You can create a Sequence for a sword animation, and play it in-game. But, the animating sword cannot be easily rotated with the player.

A Surface is a rectangular canvas where something can be drawn. Everything in that surface will not be drawn to the screen until you draw it yourself.

You can pause your game now, but you can’t see your deactivated instances. To make this work, you can make use of Surfaces.

To create particles with GML, you need (1) a Particle System, and (2) a Particle Type.

You might be getting weird graphical glitches, especially on the HTML5 platform. Clearing the asset compiler cache may sometimes fix these issues.

Scripts allow you to create custom functions. You can call your script function, pass in arguments, run some code in it, and expect a result; just like a regular built-in function.

The color of an instance can be changed with image_blend.

Tile collisions only allow the first tile in a tileset to be the “empty” tile:

To make sure that objects are drawn in the correct order, when making a top view game, you can use the depth variable.

To enable collisions in a moving object, you can do this:

1. Set the movement speed (usually hsp and vsp)
2. Check if there are collisions where you’re moving (separately on x and y)
3. If a collision is found on either dimension, you set that dimension’s speed to 0
   • Before setting it to 0, you run a while loop to close any gap between the two colliding instances

Take a look at these pages:

Simple sprite animation in an object can be done by changing the sprite_index when appropriate.

Take a look at these pages:

Jumping in a top-down game is tricker. You’re already using up the X and Y axes for 4-directional movement, so for jumping, you now need a third axis: Z.

Whether you’re making a platformer or a top-down game, you want your instances to flip, depending on where they’re facing on the X-axis: that is, either left or right.