Tether - Every Bond Drawn as a Cord, for GameMaker

The visual layer above your game's relationship system. Tether draws a chart page where every character is a medallion and every bond between two of them is a CORD: its material is the kind of bond, its weight is how strong it is, and its knots are the events that changed it. Pure GML, no image files.

Most relationship systems end in a list of names and numbers. Tether keeps your system and draws what it reports: love as round red silk, friendship as laid rope, an oath as a steel chain, a rivalry as barbed wire, family as a ribbon that turns over as it runs. A strained bond frays, its chain link hangs open, its wire snaps. An event ties a knot: a loop of the cord itself, a padlock on an oath, a bow on family, each labelled.

my_chart = tth_chart_create({ title: "The Company" });
tth_member(my_chart, "aldric", "Aldric", { face: spr_aldric_face, form: "studded" });
tth_bond(my_chart, "aldric", "isolde", 80, { kind: "love" });
tth_knot(my_chart, "aldric", "isolde", "Mother's Letter");
tth_chart_draw(my_chart, 0, 0, 1280, 720);           // or ..., "aldric") for his ledger

What your players see

• Five materials at six weights, each with its own structure, not one line in five colours.
• Strain and knots: fraying, an open link, a snapped wire; loops, padlocks and bows, labelled clear of every frame.
• Medallions in four gilt frame forms with one to three rings; your face sprite clipped to the round, or a monogram on the character's own colour.
• The ledger: a summary counting every kind, or one character's bonds as swatches of their own cord with tier pips and knots.
• The cast is ordered round the ring to cross as few cords as possible; up to sixteen characters.

Built for a real game

• The page is baked once into a sprite and drawn as one sprite until the chart changes (measured: 444 to 630 ms for a 960 x 540 page across three test runs on our machine, VM runtime). Change bonds freely; the bake happens at the next draw.
• Values come from your own system: their size picks the tier, a negative value strains a bond, a pair you never set draws no cord. Knot positions are hashes, so a save always draws the same chart.
• A full cast of twelve wants a page of at least 1280 x 720; a party of four or five reads well at 800 x 450.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source, and proven able to fail.
• 16 in-engine assertions on a real built exe, held to our RPG Maker MZ original: 240 cord cases and 24 medallions drawn through both with exactly the original's drawing operations (53,834 of them). Plus a whole chart page, the reader, the bake and its cache, and the refusals.
• 15 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code.
• 36 adversarial calls against the 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_tth_demo, press Play: a company of twelve; arrows focus each character, Space shows everyone, K ties a knot, S strains or mends. Tether makes no sound.

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

Paid, from the same studio

• Tether for RPG Maker MZ ($9.99): the original, with its own chart scene.
• Wanted ($12.99): every bounty prints its own poster, for GameMaker.
• Cartouche ($14.99): a dialogue box drawn as an object, different for every speaker, for GameMaker.
• Chronicle ($12.99): the quest board and its notices, for GameMaker.

More GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code, the generated artwork and the sample cast and event text in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image, the cover and the GIF were rendered by the product itself. Type: Marcellus SC and Sorts Mill Goudy (SIL OFL 1.1) and Open Sans (Apache 2.0), notices included.