Closed beta
Make point-and-click adventure games in one editor
Clickwork is an engine and editor for narrative adventure games. Scenes, pixel art, lighting, effects, scripting, dialogue, voice-over, sound, music and task tracking are all part of the same app, and it runs in the browser. Your project files stay on your computer.
There's nothing to download. Once your access is approved, log in and open the editor.
Scene workspace
3D scenes, rendered as pixel art
Rooms are built from simple 3D geometry, and you paint the art in 2D on top of it. Because the paint is projected onto real geometry, characters can walk into the scene, get smaller with distance and pass behind things like railings, and the result still sits on the pixel grid.
- Paint layers directly in the camera view
- Depth sorting and character shadows without hand-made masks
- Per-room resolution, parallax and cropping
Lights and fixtures
Lighting and animated fixtures
Lights and shadow casters sit in the 3D scene and light both the room and the characters walking through it. Fixtures are the moving parts of a room, like a door or a hanging sign, and you animate them on a keyframe timeline with a curve editor.
- Live preview while you place lights
- Move, rotate and scale gizmos for fixtures
- One animation clip can drive several fixtures
- Clips can be started from scripts, and their end state is saved with the game
VFX graph
Particle effects in a node graph
Rain, fire, dust and fireflies are built in the VFX graph. Each emitter has spawn, initialize, update and output blocks, and operator nodes can feed values into any of their fields.
- 25 operator types
- Particles are lit by scene lights and can collide with floors
- Emit from the surface of a mesh
- Parameters can be set from Lua and script graphs
PostFX graph
Looks, layered over the picture
A look is a second node graph, this one over the finished frame: colour balance, LUTs, blur, lens distortion, scanlines, grain, vignette, letterbox bars, light rays cast by the room's own lamps. It runs at the game's own low resolution, and the HUD stays untouched on top of it.
- Time, LFO, noise and maths nodes drive any field, so a look can flicker or drift
- A look per room, per character or per cutscene, or set from a script
- Looks cross-fade into each other
- A look can hang off a player setting, so someone can turn the bloom off
Art workspace
Draw and animate sprites
You draw characters, props and particle sprites in the editor itself. Each animation has its own filmstrip per facing direction, and each frame its own hold time. You set the pivot and tag the frames where a foot lands, and those tags trigger the footstep sounds.
- Pencil, fill, select, move and crop tools, and a palette shared across the project
- Every character runs an animation state machine: walking, turning, talking, carrying, a state per verb
- Transition clips, so a character turns or sets off on the spot instead of sliding
Graphs and Lua
Script with nodes or Lua
Cutscenes, conversations and puzzle logic are node graphs. You can run a graph from any node while the game is running, which makes it quick to test a single scene. For anything that's easier to write as code there's Lua, and both share the same save-game state.
- 40 node types
- Group nodes into functions and call them from any other graph
- One blackboard holds the world state, and it goes into the save file
- Room and global Lua scripts reload when you save them
Dialogue workspace
Dialogue, voice recording and translation
Every spoken line is stored in one lines database that conversations, cutscenes and barks refer to. The recording booth shows the script one line at a time: record a few takes and keep the best one. Speech-to-text transcription helps check that the takes still match the script after edits.
- Split long recording sessions into per-line clips
- Lipsync
- Translations and an in-game language setting
Audio workspace
Audio mixer and positional sound
Sounds go through a bus mixer with ducking, reverb and a limiter. An audio object can be a single clip, segments cut from one long recording, a random pool, or a switch that picks by what the game is doing. Sounds placed in a room pan with their position on screen and get quieter further back.
- Mix states you can recall from scripts
- Footsteps pick their sound from the floor material
Music studio
Adaptive music
Write and arrange the soundtrack in the music studio: tracks, MIDI clips and a piano roll, played by built-in instruments or your own MIDI keyboard. The music then follows the game. Segments are assembled into playlists, transition rules decide how one piece hands over to the next, and scripts switch state from a graph node or from Lua.
