itch.io

Answering my own question after some testing, it does store the data in local storage with HTML5

Nice library. Does it work with local storage if running as HTML5? Looks like it just calls buffer_save under the covers, so I'm guessing yes(?). I'm new to GameMaker so not sure

Try clearing out cookies from itch.io in your browser. That solved the problem for me.

I looked more closely at the error message that I was seeing in the console and saw that the error was coming from trying to parse JSON that was read from local storage. I tried clearing out cookies for itch.io (I think that includes clearing out local storage in Chrome?) and the game now loads in Chrome on my M1 Macbook Pro that previously had been stuck loading at 98 or 99%.

Perhaps some corrupted data got stored in local storage?

I'm seeing the same thing on my M1 Macbook Pro (it works fine on an Intel Macbook Pro and a Windows 10 PC). I see the following error in the console:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token '᭣', "᭣㰱lࢀᜥᦠ⸢ᠦ怳ᔠ"... is not valid JSON