adminandClaude Opus 5.5
4ea752feef
Notes could only be played one at a time, by a key or a behavior. A pattern is a stretch of notes for one instrument, drawn in a piano roll and played in time through the scheduler of #332. Songs (#334) will lay patterns out on tracks. - New asset type pattern under the heading Patterns. Instruments are listed under Instruments now, since a heading is one per type. - Notes are a start and a length in ticks, a note number and a velocity, kept to their rules on load and in every command. The instrument, the length in bars, the grid, the meter and the tempo are rows in the inspector. The loop is the asset's own data, the whole pattern while none is set. - Grids from 1/1 to 1/32 and the triplets 1/4T to 1/32T, all whole ticks. The meter only moves the bar lines, the notes stay put. - The tab shows the keys down the left, a ruler with bars, beats, loop and start along the top, the notes between them and a velocity lane below. Keys the instrument plays nothing for are grey, the names of a drum kit stand on its keys. - A click draws a note on the grid line before the pointer, as long as the last one drawn or lengthened and as hard as the last velocity set. The body moves a note, the right end lengthens it, Alt leaves the grid. A drag on empty grid picks with a band, Shift adds, a right-click deletes. - Keys: Space plays, Delete, Ctrl+C/V/D/A, the arrows by a semitone or a grid step and with Shift by an octave or a bar. A paste lands where playing starts. Every gesture is one undo step. - A click on the ruler sets where playing starts, a drag the loop or one of its ends, its menu loops a bar or the whole pattern. - The wheel scrolls, Shift across, on the ruler or with Alt it zooms. Ctrl+wheel stays with the browser, Pixi listens passively. - Play runs the loop through the scheduler. An edit goes to it on the next window without a restart, a new loop or tempo counts from what is planned. Another pattern shown or a project opened stops it. - The time axis and the ruler are their own pieces in editor/music for the song tab. The rules of the roll are pure functions in rollView and rollEdit. Findings: - Music.play could start after a stop that came while it was still loading its files. A run counter makes the late start give up. Music.edit now loads what a new note needs as well. - A click on an end of the loop would have set the loop again. A press there only moves the end once it is dragged. Tests: - pattern.test.ts (new, 9) and piano-roll.test.ts (new, 16): model, grids, meter, held notes, sequence, commands, loop, round trip, drum names, time lines, rows, hits, bands, lane, edit rules. - e2e 64 (new) on melektaus-atx: ALL PASSED, 20 checks. e2e 4 with 29 asset types: ALL PASSED, 62 checks. - Gate on melektaus-atx: CHECK EXIT 0, 247 test files, 3839 tests. - Counter-checks: the move without its clamp, the sequence without the end of the pattern, the duplicate offset without whole grid steps each fail 1 test. Without passing edits to the scheduler the e2e check for a note drawn while playing fails, the rest passes. - Probe on stein2: the tab with a drum kit, before and while playing, looked at in two screenshots. 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.