feuerwerk/README.md

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, container, texture, animation, state machine) 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.
• 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, 762 checks (GM_STEPS=20 for one step)
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, 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
Scene editing	Placing, z-order, hierarchy, the editor offset
Behaviors	Node graphs: variables, the node set, structs and lists, loops, nesting, editing
Colliders	Collision events and blocking movement
Textures	Images, frames, the filter, upload limits
Animations	Animation assets and the Animation tab
State machines	The asset, State branch and Set state
Containers	Templates, instances, screens
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.