Hallmark - Struck Maker's Marks for Every Item, for GameMaker

Every item your loot system rolls gets its own maker's mark: a round, punched guild stamp struck from the item itself and drawn as vector geometry at any size, from a 16 px inventory icon to a 200 px plate. 2,688 marks before a single affix pip. Nothing is an image file and nothing is rolled - the same item strikes the same mark in every run and every save. Pure GML.

An inventory full of loot where every icon is the same sword is a list of names. Hallmark reads what your loot code already rolled and strikes a mark for it, so a player learns to read the shelf: every axe comes from one guild and every staff from another, a dearer piece wears a heavier ornament, and the bonuses and elements it rolled are struck as small pips along the lower arc.

my_item = { kind: "weapon", type: 2, id: 14, name: "Hooked Falchion", price: 1250,
            params: [0, 0, 12, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0], elements: [1] };
// Draw GUI: the mark beside the item's name in an inventory row
hlm_draw_item_mark(my_item, 32, 100, 32);

What your players see

• 56 guild devices in 14 guilds: bladesmith, anvil, crown, beast, celestial, tower, flora, serpent, vessel, key, mariner, ecclesiast, cipher and hand - chevrons, crossed blades, hammers, crowns, a wolf's head, a stag, a comet, a keep, a thistle, a serpent, a crucible, a lock, an anchor, a chalice, a rune, a gauntlet and forty more.
• 8 metals with their own palettes: iron, steel, bronze, silver, electrum, cold iron, meteoric and blackened - a ground, an ink, a shine and a patina each, not a tint.
• 6 ranks by price: struck, ringed, banded, cartouche, laurel and sunburst - rings, studs and rays around the punch.
• 24 affix pips from what was rolled: a stat bonus (Bulwark, Warded, Heavy, Stone, Arcane, Holy, Swift, Lucky), an element (Ember, Frost, Spark, Venom, Gale, Tide, Shadow, Echo), a curse, a reflect, and six more by note.
• It reads as metal: a raised lip, a faint shine copy of the punch offset up and left, and holes - an eye, a keyhole - punched clean through the disc.
• The Assay Ledger: a book of every mark the player has seen, thirty to a leaf, with the selected mark under the loupe - its form, guild, metal, rank, pips and the item it was first seen on. Tooled leather, gilt rules, an eased bracket cursor, a strike when the selection changes and a shimmer across the plate.

Built to plug in

• Takes the plain struct your loot code already has: kind, type, id, name, price, eight stat bonuses, elements, a curse, a reflect. Every field but kind is optional.
• Derived, never stored: the mark is a function of the item and one world seal (hlm_reseal(seed) re-casts every mark), so there is nothing to save but the Ledger's record (hlm_record_save(), a JSON string).
• Override any item with a note ("<hallmark: form=anvil, metal=meteoric, rank=sunburst>") or opt it out ("<hallmark: none>") and draw your own icon.
• Struck once per size into a cached sprite; after that a mark is one sprite draw (all 56 from the cache: 1.2 to 1.6 ms). A per-frame strike budget means an inventory of fifty new items fills in over a few frames instead of freezing, and hlm_prepare strikes them ahead on a loading screen. Measured on our machine, VM runtime.
• The Ledger is a struct you create, step and draw at any scale, with default controls or your own.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source, and proven able to fail.
• 57 in-engine assertions on a real built exe, held to our RPG Maker MZ original run in Node: 353 derivation cases with exactly the original's signature, mark and description, and 400 marks with exactly the original's paint operations (8,930 of them).
• 48 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code.
• 176 adversarial calls against 44 documented functions with zero crashes.

Requirements

GameMaker 2024.14 or newer (built and tested against runtime 2024.14.4.268, VM). Pure GML: no extensions, no DLLs, no shaders, no sprites. Import the .yymps, open rm_hlm_demo, press Play: THE ARMOURY rolls a dozen items and strikes each one's mark; R rolls new loot, S reseals the world, L opens the Ledger. Hallmark makes no sound.

One commercial licence, unlimited games, no attribution required. Every mark the package strikes in your game is yours to ship, including on your store page and in your trailers.

Paid, from the same studio

• Hallmark for RPG Maker MZ ($14.99): the original, replacing the stock icon everywhere the player looks.
• Panoply ($9.99): a loot and gear system whose every item gets a generated item card, for GameMaker.
• Armoury ($14.99): weapons that forge themselves from their own materials, pattern and history, for GameMaker.
• Anvil ($12.99): a forging minigame, the blade drawn as the player shaped it, for GameMaker.

More GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code, the generated artwork and the interface text in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image, the cover and the GIF were rendered by the product itself. Type: Libre Baskerville (SIL OFL 1.1), notices included.