adminandClaude Opus 5.5
3a52f2290f
Until now every sound went straight to the speakers. There was no point where all of them came together, so nothing could turn the music down against the effects, and a compressor or a shared echo over everything had nowhere to sit. The bus technique of #346 was there already, only the end of the chain was missing. - Bus asset (Audio): Volume, Sound FX and Into. Into is empty for the master and never offers the bus itself nor a bus that already goes into it. The list is worked out when the menu opens, so a change made meanwhile counts. A loop that is in a project anyway sends the buses on it into the master. - The master is no asset. Its volume and sound FX are two new rows under Master in Project settings, one undo step each. A project written before has 1 and none, which is how it sounded. - Sound, instrument, pattern and song have a row Bus, empty for the master. Play sound, Play note, Play pattern and Play song have an input bus: From the asset, Master or a bus. Inside a song or a pattern only the bus of the song or pattern counts. - Set bus volume (bus, volume, time, easing) and Bus volume. An empty bus is the master. The volume set holds for the whole run, across scenes, over that of the asset. GameRun resets it at start and end. Set sound FX parameters without a voice now reaches the sound FX of the bus picked in its new bus input. - SoundLibrary: the master is the bus "mix", each bus "mix:<id>". Every bus, the playing masters of #346 included, ends there, and only the master is heard. setMix sets them up once a context exists, so an editor nobody listened to opens no audio device. The same mix again changes nothing, which lets the editor hand it over on every change of the project. - The tabs play as the game does: Sound, Sound FX, Instrument, Pattern and Song tab through the bus of their asset and the master. - Pause game does nothing to the buses (the user's answer 4b). A game that wants quiet in its pause menu sets a bus volume itself. - Streaming long music files is #349, split off as asked. Finding on the way: the Into menu first worked from a list made when the inspector row was built. After another bus was sent into the open one, e2e 34 saw it still offered. It is now asked on open. The SoundLibrary tests expected voices to end at the destination. They now end in the master, which adds its input, level and pan to every wiring and two gains to every list. Those expectations are updated, nothing else in them changed. Tests: - Unit buses (new): 15 green. Ten counter-checks, each red on its own: loop check, bus picked, reset at run start, bus of Set sound FX parameters, master volume in the settings, and in SoundLibrary default into the master, voices into the master, run volume over the mix, no context before a play, a playing on its bus. - Unit sound-library: 90 green (5 new). Node catalog: 416 green (9 new cases). - e2e 34 (melektaus-atx): ALL PASSED, 75 checks (3 new). The voice of the Sound tab was heard on mix:<bus>, that bus into the other, that one at 0.5 into the master. Master volume 0.6 via the dialog, undo back to 1. - Gate (melektaus-atx): CHECK EXIT 0, 262 files, 4072 tests. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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, 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, 1744 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 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 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.