Charter - Illuminated Auto-Cartography for GameMaker

As your player explores, Charter inks a hand-drawn manuscript chart of what they have actually seen. Landmark marks in the cartographer's tradition, a scribe's annotations, a compass rose — and unexplored ground left as unpainted parchment with a torn edge, never a black rectangle.

There is no sprites/ folder in this package. There is nothing to put in one. Every mark, hatch, rose, cartouche and page edge is drawn at run time from data by raw, readable GML.

What you get

• 44 landmark marks, hand-authored in six families — 8 settlement · 7 relic · 6 sacred · 7 passage · 8 wild · 8 works.
• 4 ink hands. The scribe drawing the chart. Survey draws pure outline like a technical pen; Field Sketch is heavy, wobbly and leaves its shapes open; Chancery is formal; Illuminated doubles every contour. The same mark is visibly a different drawing in each.
• 3 landmark states. Rumoured is faint, dashed, annotated with a query — and deliberately in the wrong place. Sighted is contour only, with no name. Visited is fully inked and named.
• 6 parchment palettes computed in Oklch, including Nocturne, which inverts the whole polarity: silver ink on a dark ground, and the unpainted fog goes darker than the page.
• 8 compass roses, 6 cartouche frames, 8 terrain fills, 4 page edges, 5 border treatments.

44 marks × 4 hands × 3 states = 528 distinct mark renderings, before palette. Across 6 pages: 3,168 distinct appearances. Zero PNGs.

It is a system, not an icon set

• Discovery grid. One call in your player's Step event reveals ground, advances landmark states and extends the route trail.
• Landmark registry. Register a place and it starts as a rumour, drawn in the wrong spot, snapping to the truth the moment it is sighted.
• Terrain regions clipped to any POLYGON, not to a box — so a forest follows a coastline instead of announcing itself as a widget.
• Route trail, inked as a survey line with periodic ticks.
• Save and load. The chart's knowledge serialises to a string your own save system can hold, and a save from a mismatched grid is refused rather than half-applied.
• Dirty-surface caching, so a full page re-inks only when something actually changes.

The whole integration

chart = cht_chart_create(0, 0, room_width, room_height, 48, 32);
cht_chart_add_landmark(chart, "ostmarch", "city", "Ostmarch", 1200, 800, true);
cht_chart_add_region(chart, "woodland", [[200,300],[900,260],[1100,700],[400,820]]);
// Step:
cht_chart_observe(chart, player.x, player.y);
// Draw:
cht_chart_draw_cached(chart, 64, 64, 960, 720);

Compatibility

GameMaker 2024.14 and later. Built and verified against runtime 2024.14.4.268 (the legacy GMS2 runtime, which GameMaker has committed to supporting with fixes until at least Q1 2028). Pure GML — no extensions, no native DLLs, no shaders, so nothing here is platform-locked.

Install is Tools → Import Local Package → Add All, then open rm_charter_demo and press Run. Every global and macro is namespaced cht_ / CHT_, because GML's global namespace is flat and a collision in your project is a support ticket nobody can debug remotely. No absolute paths and no hardcoded room or layer indices.

Verified, and here is what that means

• 375 in-engine assertions, run headlessly against a real Igor-built executable — every corpus count, the coordinate contract on all 44 marks in all 4 hands in all 3 states, the polygon clipper on a concave shape, and the whole discovery and save system. Press F1 in the demo room to run them yourself.
• Every image on this page was rendered by the product itself, through the same public functions you call. No previewer, no mockup.

---

Also from Core Systems Asset Factory, for GameMaker: Affliction (a status system that draws its own icons) · Meridian (procedural skill trees) · Trove (inventory).