![Metroidvania Map the easy way - Concept [GameMaker] @1upIndie](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kgZjhEuhgNc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
This video tutorial covers the concept of how to create a metroidvana map in GameMaker. Every good sidescroller/metroidvania has it and now I can offer a simple, scaleable and performative version to you without tanking your performance.
The idea is quite simple, you define how many columns and rows you want to have, draw on each cell one empty image/sprite and draw one "active" cells recolored rectangle and their walls (connector walls optional). Or do create for each cell one specific sprite (delux version) where you have less repeated cells to work with but map clarity is much improved.
The following parts will be coding and add, start location, visited/not explored cells aswell as map movement and zooming.
You can find the project file in my discord server under this section:
free-stuff_gamemaker or the first pinned comment by me
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23 (See youtube about page for discount)
0:00 What we will build in part 2
0:45 How the my old map worked and now is fixed
1:35 Step 1 - Define how many rows and columns you want, draw empy cell
1:55 Step 2,3 - draw active cell on x,y cooridnates that have a level via one white block and recolor it
2:20 Step 3 - Draw walls to show where the player can go, alternative draw wall-connectors
3:28 Delux version is where you have one specific image to draw and recolor it
4:45 - Concept again, one event, we draw all pieces, draw that on a surface and store the whole thing in one image/sprite
5:20 The basic version will be free to download on my discord server
This video tutorial covers the concept of how to create a metroidvana map in GameMaker. Every good sidescroller/metroidvania has it and now I can offer a simple, scaleable and performative version to you without tanking your performance.
The idea is quite simple, you define how many columns and rows you want to have, draw on each cell one empty image/sprite and draw one "active" cells recolored rectangle and their walls (connector walls optional). Or do create for each cell one specific sprite (delux version) where you have less repeated cells to work with but map clarity is much improved.
The following parts will be coding and add, start location, visited/not explored cells aswell as map movement and zooming.
You can find the project file in my discord server under this section:
free-stuff_gamemaker or the first pinned comment by me
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23 (See youtube about page for discount)
0:00 What we will build in part 2
0:45 How the my old map worked and now is fixed
1:35 Step 1 - Define how many rows and columns you want, draw empy cell
1:55 Step 2,3 - draw active cell on x,y cooridnates that have a level via one white block and recolor it
2:20 Step 3 - Draw walls to show where the player can go, alternative draw wall-connectors
3:28 Delux version is where you have one specific image to draw and recolor it
4:45 - Concept again, one event, we draw all pieces, draw that on a surface and store the whole thing in one image/sprite
5:20 The basic version will be free to download on my discord server
![Metroidvania Map the easy way - Concept [GameMaker]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kgZjhEuhgNc/mqdefault.jpg "Metroidvania Map the easy way - Concept [GameMaker]
This video tutorial covers the concept of how to create a metroidvana map in GameMaker. Every good sidescroller/metroidvania has it and now I can offer a simple, scaleable and performative version to you without tanking your performance.
The idea is quite simple, you define how many columns and rows you want to have, draw on each cell one empty image/sprite and draw one active cells recolored rectangle and their walls (connector walls optional). Or do create for each cell one specific sprite (delux version) where you have less repeated cells to work with but map clarity is much improved.
The following parts will be coding and add, start location, visited/not explored cells aswell as map movement and zooming.
You can find the project file in my discord server under this section:
free-stuff_gamemaker or the first pinned comment by me
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
0:00 What we will build in part 2
0:45 How the my old map worked and now is fixed
1:35 Step 1 - Define how many rows and columns you want, draw empy cell
1:55 Step 2,3 - draw active cell on x,y cooridnates that have a level via one white block and recolor it
2:20 Step 3 - Draw walls to show where the player can go, alternative draw wall-connectors
3:28 Delux version is where you have one specific image to draw and recolor it
4:45 - Concept again, one event, we draw all pieces, draw that on a surface and store the whole thing in one image/sprite
5:20 The basic version will be free to download on my discord server")
![Contra style turret [Game Maker Studio 2 | Enemy Ai]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lHSidYF8zxg/mqdefault.jpg "Contra style turret [Game Maker Studio 2 | Enemy Ai]
This enemy ai video tutorial shows you how to make a contra style turret that rotates slowly towards the player in GameMaker Studio.
The idea is quite simple. You first define a distance towards the player on when entered the turret starts to rotate toward him. Because we dont want an instant rotation we delay the rotation. Then when we are in a good enough angle towards the player we can start shooting. Thats it!
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
Totally not mario and boomerang found here:
https://opengameart.org/content/admurins-general-items
https://opengameart.org/content/super-miyamoto
0:00 What we will do
0:46 Subscribe
0:59 How it works
2:05 Coding part
10:51 Game shown - The massenger")
![🔴Loot Vfx - The easy way [GameMaker | Vfx]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mVMZJ7toglI/mqdefault.jpg "🔴Loot Vfx - The easy way [GameMaker | Vfx]
This visual effects video tutorial shows you how to almost create a cool looking loot visual effect like you see in Nioh, the souls series or other games but this time for in a 2D engine.
