How to Fix a Memory Leak from Surfaces and Data Structures in GameMaker

GameMaker does not garbage-collect data structures or surfaces, so any you create and forget leak. Pairing creation with destruction stops the climb. Here is what to clean up.

How to fix it

1. Destroy every data structure

ds_list, ds_map, ds_grid, ds_stack, and friends must be freed with ds_list_destroy and the matching functions. Recreating one each step without destroying the old leaks continuously.

2. Free surfaces you own

Surfaces you create with surface_create must be freed with surface_free when no longer needed. Leaving them allocated grows GPU memory.

3. Pair create with cleanup

Free data structures and surfaces in the Destroy or Clean Up event of the instance that created them, and avoid recreating them every step. One create, one destroy.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every GameMaker error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.