scrollsnap

Scroll_snap is an extension for GameMaker: Studio which allows you to set up a View to "scroll-snap". That is, rather than scrolling smoothly and continuously, the view instead follows the instance by "snapping" to the next "screen" in the room when the followed instance exits the view.

In this way, you can simulate a grid of single-screen sized "rooms" or "screens" within a single large room. The advantage of this is that you can contain the entire game, or section of the game, in this large room, and not have to worry about things like persistence and managing state, and it provides a simple way to have active instances off screen, continuing to exist and do stuff when the player leaves that screen.

In the very early days of video games, computer hardware wasn't powerful enough to allow developers to create games that had large, scrolling environments. Before sufficiently powerful hardware came about to allow scrolling, videogames that took place in a larger world than would fit on one screen worked by loading a new screen when the player exited the edge of the screen. Atari 2600 games such as Pitfall!, Adventure, Superman, and Berzerk worked in this way, rather than scrolling -- the player just walking off the edge of the screen to move to the next part of the game.

Scroll_snap allows this style of game to be created in a single room, simplifying the management of instances by avoiding room transitions, and allowing action to continue happening off-screen in different areas of a large GameMaker room.

Note: Does not work with HTML5.

Full documentation

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