The idea is to create a cone texture and use that as a particle to be spawned and moved slightly upwards. This method works in any engine and is not exclusive to GameMaker. If you use Unreal/Unity/Godot you got 3D particles and well, they are superior in looks. In GameMaker we use the inbuild particle System to create the 2D particles and optional other effect to round it off. Thats it!
// to create and spawn the visual effect use this code in GameMaker:
var partSys = part_system_create_layer( Instances, 0, ParticleSystem1 );
part_system_position( partSys, x, y );
Game shown: Nioh 2
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
1:06 Subscribe
1:17 Preview
1:40 Creating own textures for the loot vfx
3:19 Customizing GameMakers particleSystem
6:37 Optional effects on top")
![Splash Screen Parallax [GameMaker | Vfx]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/miHP3zn3EY8/mqdefault.jpg "Splash Screen Parallax [GameMaker | Vfx]
This vfx video tutorial shows you how to visually upgrade your splash screen/backgrounds in GameMaker with a parallax plus some neat and cheap light effects.
The idea is quite simple: You need to have seperated images to create a pseudo 3D effect by enlarging and making them smaller in a rythmic slow time frame. For that you simply need to use the GameMakers animation curves to tween in a loop. You also use the animation curves for the flashing lightning effect aswell as for some fake blinking lights on important spots. If your images are angled not like in the video straight forward (for example to the right like in Fury Unleashed) you also can use the animation curves to move (change the x,y position of the layers) where want to move. Thats it!
Video on animation curves in detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMIzQGjmkFA
Art from Valeria The Pagan Priestess:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC BuvjesA39JuN4cZ5gxug
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
CHAPTERS
0:00 What we will do
1:12 Subscribe
1:26 Another example how have a parallax splash screen
2:23 How it is done
4:19 Setting up the animation curves
6:08 Code part
8:42 Lightning/flash setup
10:03 Flat light sources")
![Hit Animation - Juice up any game [GAME DESIGN]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oB5Y90vniCo/mqdefault.jpg "Hit Animation - Juice up any game [GAME DESIGN]
This video shows you how to juice up any video game with good Game Design. Hit animations are the backbone of any video game and indicate to the player with an animation that something is happening to the player/npc instance. This state is a short lived one and normall between a quarter of a second or even shorter. The same method can also be used for buttons or any other gui elements.
Here we will go over the internal hit animation follow by other videos to external animations/effects on top.
To understand all this we need to seperate the internal hit animation into its parts. The first part is the most common practise where the player/npc instance is being recolored/blended or shown with a low opacity (or even 0). This is being seen as a flashing or blinking to the player. The second part is to have a fully animated hit image to be swapped or just another sprite that resembles a hit. The third one is a squashing animation done mostly in code where the image scaling is being distorted and lerped into its original scaling. Most games do use all 3 methods as a combination.
Tldr:
- recolor/low
- swap images
- squish and resize
🚧 For the future: There will be follow up video that shows these hit animations with code and a visual too how to do those in GameMaker and JuiceFx.
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
CHAPTERS
0:00 Flashing image by recoloring/blending
0:43 State based image swaps
1:06 Squashing the image and reshaping to the default
1:24 All previous parts combined for a hit animation")
![Move_and_Collide - Hyper speedo, in detail [Game Maker | Basics]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oHgGEZ5Kt2U/mqdefault.jpg "Move_and_Collide - Hyper speedo, in detail [Game Maker | Basics]
This basics video tutorial shows you how to setup with the new move_and_collide function a platformer with slopes in GameMaker.
To be very frank this is a first shot of making a platformer easyier to build with the new move_and_collide function from the recent 2023.1 update.
The idea behind move_and_collide is very simple. You put in a dx, dy value which are prediction points where to move to (speed values or fix points or simply a number). It goes as followes, the first input value (dx) is taking the current bounding box of the instance (player, etc.) and adds to that the dx value and checks if there is an collision, if not the player will be moved there. This process is being splitted up into an internal iteration of pieces sliced up of the total input value dx (partly move, check collision, if not move partly, check for collision and so on). Same goes for the dy value also but this time vertically. There are other input values like xoff/yoff and these just are an anstruction (push upwards/sideways) what to do if we are colliding/clipping. The last input values are max_x_move/max_y_move and are basically maximum speed values and prevent hyper speedo shown in the video.
Note: This is an first attempt to unify the system into a platformer setup but as it seem, this is okay but not perfect for all situations. So if you got a better fix or a good idea how to make the whole thing universally useable, I would love to hear and share it with the community.
