An inventory grid could not scroll, because nothing could cut a child off at an edge. A game also had no way to hear the mouse wheel. Both are needed for a scrolling list, a dialog text or a window with more content than room. - A new object type Clip area has width and height and turns, scales and mirrors with its parent. The size gizmo drags width and height. - Everything below a clip area, on every level, is drawn only inside its rectangle, in the Scene view as in the game. Nested areas cut to their intersection. The rule works on a convex polygon, so a turned area cuts right as well. - On click, Is hovered and On mouse wheel do not hit a cut-off part. The Scene view does not pick it either. - In the Scene view the area is a dashed frame that is grabbed only at its edge, so a click inside lands on the content. The eye under Shape hides the frame. In the game the area is invisible. - While an object below an area or one of its parents is selected, the Scene view shows the cut-off part at 30 % opacity and it can be grabbed there. The rule lives in core/properties/clip.ts. - The Properties node knows the type Clip area. - The new event node On mouse wheel fires by the rule of On click. Its delta counts in notches, positive is down, and a frame's turns arrive as one value. It also gives x and y. Limits: - Only sprites and texts show the faded rest. Tilemaps and particles are cut and can be grabbed when open, but are not shown faded. - Masks by texture shape are out, as noted in the issue. Tests: - ./check.sh: 2773 tests, CHECK EXIT 0. - Full e2e run (local): ALL PASSED, 1549 checks, measured. - tests/core/clip-areas.test.ts: 12 tests for the cut rule, scene and game, save and load, hits, the wheel with and without owner, the notch conversion and the open rule. - e2e 58, 5 checks with real mouse and wheel: the scene cuts (74 of 74 red inside, 0 outside), a click on the cut part picks nothing, the selected rest is faded and grabbable, the game cuts, one notch logs 1. - e2e 04 and 46 count the object types and the eye rows. They now include Clip area. - Counter-checks: 6 in unit tests and 3 in the browser, all fail as expected. The originals were restored and checked with cmp. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Game Maker
A browser-based tool "one step before a game engine": create assets (scenes, cameras, sprites), place them into scenes, tweak their properties in an inspector and press Play – all in one program, all drawn inside a single WebGL canvas.
Live: https://nockal.com/game-maker/ · Widget playground: https://nockal.com/game-maker/?playground
The documentation is the wiki: https://git.nockal.com/meleki/game-maker/wiki – every concept, node, tab and shortcut, plus the architecture and the development workflow. This file is the short way in.
In one screen
- An asset is a named, typed thing (scene, camera, sprite, text, behavior, collider, rigidbody, container, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, font, sound, animation, state machine, shader, particles, variables, tile, tilemap) with properties and no position.
- A scene object places an asset: position, sparse overrides of its properties, an optional parent. Only what differs from the asset is stored; the inspector paints it gold and offers ↺ / ↑.
- A container is a reusable group edited once and placed many times; its content is resolved from the template on every read. A screen is a container switched on and off.
- A behavior is logic as a node graph, placed like anything else and parented to the object it acts on. Play has no built-in behaviour – everything that happens is a graph.
- An account owns projects: the editor asks for a user name and a password first, and each account sees only its own projects. The Account menu at the far right of the toolbar changes the password and signs out.
- Play runs a throwaway copy of the project; every panel stays usable and Stop brings back exactly what was saved.
Quick start
Node 22 is required.
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5175/game-maker/dist/ – API calls are proxied to production
npm run check # typecheck + lint + format:check + unit tests – the gate CI runs too
npm run build # writes dist/ and regenerates index.html; the folder is what nginx serves
The browser suite and the three example games need a machine with a GPU:
node tools/seed-e2e.mjs && node tools/e2e.mjs # the editor, 1549 checks (GM_STEPS=20 for one step)
# every tool signs in first – see the Accounts page
node tools/seed-jumprun.mjs && node tools/smoke-jumprun.mjs
node tools/seed-tetris.mjs && node tools/smoke-tetris.mjs
node tools/seed-actor.mjs && node tools/smoke-actor.mjs
Every push runs all of it on the Gitea runner – the gate as one job, build and suite as another beside it – so locally take the gate plus the step your change touches and leave the full run to CI. Details, the GPU requirement and the detached runner are in Development.
Documentation
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Concepts | Assets, scene objects, overrides, play mode, the camera, the console |
| Accounts | Signing in and out, the accounts, who a project belongs to, what the check tools need |
| Scenes | The edited scene, the start scene, and switching scenes from a graph |
| Scene editing | Placing, z-order, hierarchy, the editor offset |
| Behaviors | Node graphs: variables, the node set, structs and lists, loops, nesting, editing |
| Structs | Struct assets: a named shape that struct variables, fields and Pack/Expand follow |
| Colliders | Shapes (box, circle, capsule, polygon), collision events, blocking movement, one-way colliders and raycasts |
| Physics | Rigidbodies, the collider material, gravity, the fixed step |
| Textures | Images, frames, nine-slice, the filter, upload limits |
| Vector art | Pictures drawn from shapes: the pen, curves, gradients and texture fills, combining shapes |
| Pixel art | Pictures painted pixel by pixel: the palette, the tools, layers and frames |
| Fonts | Font assets, the picker, what a text falls back to |
| Sounds | Sound assets and Play sound |
| Animations | Animation assets and the Animation tab |
| Curves | Easings drawn by hand, the Curve tab, using one on a key or a Lerp |
| Shaders | Shader graphs a sprite wears, their node set, the properties they declare |
| Particles | Particle graphs: a particle as a function of its age |
| State machines | The asset, named transitions, State branch, Set state and State transition |
| Containers | Templates, instances, screens |
| Tiles | The tile asset, plain tiles and the two autotile kinds, the pictures as animation steps, the Tile tab |
| Tilemaps | The tilemap asset, painting in the scene view, layers, what it looks like in the game |
| Plugins | Extending the editor: the plugin file, how it is loaded, switching one on and off, API v1 |
| Keyboard | Every shortcut |
| Architecture | Stack, source layout, the rules that keep it organised |
| Development | Commands, the e2e suite, the example games, CI |
| API | The PHP JSON API and the project document |
Ideas, gaps and bugs
They live in the issue tracker: https://git.nockal.com/meleki/game-maker/issues. What is not there yet is listed on the wiki's Home page.