- Record from a MIDI keyboard, or play tracks through VST instruments
- Playlists, transition rules and music states
- Export a song as MIDI for Cubase, Reaper or any other DAW
UI workspace
Menus, HUD and cursors
Buttons, panels and sliders are skinned with 9-slice pixel art. Title, pause, save, load, settings and credits screens come with every project and you can lay them out however you like. Save slots and player settings work without extra setup.
- HUD layout editor
- Cursors per action and per character
Clickwork Tasks
Task board
It's a Kanban board in its own editor tab, and it uses your Clickwork login. Tasks have a type (art, code, audio and so on), assignees, estimates and due dates, and there's a planner for milestones and sprints. You can link a board to the project you have open.
- Dashboards you build from your own charts
- Comments, checklists and attachments
- Shareable links to individual tasks
How it works
A browser app that works on local files
You open the editor in your browser and link a folder on your computer. Clickwork reads and saves the project there, and your project files aren't uploaded anywhere. During the beta, the editor does send usage statistics to your account: counts of what's in your project, which tools you use and for how long. It doesn't send the files themselves. Updates are deployed on our end. Reload the page and you have them.
No install
Use Chrome or Edge to work on your own folders. Other browsers can still download the demo project to open later on Chrome or Edge.
Plain files
A project is a folder of JSON, images and audio. It works fine with Git.
Live reload
Saved changes show up in the running game without a restart.
HTML export
Games export as one HTML file. There are no royalties.
Floating game view
Pop the running game into a window of its own and keep editing beside it.
Built-in assistant
An assistant that knows the engine, on your own Claude API key or a local model.
Docs
The documentation is public
You don't need an account to read the manual. It covers each workspace, all the script nodes and the Lua API, and some pages have small interactive demos.
Overview
What Clickwork is, how a project is laid out and the main terms.
Getting started
From a new project to a room you can walk around in.
Workspaces
Each workspace and its panels.
Rooms and scenes
Hotspots, portals, navigation, materials and 3D scenes.
Characters and interaction
Party members, verbs and topic conversations.
Dialogue and voice
Lines, the recording booth, takes and translation.
Lighting, fixtures and animation
Lights, shadows, fixtures and clip timelines.
Visual effects
The VFX graph, its blocks and operators.
Post-process looks
The look graph, its nodes and how a look is chosen.
Audio
Audio objects, buses, ducking, acoustics and positional sound.
Music
Songs, instruments, recording, playlists and music states.
Scripting
Graph execution, the node reference and the Lua API.
UI and HUD
Theme, 9-slice skins, HUD, menus, cursors and posters.
Saving, settings and running
Save games, player settings and play controls.
Projects and export
Multiple projects, content sources and publishing.
Beta
Roadmap
Where things stand in the beta. Bug reports and requests from testers decide a lot of what comes next.
Shipped
- Browser-based editor with multiple projects, working on folders on your own computer
- Accounts and access requests, with logins emailed on approval
- Feedback button in the editor, with replies shown the next time you log in
- Public documentation, including a Getting started walkthrough
- 3D scenes with painted pixel art, parallax, lighting and animated fixtures
- Fixtures modelled in the editor, not only flat cut-outs
- Post-process looks: a node graph with LUTs, light rays, letterbox bars, and a look per room, character or cutscene
- Music studio: songs, piano roll, MIDI recording, VST instruments, playlists, transitions and music states
- An animation state machine per character, plus turn and walk transition clips
- Verbs defined by the project instead of the engine
- Node groups you can call as functions from other graphs
- Audio system with a mixer, buses, effects, positional sound and per-room acoustics presets
- Physical materials that set footstep sounds and effects per surface
- Dialogue workspace with a lines database, recording booth, lipsync and transcription
- Each character's voice effects are applied to their takes when you publish
- Task board inside the editor, with dashboards, milestones and sprints
- Floating game view: the running game in a window of its own
- An in-editor assistant that runs on a Claude API key or a local model
- Performance profiler
In progress
- A demo game made entirely in Clickwork, shipping with the engine
- Changes coming out of beta reports
- Making panels, tabs and controls consistent across workspaces
On the horizon
- Importing colour grades as .cube LUT files
- Export targets besides the single HTML file
Try Clickwork
Clickwork is in closed beta. Request access and tell us a bit about what you're making.
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