A scene with a hundred crates fills the hierarchy with a hundred rows. Groups bundle top-level objects under one folder row that folds away. They exist for the editor only. Parenting, positions and the game do not see them. - Model: a scene or container template holds a list of groups, an object may carry a groupId. Old projects load unchanged. Loading drops empty groups and members that are no longer top level. - Only top-level objects can join a group. Parenting a member takes it out of the group, and Undo puts it back. There are no groups in groups. - Order: treeOrder lists the members together, where the first one stands. The same order decides drawing at equal z, in the editor and in the game, so the hierarchy and the picture cannot disagree. The stored object list stays untouched when grouping. - Hierarchy: a group row shows a folder icon, the name and the member count. Clicking it selects all members and keeps it folded. Selecting a single member elsewhere unfolds it. Folding lasts for the session. - Create with "Group..." in the object menu. A name dialog asks first, so creating is one Undo step and Cancel creates nothing. - The group menu has Select members, Rename... and Ungroup. The object menu adds "Remove from group". - Drag and drop: onto the group row appends, into a gap between members inserts there, next to a row outside leaves the group. Dragging the group row moves all members as a block. The drop rules live in hierarchyDrop.ts as a pure function. - Copy and paste keeps a top-level copy in the group of its original. A container built from group members takes their place in the group. - Clicking an object that is already selected together with others now keeps only that object selected. ListView narrows the selection on release, so a drag starting on such a row keeps the selection. Not checked in the browser: groups in the container tab, "Remove from group", Ctrl-click on a group row and a drag out of a multi-selection. The code path covers them. Tests: - check.sh: 177 files, 2552 tests, CHECK EXIT 0 - e2e 1, 51, 52: ALL PASSED, 31 checks (new module 52) - 19 new unit tests in object-groups.test.ts and hierarchy-drop.test.ts - 9 counter-probes, all fail as expected (7 unit, 2 in the browser) Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.4 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, 1442 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 |
| 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 |
| 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.
