A sound could only be cut to one stretch, set on the asset itself. To
play two parts of one file, the file had to be imported twice. Now a
sound is always the whole file, and its clips are the stretches of it,
each with a name and a cut of its own.
- A clip is { id, name, props } on SoundAsset.clips. Its id shares the
generator with asset ids, so a sound field holds a sound or a clip,
as a texture field holds a texture or a frame.
- props are the cut: start, end, the fades and their curves, reverse.
Volume, loop, sound FX and bus stay on the sound for all its clips.
The cut rows left the sound's schema for CLIP_ROWS.
- findSound resolves either id. Play sound, the Sample of an
instrument, a Reverb impulse, song items, the scheduler and the test
sound of the Sound FX tab all go through it.
- Every sound field offers each sound followed by its clips, "Kick",
"Kick / Clip 1". A clip that is gone reads as "<id>?".
- The Sound tab has a strip under the ruler with the clips as bands.
A drag there makes a clip, a click picks one, beside the bands the
sound. Only the picked clip has handles. Reverse, fades and curves
in the header work on it and are greyed out without one.
- Whole file is gone from the header, as the user asked.
- Picking a clip is a selection of its own, like a frame. The
inspector shows its name, its cut rows and Delete clip. Delete
takes it away without asking, as with a frame. Ctrl+Z brings it
back.
- Copies get fresh clip ids: Duplicate, Embed a copy, a song
duplicated with its takes, and the copy a split or paste makes of
an embedded take. An item on a clip plays the same clip of its copy.
- A double-click on a song item playing a clip opens its sound with
the clip picked. The Sound row of an item on an embedded take
offers the take and its clips, which no list shows.
- A new take stays the whole sound. Clips are made by hand, as the
user decided.
- No migration in the code, as the user decided. The one project
with cut sounds was changed over by hand.
Deviation from the issue: deleting a used clip does not warn. A frame
does not warn either, and the issue had promised "like a frame".
Tests:
- Unit sound-clips (new): 11 green, 7 counter-checks each red
- Unit sounds, embedded: adjusted to clips, green
- e2e 34 (melektaus-atx): ALL PASSED, 90 checks (3 new, 12 rewritten)
- Counter-check in the browser: clips left out of the sound fields,
the picker check fails
- Gate (melektaus-atx): CHECK EXIT 0, 271 files, 4194 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.
