A sprite sorted by Y stood on the bottom of its box. With a shadow or empty rows under the feet that is too low, so a figure slipped in front of a tree it should stand behind. The line belongs to the frame, not the texture, because one texture can hold several sprite sheets. - New field `sortLine` on a frame: whole image pixels up from the frame's bottom edge, 0 to the frame height. 0 is stored as nothing, so old projects stay the same. Shrinking a frame keeps the line inside it. - `feetOf` in drawOrder.ts lifts a sprite by the same share of its box. Scene view, game view, play and picking all use it. In an animation the line of the frame shown right now counts. - The texture tab draws the selected frame's line dashed in yellow with a knob left of the frame. At 0 the line shares the bottom edge with the nine-slice border and a resize handle, so the knob is tested first. A line inside the frame can be dragged directly, tested after the nine-slice lines. - The inspector has a new "Sorting" section with a "Sort line" field. Dragging or typing is one undo step each. Limit: frames of one walk cycle need the same value, set by hand. Otherwise the figure changes its place in the order while walking. Tests: - ./check.sh: 160 files, 2356 tests, CHECK EXIT 0 (before 2350). - 6 new unit tests in tests/viewport/sort-by-y.test.ts. - e2e 37 and 39-43: ALL PASSED, 162 checks. New check 37b-ii drags the knob up 6 px and undoes it, plus the inspector row. - Counter checks: if feetOf ignores the line, exactly the 3 order tests fail. If the knob cannot be grabbed, 37b-ii fails. - The e2e sum in the README is 1380, counted, not yet seen in CI. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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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, 1380 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.
