to place a lot of invisible wall assets.

For the new NPC Behavior there is a special automatic collision. You can chose between Small, Medium, and Large heights that match the size of player avatar types. NPCs can also be “nudged” out of the way when players walk into them, preventing them from blocking players in crowded and narrow areas.

Avatar Teleport: Spawn inside an Area

Now, just like the Spawn Point, you can select a range in which players can be Teleported into. This way players arriving are not stacked up on top of each other. Also add is the ability to teleport teams besides Groups and Individuals. Use this to take all players from a lobby area move them to their team’s side of the field.

🎛️ Component Upgrades

This group covers new ways to define how players interact with objects and how objects behave within your experience.

Aim Pickables With Camera

Items held with the Pickable Component and Camera Oriented toggled on will now face straight forward from the camera in 3rd and 1st Person views. Most effectively, in a 1st Person view you can aim the held item up and down, affecting the angle of lights and raycast for precise targeting. In Angled and Top Down camera views, this option forces held items to not rotate as the player turns.

Stop Raycast With Message

It is now easy to turn an asset’s Raycast Component on and off with a message. Before it was not possible to turn off the Raycast without it either detecting a target or the asset being removed.

Some of the things you can use this for are to disable a laser field security alarm, enable a “stealth mode” where guards can no longer detect the player, or turn off a player’s Pickable weapon when it runs out of ammo.

New Features in Collectible Component

The Collectible Component has several upgrades:

Shows in Inventory by default is on. Toggle it to False for items you want to count using the rule system like currency. Skip the mess of dropping coins to pay merchants, and don’t clutter your inventory. It will also disable Droppable, Consumable, and Equip options.

Message on Unequip gives you more control over what happens if a player removes items you want them to wear. You could have bonus effects like infinite oxygen only while wearing scuba gear, or a cursed hat that changes the weather until you take it off. Require having a certain sword equipped to fight a boss or you are teleported out of the arena.

Auto Equip will make a player wear an item as soon as it’s picked up. This is great for Abilities Gear so players can immediately access movement upgrades in a fast parkour race without needing to stop and change equipment. You can even use this to downgrade players in a race by putting on a common backpack to replace their Flying Jetpack, or use the number row keys to swap equipment loadouts.

The "Droppable" setting is now compatible with Multiplayer experiences.

Brand New: Outline Component

Help players find items using this brand new component. A pulsing, glowing outline will highlight the edges of an asset.

By default the component is Enabled at Start of the game, but you can choose to turn it on or off with messages. You can use this to more subtly hint at objectives than using a quest marker, or highlight that some objects are special in a busy room.

Visibility range sets how close a player needs to be in order for the outline to appear.

The Color Layer option can help set player expectations of what an item does.

Interactable - buttons, levers, doors

Pickable - flashlights, carriable objects

Buff - healing potions, powerups

Debuff - poison, slow

Collectible - items that go into inventory

Play Sound Component Upgrade

While the Play Sound Component looks the same as before, the system powering it has been upgraded to the AAA quality WWise Audio Engine. We'll soon be revealing more details on how this enhances immersion in your games and brings a world to life. The audio library now has over 7000 sounds to choose from for any kind of game you're building!

🏃‍♂️ New & Improved NPCs

There are significant new capabilities for defining the behavior of Non-Player Characters in your experiences. A single character can now perform all of the old friendly NPC mechanics. They can also path-find and collide correctly with multiplayer synchronization.

For now, Legacy NPC behaviors are still usable in experiences originally made before 0.12, but no legacy NPCs can be created in new 0.12 projects - except for Soldier and Melee Enemy, and only in Single Player experiences.

By default, NPCs have the Walk Module applied, but all five modules can be added or removed to customize the NPC’s behavior. Clicking on each module will allow you to customize its settings.

For now only Walk, Flee, and Follow are available in the [SP] Single Player version of this behavior.

Walk Module

Here we can select what animation is used for the character’s movement, how fast they walk, and the rectangular area they walk around.

