Uploaded July 2022 | Updated September 2026, 13 hours ago

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This basics video tutorial shows you what rooms are in GameMaker and how they work, how to set the start room, how to jump into other rooms and finally what persistence means for rooms in GameMaker.

Image rooms to be like levels, each time you enter a room/level GameMaker is loading all the necessary things in there to be used and played. Rooms have properties and hold layers which also hold their respective assets ( instance layer holds instance, tileset layer has tiles etc. ). Besides having layers rooms also have properties like height and width and hold camera/view values and an inbuild physics system.

So how does it work? Well, you define the start room (default is the first room1) visible by the icon and this is how the game starts by loading in the (firsts) start room. When you want to transitions/jump to other rooms, you simply use room_goto() which will unload the current room and all its content and load in the new room with fresh content.

Persistence for rooms means that you save the last state of the room and when you jump back into it, you don't create a fresh version of it but with updates values (positions, instance, etc.). This is not recommened though because it makes sense to have a persistent instance which stores all the necessary values you want to inject into the freshly created room.

And lastly, you can customize rooms during runtime but not in the current room you are in. That means you need to set those instructions in advance.


Offical manual on rooms:
manual.yoyogames.com/GameMaker_Language/GML_Reference/Asset_Management/Rooms/Rooms.htm


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CHAPTERS
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0:00 What will discuss
0:29 Subscribe
0:41 How rooms work in GameMaker
4:42 Room values to read out
5:32 Room start/end events in instances
6:22 How to jump/transition to another room
8:18 Editing rooms during runtime