adminandClaude Opus 5.5
c9e8a3f6ac
A video used to run on its own clock as soon as a sprite wore it. An animation could switch the sprite on and off, but never say which picture shows at which frame. Cutting a video in an animation needs the opposite: the animation sets the time and the video follows. - Sprites wearing a video or a clip get two rows, Video clock and Video time. They show only while the texture holds a video. - With Video clock on Driven the video does not play by itself. It shows the picture at Video time, counted from the clip's start. Past the end it goes round with Loop and holds the last picture without. - Video time is a number like any other, so keys, step, easing and curves give stills, slow motion and ramps. - A driven sprite gets a player of its own, keyed by the wearer's name. The same clip can run twice at different times. - Following has two ways (`videoFollow.ts`). Running forward at 0.25x to 4x the video plays at that rate and is nudged. A still, a scrub or a step backwards seeks, and only the newest seek counts. - Sound is heard only near 1x. The animation tab now plays it too, so a cut can follow the sound. Scrubbing is silent. - Scene, game view, the inspector's PREVIEW and the shader preview show the driven picture. In a running game Play animation sets it. Found on the way: - After a scrub the video in the animation tab kept running. The preview redrew only while the playhead moved, so nobody asked for the video once it stood. `AnimationEditor.tick` now redraws it every frame while it shows a video. - Every sprite has two more defaults (`videoClock: 'free'`, `videoTime: 0`). Eight tests in five files pinned the old list and are updated. Tests: - Unit: video-clock and video-follow new, 4 files with 42 tests green. - e2e 66 (melektaus-atx): ALL PASSED, 22 checks, 3 new. 66i: two sprites on one clip stand at 0.2 s red and 0.7 s green. 66j: a scrub to frames 2, 7, 12 and 3 shows red, green, blue, red, and each colour still stands 0.7 s later. 66k: playing runs 10-30 ms behind at rate 1.00-1.03 and is not muted. - Counterchecks: a seek that keeps the rate turns the seek test red. Not seeing Driven turns 66i, 66j and 66k red. - Gate (melektaus-atx): exit 0, 297 files, 4546 tests. - Not tested in the browser: Play animation in a running game. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
7.6 KiB
7.6 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, variables, struct, collider, rigidbody, joint, container, clip area, texture, vector art, pixel art, palette, animation, curve, tile, tilemap, state machine, shader, shader function, font, sound, sound FX, instrument, pattern, song, bus, 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, 1999 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 runners – 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, joints |
| 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 clips, Play sound, buses and the Master routing, sound FX |
| Instruments | Instruments as node graphs, Chips and presets, the keys of the Instrument tab, Play note |
| Patterns | Patterns and the piano roll, playing one in a loop or from a game |
| Songs | Songs, their tracks and items, routing, recording, playing one from a game |
| 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 that sprites, texts, particle fields and cameras wear, their node set, passes, shader functions |
| 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.