A sound was decoded whole as soon as the project opened, in the editor and in a released game: five minutes of stereo held some 115 MB for as long as the page was open. A sound with Stream on now plays from a copy as Opus in Ogg, fetched a piece at a time and decoded a few seconds ahead by WebCodecs, so a game holds a few megabytes for it. - The Stream switch is a row of the sound, off by default. The Sound tab suggests it from a minute on and says how far the copy has got. - StreamKeeper makes the copies in the browser, a moment after the last change, one at a time: the sound's own and one per clip of its cut, fades and Reverse baked in. A copy that is no longer wanted is taken off and deleted once the project is saved without it. - streamTable says which played names stream from which copy. A clip without a fitting copy, a Sample and a Reverb impulse stay decoded. A sound with Stream on is never decoded ahead. - The page fetches by Range and takes the whole file from a server that ignores it, as the CI's PHP server does. It keeps the bytes and the first two seconds decoded, the rest goes four seconds ahead. - A jump decodes 32 packets before the place first. Measured in Chrome, what follows is then the same to the bit as decoding from the start. With 4 packets it was 0.06 off. - The stream-player on the FX worklet reads the samples at the rate of the context along a Catmull-Rom curve. What comes late is silent and skipped once it is there, so a clip keeps its beat. - The opening stretch goes with the player as it is made. Sent by message it came a few milliseconds late, and 557 samples of the attack were lost. - Pitch on a streamed sound is a shifter after the player, as on a bus: the length stays and it is heard 42.7 ms late. - Bakes of patterns and songs (#340) always stream now. - The song timeline draws a streamed sound from its copy decoded at 8 kHz, keeping only the peaks. Tests: - Gate: CHECK EXIT 0, 280 files, 4312 tests (31 new: ogg +3, stream-queue 6, streams 11, streaming 6, sound-library +5). - e2e 34: ALL PASSED, 106 checks (7 new). Five minutes of mono, 4.8 MB as WAV, 3.6 MB as its copy: streamed the renderer grows by 5.8 MB, decoded by 69.6 MB. Offline at 48 kHz, start, loop seam and a reversed clip are the copy decoded whole to the sample (0). - Counter-checks red as they should be: no pre-roll, no catch-up of late samples at the end, no opening stretch, a streamed sound decoded ahead. 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, variables, struct, collider, rigidbody, joint, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, shader function, font, sound, sound FX, instrument, pattern, song, bus, particles) 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. Release… shares a link that plays the saved game on its own, without the editor and without signing in.
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, 1935 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 runners – 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, joints |
| 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 clips, Play sound, buses and the Master routing, sound FX |
| Instruments | Instruments as node graphs, Chips and presets, the keys of the Instrument tab, Play note |
| Patterns | Patterns and the piano roll, playing one in a loop or from a game |
| Songs | Songs, their tracks and items, routing, recording, playing one from a game |
| 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 that sprites, texts, particle fields and cameras wear, their node set, passes, shader functions |
| 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.
