Designing Games with Game Maker - YoYo Games

You can select areas in the usual way by pressed the select button and then drawing a
rectangle. Next you place the mouse inside the selected area to move it somewhere else.
Normally the original area is filled with the left mouse color. If you move the selection with the
key pressed, the original area will remain unaffected. With the key you can
also make multiple copies of the selected area. If you use the right mouse button for moving
rather than the left mouse button, the selection is considered to be transparent.
The text tool might required some additional explanation. To add a text, press the text button
and then click on the image. A pop-up window appears in which you can enter the text. Use
the # symbol to insert a newline. Once you press OK the text is put in the image, with a box
around it. You can now move the text by pressing with the mouse in the box and dragging the
text. You can change the text by clicking with the right mouse button in the box. Using the
Text menu you can also change the alignment and the font to be used.
At the right of the form you can select the colors to be used (one by the left mouse button and
one by the right button). There are four ways to change the color. First of all you can click
with the mouse button (left or right) in one of the 16 basic colors. Note that there is a special
color box that contains the color of the bottom-left pixel of the image that is used as
transparency color if the sprite is transparent. You can use this color to make part of your
image transparent. The second way is to click in the image with the changing color. Here you
choose many more colors. You can hold down the mouse to see the color you are selecting.
Thirdly, you can click with the left mouse in the boxes indicating the left and right color. A
color dialog pops up in which you can select the color. Finally, you can select the color dropper
tool at the left and click on a position in the image to copy the color there.
There are two special features. When you hold the key you can pick a drawing color
from the current image. When you hold the key while drawing lines you will only get
horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines. Similar, when you hold the key while drawing
ellipses or rectangles you will get circles and squares.
In the menus you can finds the same transformation and image changing commands that are
also available in the sprite editor. This time though they only apply to the current image.
(When the sprite has multiple images, commands that change the size, like stretch, are not
available.) You can also save the image as a bitmap file. There are two additional commands
in the Image menu: