adminandClaude Opus 5.5
b2326085ed
A camera could only show the whole scene, so a HUD drawn in the world would run through a camera shader (#299) with everything else. Render layers say which cameras see an object, and overlay cameras draw their own picture over the main one. - The project has a list of up to 16 render layers, edited in Project settings next to the collision layers. It is a list of its own, read by the same rules (`layerNamesOf`). - Sprites, texts, tilemaps, particle sources and containers carry a row `Render layer` under their switches. Its default `Inherit` takes the parent's layer, at the top the first one. - A camera has `Sees` (all layers by default) and `Overlay`. The main camera is the first one switched on without Overlay, so two plain cameras still draw through the first one only. - Every view through a camera keeps only what that camera sees and lays one see-through view per overlay camera over itself. That view is a `WorldViewport` of its own, handed its view and frame from below. - An overlay is fitted into the main camera's whole picture without distortion. One of the same size and zoom covers it exactly. - `z` sorts within one camera only. The pictures lie on top of each other as a whole, which is what a shader per camera (#299) needs. - The Game tab's preview now collects the scene once per redraw. Before it collected it twice, with the cameras it would have been five times. - `SetCollisionLayersCommand` became `SetLayerNamesCommand`, which takes the list it sets. Follow-ups: #304 (the mouse through a chosen camera) and #305 (change the render layer at run time). Tests: - Gate: 226 files, 3487 tests (3480 + 7) - e2e 63 (new): 4 checks. A green overlay sprite at z -10 covers a red main sprite at z 1000, in the preview and in the running game. A `UI` sprite in front of the main camera and a `Default` one in front of the overlay stay away. Without Overlay the second camera draws nothing. The settings dialog adds a render layer at the end. - Counter-checks: inheriting from parents switched off fails 1 unit test. Overlays never drawn fails the two overlay checks in e2e 63. - e2e total 1720 (1716 + 4), computed. 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, variables, struct, collider, rigidbody, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, font, sound, particles) 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. Release… shares a link that plays the saved game on its own, without the editor and without signing in.
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, 1720 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.