By toggling on “Wait For Message”, we can prevent NPCs from moving around before they are activated. Use this to reduce the number of NPCs roaming before a player gets to them, or have them wander after an event like a conversation or quest.

Flee Module

When enabled, NPCs can run away from any tag that is set. A tag of “Hostile” is automatically applied to any player or entity that attacks an NPC. You can also have NPCs flee from any given custom tag by default.

Follow Module

This module is totally new and powerful behavior for NPCs! You can use it to create characters who can follow after you (or any other tag you define) across block terrain, respecting open and closed doors, even following you all the way across the map!

Careful though, they only like walking on terrain blocks, they cannot swim, and have no fear of heights. They may try unsuccessfully to jump across a chasm to reach you, or get stuck if they follow you into water or a floor made from assets instead of blocks.

When combined with the Walk Module, if you go out of the NPC’s range, they will walk back to their original walk zone. This could be useful for making something like a patrolling guard who chases you but will give up and return to their post.

There are so many friendly and unfriendly ways this could be used:

• A row of ducklings can follow their mother, flee if disturbed, but then return to their line.

• A dog, cat, and mouse can chase each other in a circle around a tree.

• Loyal companions and pets can follow you around an entire game.

• The lazy guard mentioned before can send a message when they catch up to you to teleport you to jail or even send a negative Health message to attack you.

• An escort mission can require you to safely guide an NPC home with a message turning off their Follow Module when the quest is complete.

• Play tag among a hoard of zombies. Though note that NPCs do not collide with each other, so they will visibly run through each other to try to reach you.

Gather Module

This module replaces the old Farmer NPC. It will look for the tags specified and play an animation before the found item is removed.

While the items being gathered do not send a message, you can use a Trigger Volume component in the area that is being gathered from, and sense when the tag exits the zone. Connect this to the rule system with a variable counter on the HUD, and you can watch the number of gathered items go up for passive farming.

Healer Module

This module replaces the Healer NPC. Like Follow, it will chase after the player or whatever tag is set. If it senses the tagged actor does not have full health, it will heal them at the rate you define.

This doesn’t just have to heal players and their companions. You can also have enemy healers that will heal your opponents and keep boss enemies protected until the healer is taken out.

⏱️ HUD (Heads Up Display) Editor

A new revamped HUD Editor will let you more easily control and visualize multiple layouts needed to display variables in your game. Learn all about the new HUD Editor in the Upgrade Guide.

👥 Matchmaking and Game Size Options

Multiplayer is more social and accessible with new features allowing players to find matches and join friends. Multiplayer Lobby Queue Cards and Quick Play let players jump into games faster than ever.

From the Gameplay tab, go to the Multiplayer Settings menu to set up how many players are needed for a match. You can set minimum needed players before the game begins. Once this number of players joins the match starts in 30 seconds. Once a game instance is full, a new instance will be created for another group of players.

The "Join in Progress" option will allow new players to join after the match has started. Leave this on if you want more players to join if some have left or the maximum has not been filled yet. Turn if off for games like a Battle Royale to prevent new competitors entering.

Here are some suggested game types that could work with different match sizes, but you can use whatever size makes the most sense for how you intend your game to be played.

💾 Persistence & Data Management

A major new system has been added for saving and managing player data across sessions. Encourage players to return to your game and continue their progress by saving their collected items and equipment, variable values, checkpoint progress, and completed quests. Each of these four options can be toggled on in the new Data Storage menu in the Gameplay tab.

Persistent Equipment & Consumables

When you toggle on the first option you will enable a new setting on any items with the Multiplayer Collectable component.

“Is Persistable” option when toggled on will save if the item is in the player’s inventory. This works for consumables, equipment, and any other items you want the player to hold.

Make collection quest items more meaningful by enabling players to leave without worrying about losing progress, and return to collect more. Allow players to interact in more complex economies with one another trading and crafting with dropped items.

