If you’ve ever used GameMaker for an extended period of time, you know that some things can become a little repetitive. The good news is that there are keyboard shortcuts that you can use that you may not even know about! I went way too long without using most of these, and I could have saved a ton of time had I been using these in the first place.

Remember the Basics!

Almost every computer program has the basic keyboard shortcuts that you should be taking advantage of. We won’t go over every one, but I wanted to list the most common ones here as you’ll be using them in GameMaker also!

CTRL + Z to undo

CTRL + Y to redo

CTRL + C to copy

CTRL + X to cut

CTRL + V to paste

F1 to open Help

Comment Code and Uncomment Just as Quickly

You’re a good dev, and good devs comment their code. Right? Right! Well, if you’re like the rest of us, you’ll be commenting and uncommenting out your code to test new scripts and make sure everything is behaving as expected. To quickly comment a line of code in the script editor, press CTRL + K to automatically comment the selected line (or lines!) of code. To remove those comments, press CTRL+SHIFT+K.

CTRL + K to comment a line

CTRL + SHIFT + K to uncomment a line

Duplicate A Line of Code

Here’s another shortcut for the code editor. Sometimes you’ll write lines of code that look very similar to eachother. One way you can easily copy one line into the next is to highlight the line you want to duplicate, press CTRL+C to copy, then CTRL+V to paste the line. Another way is to simply place your text cursor on the line you want to duplicate, and press CTRL + D to duplicate that line!

CTRL + D to duplicate a line

Cut it Out!

Okay, okay. So, I know I called this one out at the beginning but in GameMaker it’s got a special trick. If you want to cut a line out and save it to your clipboard, you can simply place the text cursor anywhere on the line you’d like to cut, and press CTRL + X to cut out the entire line. No highlighting needed!

CTRL + X to cut out a line (no highlighting necessary!)

Find Any Resource

GameMaker projects can get pretty big if you let them, and sometimes Workspaces aren’t kept as clean as you want them to be. If you aren’t sure where you’ve placed a resource, or if you know it’s buried in a mountain of folders, press CTRL + T to bring up a search. Type in the name of the resource you want, and a list appears of all resources in your project with that name! Just click on the search result to open up that resource immediately. Cool!

CTRL + T to search for a Resource

Search and Replace

If you want to search for keywords in some code you’ve written, not just search for resources by name, CTRL + SHIFT + F is your best friend. It’ll open the Search & Replace window, and allow you to search all code for any keyword that you enter.

You can choose to replace each instance of the given keyword in the search with the keyword in the replace field, too! For instance, if you wanted to change all mentions of the variable “y_speed” to “yspeed”, you can do that with a simple search and replace.

Additionally, when search results come up for the keyword you’ve specified, you can double-click on the results in the Search Results to bring up the script where that keyword was mentioned!

CTRL + SHIFT + F to search and/or replace

Run, Run, Run!

What fun is developing games if you never get to test them? As a developer, you hit the run button so many times a day that there has to be a better way! There is. Press F5 to run the project and save yourself a literal 2 seconds instead of pressing the button at the top.

F5 to run the project

Debug for Pest Control

Got bugs? Don’t we all. To open run the project in debug mode, press F6 and spend all that energy hunting down those pesky errors.

F6 to run the project in debug mode

Save your project!

This one is a no brainer. Everyone has lived through the heartbreak of pouring their heart and soul into something only to find out one computer crash later that that cute little disk icon was never poked. Don’t let it happen to you, too. Press CTRL + S to save your project.

In GameMaker, everytime you run your game it is automatically saved, but it’s still good practice to save your project often. Use this shortcut so you don’t have to reach alllll the way over to your mouse to click the save button in the toolbar.