The top bar, the magnet, the eye and many marks of the inspector are
pictures without a caption. Whoever did not know one could only try
it. The toolkit had no hint on hover, which also forced the point
menu of #195 to be words. The answers in the issue settle the open
points: a cut tab name shows in full, shortcuts are part of the
text, the point menu stays as it is.
- Button takes a tooltip, a text or a function asked each time. It
shows on a small sign once the pointer has rested for half a
second.
- There is one sign for the page, a TooltipLayer on the overlay
above the menus. A control reports each pointer move and the
pointer leaving, the layer does the waiting.
- A press, a key, the wheel or a blur of the window takes the sign
away. initUI listens for them on the window.
- placeTooltip in ui/tooltip.ts is the rule for the place as a pure
function: under the control and flush left, flush right at the
right border, above the control at the bottom.
- toolbarTip says what the five buttons of the top bar do right now.
Undo and redo name their step from CommandStack.undoLabel and
redoLabel, as in "Undo Paint tiles (Ctrl+Z)".
- A SortableList reports its own marks with a key per mark: the eye,
the duplicate mark, the cross and the plus.
- The magnet, both fullscreen buttons, the eye of the scene tab, the
overflow of the tab strip, the plus of the assets panel, the marks
of the inspector rows and the nine anchors of the resize dialog
carry a text.
Decided here:
- Every button whose text is cut short shows the whole text, not
only a tab.
- A row action of the inspector names the one thing a click does. A
button that opens a menu says only Reset, Apply or Size from the
picture.
- A button just clicked stays quiet until the pointer has left it.
- A greyed out button shows no sign.
- The switches of the eye popup, the cross of a document tab and the
tools of pixel art have none. The tools carry words, other than
the issue assumes.
- The marks of a list say Show or Hide, Duplicate, Remove and Add,
whatever the list holds.
Found on the way:
- Signing out empties the overlay and would have destroyed a sign on
screen with it. The editor takes the tooltip away first. This has
no test of its own.
- The text hooks locate and has skip the sign, or it would answer
for the button under it.
Tests:
- Gate on melektaus-atx: 210 files, 3209 tests (3176 + 33), exit 0
- e2e 46 on melektaus-atx: 20 checks, all pass
- e2e 1-14 on melektaus-atx: 508 checks, all pass
- e2e 1-9,14,39,40,44-48: 685 pass, 2 fail, both in module 14. It
measures tabs that modules 10 to 13 open, and the chain 1-14 is
green. The cut chain was not run on the state before.
- No full run and no smokes. The sum of 1667 (1664 + 3) is reckoned,
1664 is what CI counted for 3452899.
- 33 unit tests in tests/ui/tooltip.test.ts
- Three e2e checks in block 46h of module 46: the redo button after
the wait, taking the sign away, turning at the right border
- 50 unit counter-probes and four browser counter-probes all fail
their tests. Three of the unit ones did not at first and got
sharper tests.
- Not checked in the browser: the sign of a cut tab, the marks of
the lists, turning upwards at the bottom, each other button alone
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.8 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, 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, 1667 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.