Persistent Variables

Toggling on the second Data Storage option will let you save Number (Integer), Decimal Number (Float), Text, and True/False Variables to be loaded when players return. Persistence is not currently available for Time variables.

When creating a new variable, or editing an existing one, you will now see a checkbox option for Persistency, but ONLY on “Player” variables. Global and Team variables are not saved.

Some great uses of this feature:

• RETENTION: save player’s experience points for deep RPG leveling mechanics. Retain unlocked skills, kill counts, points and more.

• NARATIVE: make player decisions meaningful. Every choice can have a branching effect on future plays like faction alliances and karma.

• ECONOMY: save currency and material quantities to create complex crafting and trading ecosystems. Use the new option to hide a collected item from the inventory and a collection message to count up the value of a material variable which can be sold in shops.

Progress Checkpoints

The third Data Storage option is the simplest. Once toggled on, all Checkpoints you set will automatically save. When a player leaves and returns to the game, they will spawn at the last checkpoint they activated. There is no option to exclude specific checkpoints from being saved, so keep this in mind while designing your levels to ensure players do not get stuck.

Quest Completion

Just like Checkpoints, turning on the last Data Storage option means that all Objectives are saved with no option to exclude specific Objectives. However, because Objectives can have different states, there are some more complicated situations to consider.

When players return to a game, they will find quests either inactive, unlocked (ready to be started), or complete. Refer to this chart to see how quest status might change when a player exits or experiences a crash:

This provides an opportunity for failed quests to be tried again. However, be careful with quests that use a counter like collecting multiple object or killing multiple enemies. An item held in the player’s inventory will not count toward the quest, so they will need to collect it again. This could end up confusing if the player can see they hold 3 items but have 0/4 items on the objective tracker. Use variables in the rules system to track the player and restore their objective status when they return.

For defeating enemies in a multiplayer scenario, it’s best to have enemies respawn regularly like an MMO, so players are still able to collect all the kills needed. This is especially important as some players may defeat and enemy when other players are not connected yet.

It is critical to plan for players possibly returning to the same multiplayer instance they just left. In the case of a quick restart after a crash or returning to a game later when other players have kept the instance live, a returning player may have collected half of the items they need, but now their quest is reset. If you have not created a way for the player to collect all the items they need, they will need to leave and wait for the instance to shut down in order to complete their quest. This is a bad experience for users. So make sure that items respawn to be picked up again and consider other changes that happen to your game world as a quest progresses to prevent players from getting locked out of completing objectives.

New Rule: Compare Quest State

It is also important to note that Quest Completion does not save the state of the game world. If your world is modified by the completion of quests (bosses are dead, chests and doors unlocked, castle destroyed, day changed to night, etc.) these states are not automatically triggered when returning to the games.

The only thing this persistency saves is the quest status. Any changes triggered by the quest being completed need to be re-triggered to bring the world back to the state it was in before the player left.

You could accidentally lock a player in a room if they’ve completed a quest that opens a door. If the quest is complete but they leave and return and the door is not triggered to open, they cannot restart the quest to open it.

The new Compare Quest State rule can be used when a player joins to check the status of quests and update the game world to match the expected changes. Now the game can replay the same completion message and open the door as expected.

🎮 Game Client Updates for Players

Besides all the amazing features above that will improve the gaming experience for your players, there are updates to the Game Client user experience.

UI/UX Improvements

New 3D transitions make the Game Client menus more immersive. The NFT Gallery lets you view assets in 3D with animations. Brand new Quests menu lets you easily view active and completed objectives. And the Map has been upgraded to show all launched games so you can find more to play!

Dynamic Chat

In single player experiences and social hubs, players will see the Metaverse Chat, which connects you to every player in The Sandbox. If you want to chat with only the other players in your current experience, you can manually switch to the Local Chat.

But when you join a multiplayer game, you will automatically switch to Local Chat so you only see chat relevant to your current game, allowing you to strategize with fellow players (or taunt opponents).