The game view always stretched the camera picture to fit the pane.
Pixel art came out blurred at odd factors, and there was no way to
see the game at its real size. The view now has a header with a
scale drop-down, and 100 % is the default.
- The header of the new GamePane offers Auto, Fit, 25 %, 50 %,
100 %, 200 % and 400 %. Auto and Fit show the factor they land
on, e.g. "Auto · 100%", and follow the pane when it resizes.
- 100 % means one screen pixel per pixel of the camera resolution
(width x height). The camera zoom scales the world on top of
that, so a zoomed camera still fills the same frame.
- Auto takes the largest fixed step that fits the whole picture
and falls back to 25 % when nothing fits. Fit keeps the old
behaviour.
- A picture larger than the pane is cropped around the camera
centre. Fixed steps start on a whole pixel so pixel art stays
sharp at 100 %.
- The choice is kept in the browser like "Play starts". Nothing
is written into the project.
Found on the way: the first draft applied the step to the world
instead of the camera resolution. The camera zoom then had no
effect at 100 %, which the existing check 12c caught (zoom 1.37
measured as scale 1).
The CI smokes were not run locally, because that would reseed
projects the user works in. All three smoke cameras are 640x360
and fit the 670x383 harness view at 100 %.
Tests:
- ./check.sh: 156 files, 2298 tests, CHECK EXIT 0 (before 2290).
- 8 unit tests in tests/viewport/view.test.ts for whole-pixel
steps, cropping, Auto and Fit with fallback, and zoomed cameras.
- 7 e2e checks in 03g. e2e 1-17,28,30,38-40: ALL PASSED, 727
checks.
- Counter-checks: no cropping, no rounding, no factor reported to
the header, and no zoom share each fail their own tests.
- Check total: 1367 (CI at c1a702b) + 7 = 1374, computed only.
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, 1374 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.
