TUTORIALS
Arrive a beginner. Leave with a game.
Every tutorial here ends with a playable game in the page, and the code you read is the code that's running. No jargon without a plain-English introduction first, no setup, no installing anything — a text editor and a browser is the whole toolkit.
The fast path: a game in two hours
If you want the shortest honest route from nothing to a finished game, take it — one page, one file, every part a game needs: a player, getting hurt, fighting back, enemies, a score, a goal, and both endings.
Prefer the wide view first? Build a Game from First Principles is the twelve-step map of the whole method — loop to map to body to look to fight to world to shipping — every step runnable, every step linking to the deep tutorial that owns it.
🥋 Build a Fight Game in Two Hours →
The build-up path: one idea at a time
Four tutorials, each adding one idea to the last. By the end you'll have built a multi-room world you can walk around — sideways like a platform game, or top-down like a maze game.
The smallest thing that feels like a game: a room, some platforms, and a character that runs and jumps — in about thirty lines.
Add something to avoid and something to collect, and suddenly it's a real game: a goal, a danger, and a win.
Conveyor belts, crumbling floors and ladders — the floor tiles with personalities, each just one line in a legend.
Join rooms into a world: walk off one screen onto the next. Then tip the whole thing over and play it top-down.
The reference shelf: every part, explained
One page per engine part, in plain words. You don't read these in order — you come back to them when you're curious how something works or need the full list of options.
Rooms are rows of text; tiles are what the letters mean. How floors, walls, hazards and crumble all work.
The numbers that decide how moving feels, the character roster, frames as JSON, the moveset — combat as data, stomp included — and what happens when you get hurt.
Everything that moves or can be picked up — patrollers, chasers, turrets, coins, gates, exits, falling boulders — and how to invent your own in twenty lines.
The machine underneath: the heartbeat, the screen, the keyboard and the camera that follows you around.
The bookkeeper: clocks, points and win conditions, written as a list instead of programmed.
Turn connected rooms into one long scrolling level — then take the camera away from the player entirely and make a shoot 'em up.
What you'll need
A text editor and a browser. The engine is plain JavaScript — no installs, no frameworks, no build tools. Copy it from this site (or grab the one-file download on the engine page) and you're ready. Everything you build uses exactly the same engine that powers every game on this site — there is no "tutorial mode."