Neon - Signs Made of Light, for GameMaker

Neon makes the signs for your night streets. One call builds a whole neon sign from its wording: every letter is a length of glass tube bent along a stroke alphabet, joined to the next letter by a painted-out run the way real signs are made, clipped off a backing board, framed, hung and lit. Your game then drives it: switch it on and the letters strike one after another, age it and it starts to hum, flicker, sputter and lose a letter, put a wet street under it and it reflects.

Every image on this page was drawn by the package itself, rendered by the shipped build.

What it generates

• 47 characters (A-Z, 0-9 and ! ? . , - ' / : + * #) in 4 letterforms - block, round, script and condensed - all bent from the same skeletons: 188 letterforms
• 16 pictograms beside the words: cocktail, coffee, noodles, heart, star, arrow, bolt, eye, moon, dice, cross, fish, key, note, cat, crown
• 9 boards (plate, rounded, capsule, octagon, arch, arrow, lozenge, disc, or open letters on a raceway), 4 frames (none, single tube, double tube, marquee bulbs), 4 materials (acrylic, metal, painted, timber), 3 mounts (flush on standoff bolts, hanging on chains, wall bracket)
• 12 tube colours, with a second colour for the second line, the pictogram and the frame
• The hardware is part of the picture: tube clips, electrode housings, painted-out joins, a transformer can on open letters
• A soft glow, the light the sign throws on the wall behind it, and a reflection on wet ground

Two hundred seeds over twenty-four shop names gave 189 different sign forms in the suite, before counting colours and pictograms.

Signs your game can drive

• Power: on, off, warm-up (the frame lights, then the pictogram, then each letter strikes with a stutter as the gas catches) and shutdown (a fade with an afterglow)
• Age from 0 to 1 walks a sign through 6 faults: steady, a hum, flicker, one letter sputtering, one letter dead, the whole sign cutting out. Which letter fails is the sign's own
• nen_sign_brightness gives you the light it is putting out right now, to drive your own lighting: the street dims when the sign above it sputters
• Every level is a pure function of the seed and the clock, so a sign flickers the same way every run

// Create
my_sign = nen_sign_make("NOODLE|BAR");        // "|" starts a smaller second line
nen_sign_power(my_sign, "warmup");
// Step
nen_sign_update(my_sign, delta_time / 1000000);
// Draw
nen_draw_reflection(my_sign, 400, 200, 48, 520, 1, 0.5);
nen_draw_sign(my_sign, 400, 200, 48);
// or choose any part yourself
nen_sign_make("ARCADE", 37, { board: "arch", frame: "marquee", icon: "star", colour: "electric blue" });

A runnable demo room is included: a night street of six signs over wet pavement. Choose a sign, regenerate it, power it down and up, age it, and dry or wet the street.

Tested, not just compiled

The in-engine suite reported 411 of 411 assertions on the shipped build: every character in every letterform, every pictogram, the generator over 200 seeds (every tube on its board, every board shape, frame, material, mount, letterform and pictogram reached), power timelines, all six faults, and real drawing measured in pixels. The package was imported into a blank GameMaker project and used the way the Readme documents it (26 of 26 checks), 124 hostile calls against its documented API crashed nothing, and every function the Readme names was checked against the package (33 of 33).

Compatibility

• GameMaker 2024.14 or later; built and tested on runtime 2024.14.4.268 (not tested on GMRT)
• Pure GML: no extension, no shader, no sprite. Everything is namespaced nen_, NEN_ and global.nen_
• Draws in Draw or Draw GUI; the glow uses one shared surface, freed with nen_cleanup()
• You get the .yymps package, the full readable project, the Readme and the licence

Also from CSAF

Set the street under the signs on fire, or flood it, with Touchpaper, elemental surfaces that react. And for the save screen, Colophon draws every save slot as a printed leaf.

AI disclosure: the code and the generated artwork of this package were written with AI assistance. It contains no audio.