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
CHAPTERS
0:00 What we will do
1:28 Subscribe
1:40 The new function move_and_collide
2:16 How collisions work with instances
2:43 What move_and_collide is doing
4:40 Setting the platformer in GameMaker with walls/slopes
6:23 Setting the player up for horizontal movement, get input
7:13 Setting the player up for horizontal movement, set horizontal speed
7:45 Apply horizontal input with move_and_collide
10:17 Setting the player up for vertical movement, have a constant force downwards
11:07 Setting the player up for vertical movement, clamp the result downards value
12:28 Hyper speedo enabled, we need to counter mixed up speeds
13:15 What the number of iterations value of move_and_collide means
13:15 What xoff/yoff of move_and_collide do
15:20 Avoid hyper speedo by clamping horizontal total speed
15:54 Add jumping
18:40 Reduce jumping to be available only when on ground
21:40 Optional part
28:04 Fail, next time 1up Indie dont disabled the other video layer when rendering the video")
![Patch V2022.3 - More cool features [GameMaker Studio 2]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/okl5XJh1cYU/mqdefault.jpg "Patch V2022.3 - More cool features [GameMaker Studio 2]
The newest patch V2022.3 comes with some good quality updates like cool new fx effects like outline, a new blur, a stripe and dot effect plus grain effect. Besides that you get overal some minor quality updates for more supported languages, a fix for steamworks, fine tuning on texture pages and redefining gml/dnd or a long list of bugfixes.
A change is that your project made in 2022.2 and now 2002.3 is not compatible with older projects of GameMaker Studio. Please take this factors into consideration when you are about to update your ide.
Note: I personally had and have some issues with the newer versions of GameMaker Studio which broke a project I am working on, so I am for now stuck on V2022.1. But please note that for most people this wont be an issue.
Video on texture pages:
https://youtu.be/DBrGo0YFla0
Release notes:
https://www.yoyogames.com/de/blog/release-2022-3
https://gms.yoyogames.com/ReleaseNotes.html
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)")
![Patch V2022.2 - Before you update [GameMaker Studio 2]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pSaUxy9mj5o/mqdefault.jpg "Patch V2022.2 - Before you update [GameMaker Studio 2]
The newest patch comes with some good quality updates like texts in sequences or that you can now use the rgb standard by defining your colors in code.
One fundamental change is that the steamworks inbuild functions are being removed. That doesnt mean they are all gone but the process goes now through an extension (in the their marketplace) that is on a more modern steamworks standard. This also means that your old setup is being removed from preference/platforms in GameMaker Studio. This may cause some issues if you are about to ship your game to steam. The second change is that your project made in 2022.2 are not compatible with older version of GameMaker Studio. Please take these two factors into consideration when you are about to update your ide.
Release notes:
https://www.yoyogames.com/de/blog/release-2022-2
https://gms.yoyogames.com/ReleaseNotes.html
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)")
![Inventory system part 2b (alternative) pre-set and fixed [GameMaker]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pkKKslaKh8I/mqdefault.jpg "Inventory system part 2b (alternative) pre-set and fixed [GameMaker]
This video tutorial shows you how to setup the first part of an inventory system that is modular and later on it will be advanced to suit more then basic needs.
Here we will make a system for a fixed inventory where all items are unique, their position is unique and if tey are collected or not and. That means all items are preset in advance and the player only unlocks them.
Icons used by Dusk CC4by found here:
https://dusk-games.itch.io/
You can find the project file in my discord server under this section:
free-stuff_gamemaker
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)
0:00 What is the series about. Make an inventory system Nioh style
1:03 Subscribe
1:16 What is a fixed/pre-set structure for inventories
2:09 Setting up grid positions
3:08 Inventory drawing all grid positions code
6:08 Pre setting all inventory entries/items and adding a collected variable
8:19 On click flagging the corresponding item/entry as collected
11:29 Game shown: Souldiers")
![Series is on ice/cancelled [#6 Remake Undertale in GameMaker ]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qI-jju179aU/mqdefault.jpg "Series is on ice/cancelled [#6 Remake Undertale in GameMaker ]
This is the 6th in a short series of remaking the battle system which you see in Undertale in GameMaker.
What is Undertale?
Undertale is a video game made also in GameMaker by Toby Fox where
you play as a child that is being trapped in an unknown world and your job in this linear story is to progress. The difference is that you can genocide monsters, be neutral or even befriend them. This throws the concept of enemies being simply neutral farm on its head.
🚧 For the future: This series is under construction and since views have been super low, I have to cancel it. It seems the interest and my method didnt bind enough people to actually watch it.
Template project file found here:
https://discord.com/channels/582918792145928202/1205513075273502740
You can find the full projects if you are a patreon or later on for 2 bucks on itch.io.
👑 Support me and get fresh game art and game maker projects every month:
https://www.patreon.com/1upindie
Game shown: Until we die (it is an cancelled game though!)
Follow me on:
📸 Instangram: https://www.instagram.com/1upindie
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/1upIndie
💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/gvr98nb
📜 Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-video-game-developer-with-gms-23/ (See youtube about page for discount)")
