Screenshot (Game making)

This tutorial outlines screenshots as part of the process of making a video game. That is, in what way screenshots can advertise and contribute to your project and how to use them effectively.

Purpose

 * See Screenshot (Digital image) for the other applications of screenshots

When uploading a game, actual screenshots best illustrate the genre and type of game you are advertising; although sprites may look good within your game, there is no guarantee that on a website they will look as good (due to scaling for size).

Game Maker 8.0
In GM 8.0, creating screenshots is easy. Pressing F9 whilst playing the game will create an image in the same directory as the game executable. The images are created in PNG-format, which has a pretty decent file-size/image-quality ratio. You can use these images, or manipulate them first with an image editor (e.g. MS Paint or GIMP).

Game Maker 7.0
In GM7, making a screenshot works exactly the same as in GM8. Only here, the resulting image is created in BMP-format, which is uncompressed and so may be of a large file size. A large file size will lead not only to a large upload- and download time, but many image hosting sites (e.g. Imageshack and Picoodle) have limits on the size of images they will host. Therefore it is advisable to convert them to a smaller size, using an image editor (e.g. MS Paint). Open the image and save it as GIF, JPG or PNG (I advise PNG for the best quality-size comparison).

Older versions/Alternative method
For older versions of GM you can proceed as following:


 * 1) Open your game and find one place (you may not want the cursor to be visible) in the game and press the button beside F12 named Print Screen. Press Alt + Print Screen to take a screenshot of just the current window.
 * 2) Open Paint or a similar image editor.
 * 3) Go to Edit -> Paste, or press Ctrl + V.
 * 4) Shrink/crop the image and edit as necessary.
 * 5) Save the image as a GIF, JPG, or PNG.