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, 1965 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.