Designing Games with Game Maker - YoYo Games

Tiles can be placed in layers at different depths. At the bottom you see the current depth.
Default this is 1000000 which is normally behind all instances. So the instances will move in
front of the tiles. You can use the Add button to add new tile layers, each with a different
depth. Negative depths can be used to put tiles in front of instances. If you also give objects
different depths you can put them between different tile layers. If you press Delete you delete
a tile layer together with all its tiles. (There must always be at least one layer.) If you press
Change you can change the depth of a tile layer. If you give it the same depth as another
layer, the layers are merged.
Using tiles is a powerful feature that should be used as much as possible. It is much faster
than using objects and the tile images are stored only once. So you can use large tiled rooms
with very little memory consumption.
Views
Finally, there is a tab labeled views. This gives a mechanism for drawing different parts of
your room at different places on the screen. There are many uses for views. First of all, in a
number of games you want to show only part of the room at any time. For example, in most
platform games, the view follows the main character. In two-player games you often want a
split-screen mode in which in one part of the screen you see one player and in another part
you see the other player. A third use is in games in which part of the room should scroll (e.g.
with the main character) while another part is fixed (for example some status panel). This can
all be easily achieved in Game Maker.
When you click the tab labeled views the following information will show: