This tutorial is aimed at Novice GML users but intermediate users may also find it some sections useful. This tutorial shows you how to build and customize a Game Level Selection Menu for your games and optionally create a level locking system, preventing some levels being selected until certain tasks or levels have been completed.

Many games require the ability to display information to the player and although Game Maker Studio contains functions which allow you to do this, the message windows are produced by the OS for the target platform, cannot be customized and cause the game to lose focus.

This tutorial will show you how to create your own message objects which you can customize to suit your game. You can create them as fake pop-up windows or, as in this example have them scale in and out.

Many games require the ability to accept user input. Not all devices have a physical keyboard and use their own built-in virtual keyboard, which is impossible to customize.

This tutorial will show you how to create your own virtual keyboard object which can be used to accept input by the mouse / touch or a physical keyboard.

The default GM high score system only saves a name and the score attained; this Custom display permits you to save an extra numeric field which can be used as a level counter, money earned, rank attained etc. It uses data structures to maintain the top ten score data which are written to file thus preserving them between game runs.

This tutorial shows how to make a match3 game similar to Bejeweled. It contains the fully working game mechanics which you can add to and modify to create your own match3 game variant with.

As supplied the Match3 Game Engine is a fully working editable example containing the bare-bones mechanics which can be used without credit or acknowledgement – even for commercial titles!