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Online

Create a project from the Project Dashboard. Click New project and fill in the project information. Create Project To link the project to a GitHub repository, click Add repositories from github and select the organization to use. Once the project is created, click Open Editor. The first time, a page asks for the programming language and whether the game is single-player or multiplayer. Init Project

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On your machine

With the NanoForge CLI:
nf editor without a path opens the list of recent projects. The first time a folder is opened, the editor asks whether you trust it. A trusted folder’s code runs on your computer: its nanoforge.config.ts, its plugins, its builds and games, its Prettier and its Git hooks. Open in restricted mode keeps all of that off: you can read and edit the project, and Trust this folder (in the notification, or the command palette) turns it on later. Projects you create with New project are trusted. A local editor works on the folder itself: what you change in the editor is on your disk at once, and what you change on disk shows in the editor. A local editor can do what a hosted one cannot: run the game, use Git with your own credentials, and install plugins and packages. On a computer other people use too, an editor started directly from its build (EDITOR_TOKEN=random pnpm start in apps/editor of the editor repository) answers only to the link it prints when it starts (it ends with ?token=…), so the others can’t reach your projects through its port. Don’t set it with nf editor: the browser it opens has no token, and the editor refuses it. The browser keeps the token in a cookie, which it also sends to the other local ports of the computer: any server listening on one of them, another user’s too, gets it when this browser visits it.

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The tutorial

New to the editor? Its home page offers Start the tutorial (and Help › Tutorial plays it again at any time). A local editor makes a small game, my-first-game, in the folder it works on: an orange ball that should bounce, and one mistake that keeps it still. A tour then walks you through the editor while you fix it: the screens, adding an entity, changing a value, fixing the mistake from Problems, playing the game, looking into it with World, and a first Git commit. In a hosted editor, open one of your projects first: Help › Tutorial shows the screens, adding an entity, changing a value and editing the code.

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The editor

The editor
  • Top: the menu bar, the four main screens (Project, Scene, Script, Game), and the Play button.
  • Left: Files, the Hierarchy of entities and, for games made of scenes, Scenes.
  • Right: the Inspector.
  • Bottom: the Console.
  • Status bar: the project, the count of problems, the Git branch, and the game’s speed while it plays.
The editor starts with these main panels only. View › Layouts › All panels adds the others: Commit, Components and Systems on the left, Problems, Git, and the Profiler, Network and World panels at the bottom. View › Panels opens any one of them, and the History of changes. Every panel can be moved, floated or closed: see Layout.

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Next

  1. Open the Scene screen and select an entity in the Hierarchy: its components show in the Inspector. See Entities.
  2. Press Play (F5). See Play the game.
  3. Open apps/client/src/main.ts from Files. See Code editor.