A behavior could move sprites around but had no way to look at or
change the tilemap it was standing on. Doors, breakable blocks and
"is there ground ahead?" checks all need that.
- New nodes Tile at, Set tile, World to cell and Cell to world. The
conversion honours position, rotation, scale and mirroring of the
placed map. A small Tile literal node lets a graph compare what it
read against a fixed tile.
- The layer is picked by name from all tilemap layers in the project
through a new field kind. "First layer" takes the map's first one.
Because layer is an input, a text can also be wired in.
- Each placement keeps only its edited cells in liveTilemap.ts,
layered over the asset's cells. A second placement of the same map
stays untouched, and the asset itself is never written.
- A read sees a Set tile from earlier in the same flow. Drawing picks
up the edit at once and neighbouring autotile edges adapt.
- Solids see the edits straight away, so a Move in the same frame
already hits the new cell. Rapier rebuilds its shapes on the next
step.
- After Stop the map is back to what was painted. The editor run shows
the edit in the scene view while it lasts and does not touch the
project.
- An unwired tilemap input means no map, like Get position. Cells
outside the grid are refused and done reports false.
Tests:
- ./check.sh: 155 files, 2271 tests, CHECK EXIT 0 (before 2245).
- tests/core/tile-access.test.ts (14), one physics test for a floor
set at runtime, catalog entries for the five nodes.
- e2e 39,40: all passed, 86 checks (before 81), five new in 40s.
- Counter-checks: collision ignoring edits fails 3 unit tests, the
solids cache missing same-tick edits fails only the "at once" test,
drawing ignoring edits fails the 2 drawing checks, the editor run
not reporting a new tile fails only its check.
- 40s uses a still tile. The animated fixture tile redraws every frame
and hid the last counter-check at first.
- Check total 1351 + 5 = 1356, computed. CI confirmed 1351 at cb32b4b.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.4 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, 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, 1356 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.
