adminandClaude Opus 5.5
94c1055895
With the behaviors fixed, the scene Performance test still ran at about 23 fps with 500 entities. The rest of the frame went to the editor: every spawn or destroy rebuilt the hierarchy with all its rows, redrew the scene view behind the game tab and refreshed every panel. The game itself is cheap. What the panels show of it now follows a preset in the project settings. - New section While playing in the project settings with three presets: Live, Balanced and Minimal. Every project reads as Balanced, including those saved before the setting existed. - Live keeps today's behavior. Balanced brings hierarchy and panel values up to date 4 times a second and stops redrawing the hidden scene view. Minimal updates hierarchy and values only on pause and throttles the graph tabs as well. - The graph and state machine tabs stay live under Balanced. At 4 updates a second the beads on exec edges stutter, and the tabs draw only while on screen. This differs from the issue proposal. - The game itself is never throttled. Pause, step and stop bring every panel up to date at once, and a change of structure that falls between two updates is kept for the next one. - The rule lives in editor/playThrottle.ts as panelPolicy and PanelClock. PlaySession asks it after every frame. - Objects spawned at the top level go into a hierarchy group named after their asset, so hundreds of gold pieces fold into one row. Groups start folded. Measured on a throwaway copy of Performance test, 3 s each, fps: - About 500 entities: Live 38.6, Balanced 56, Minimal 60.6. - About 315 entities: Live 56.9, Balanced 60.5, Minimal 60.6. - p95 frame time at 500 entities: 60 ms, 41 ms and 23 ms. Tests: - ./check.sh: 193 files, 2799 tests, CHECK EXIT 0. - GM_STEPS=1,18,59: ALL PASSED, 54 checks. - Full e2e run (local): ALL PASSED, 1562 checks. - tests/editor/play-throttle.test.ts: presets, update rates, kept structure changes, flush, spawn group and loading old projects. - New e2e module 59: preset chosen with the mouse, measured update rates, scene view behind the game tab, Minimal with pause. - Module 03 now expects spawned objects in their group row after the next update. - Counter-checks: 4 in unit tests and 2 in the browser, each failing as expected. 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, 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, 1562 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 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.