Short answer: They're Signals - small colored cues beside the Forge dock that show what is active at the current moment of the story. Each color is a category: violet for effects, blue for sprites, amber for logic, green for audio. A square pulses while something in its category is in force, so when you wonder "why does the stage look like this?", the answer is one click away: open the square, click the cue, and Forge jumps to the event that caused it.
Reading the colors
- Violet - Effects. A blur, color grade, camera move, particle emitter, or other effect is applied or just fired.
- Blue - Sprites. A sprite was shown, hidden, moved, or changed, or the background swapped.
- Amber - Logic. A variable was set, a condition fired, a jump or call happened, or a variable is holding a value.
- Green - Audio. Music, ambience, or a sound effect is playing.
A category with nothing active shows no square at all, so a quiet stage shows a quiet tracker.
Still active vs just fired
Signals distinguish two kinds of cue:
- Still applied - something set earlier is still in force: a lingering blur, a zoomed camera, a sprite standing on stage, music that's still playing. These keep pulsing until the state clears.
- Just fired - a one-shot that leaves nothing behind: a screen shake, a sprite hop, a variable assignment. These light up when the playhead reaches them, linger for a beat, then clear.
That difference is the point: a stage that looks wrong usually looks wrong because of something still applied from several events ago, and Signals is how you find it without scrubbing backwards.
Jumping to the cause
Click a square (or the caret below the cluster) to open its cue list - each cue is a small icon chip with a tooltip explaining it. Click a chip and Forge jumps to the event that produced that state, selecting it on the timeline and opening its editor. Most cues point within the current scene; a variable's value can have been set in an earlier scene, and its cue jumps there.
Dismissing and muting
- Right-click a cue chip to dismiss it. The dismissal lasts until that state changes again - if the cue becomes relevant again, it comes back on its own.
- Right-click a category square to hide the whole category the same way.
- Settings (the gear in the Forge top bar) has the durable controls: turn Signals off entirely, mute a whole category, or mute individual cue types within a category. The variable-values cue starts muted, since variables hold values across whole playthroughs.