i have the game running in studio now, however, the port is not fully complete. i still need to port the fmod engine (the sound engine i used in the gm7 version), so right now it's ported, but with no sound, and there are a few other bugs i need to work through. so basically... the game is playable in studio now, but isn't completely bug-free or feature-complete in studio. i think it'll probably be fully ported by the end of the year.
as for how hard it was, it was tedious, but not difficult. lots and lots of little changes that i had to manually make to the code over and over. the game has 70,000 lines of code (which may be a record for a game maker game), so it took awhile to change things.
for instance, in gm studio, you have to draw on surfaces during the 'draw' event, not the 'step' event. but in gm7, it's the opposite, you can *only* draw on surfaces during the step event, and not in the draw event. so i had to do a lot of shifting around of code from one to another.
another major difference was function parameters. in gm7, you could do function overloading (a function that accepts a variable number of arguments), but in gm studio you can't, so i had to make sure each function always got the same number of arguments, and always used all the arguments it got.
sandboxing is also a big difference -- i haven't yet fully ported that aspect of it, but basically in gm studio, you can only save to a particular folder on the hard drive, and can't actually save to the folder that the game itself is installed to.
also (this one is my own fault) gm7 allows an option to treat uninitialized variables as 0. gm studio doesn't. it's not a recommended option, but i used it in gm7, so all variables that weren't initialized before being read i had to go and initialize them. so i have scripts now that are just like 600 lines of initializing variables to 0.
so lots of little stuff like that add up. but the port was necessary because gm studio is cross-platform (gm7 is windows only), much faster (like, more than twice as fast, i get much less slowdown), etc.
and here's some new gifs of the game in studio (in the first one, there is a bug where the crystals have different transparency values if they are above/below the player in y value -- that's another bug i still need to fix):
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