adminandClaude Opus 5.5
4194f3e150
A project could only be played inside the editor, behind the login.
To show a game to someone else there was no way short of an account.
A release freezes the saved project under a random token and serves
it on a page that holds nothing but the game view.
- Menu -> Release... opens a dialog with the state of the release,
the link with Copy link and Open, Publish or Update release, and
Take down behind a confirmation.
- Publish saves first and refuses while anything is unsaved, like
snapshots. Updating keeps the link. Take down kills it, and a new
Publish hands out a new token.
- The link is play.html?game=<32 hex>. The page needs no session,
paints Theme.colors.background, zooms with Auto and waits for
"Click to play" so that sound and keyboard focus are allowed.
- The game always starts in the start scene. Persistent variables
are stored per link in the browser. Plugins are not loaded, and the
dialog warns about them and about a project without a scene.
- GET ?r=releases/{token} is the only route besides auth/* that works
without a login. The public answer carries the token as project.id,
so the project id stays hidden. Release files are written with 0640
and nginx does not serve them directly (measured 403).
- Starting, the frame and Load scene moved into runtime/GameRun.ts.
Play in the editor and the play page run through the same code.
- WorldViewport moved to src/viewport/ and no longer needs the
EditorState. Pointer forwarding (gamePointer.ts) and setting up
textures, fonts and sounds (projectFiles.ts) exist only once.
- Vite builds two pages. The play page loads 4 kB of its own code
plus the shared chunk (Pixi, runtime, drawing, 653 kB) and Rapier,
without the editor.
Found on the way, not fixed here: data/projects/<id>.json answers 200
without a login because the files are 0644.
Tests:
- ./check.sh: 194 files, 2808 tests, exit 0.
- tests/php/releases.test.php: 20 checks, also added to CI.
- New e2e module 60 with 10 checks, played in a browser without a
session. Module 46 counts the menu entries and was updated.
- Full e2e run: 1572 checks passed.
- Counter-checks: 3 unit, 2 PHP and 3 browser mutations all fail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.7 KiB
6.7 KiB
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, 1572 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.