As I continue to wait for a working beta for Asylum I discovered something I had completely missed in GameMaker Studio.
Since I started Asylum and had completed dozens of hours of tutorials for GMS I got into the practice of creating an object for eah and every sprite I imported. It seemed to make perfect sense because if you want to control a sprite on screen it needs to be an object (for events, etc). At least that’s what I thought.
During the development of Reflex (in GMS2.3) I accidentally dragged a sprite directly into my room. A pop up informed me that it wasn’t an object and did I want to create an Asset Layer. What the heck is an Asset Layer? I thought.
Somehow I had missed the fat that it is possible to have a layer than can have sprites on; these would be graphics that have no code attached and so should have less impact on performance.
Asylum has a LOT of sprites already so it took me 2 days to go through every room I have so far and move out any objects that did’t need to be objects and place them as sprites instead.
I was kind of hoping that the resource drop would mean the game would work in GMW2.3 but sadly it didn’t help. However, the process of ditching probably 70% of the objects in the game for sprites/assets makes managing all the elements a great deal easier, so it was worth doing.
