Getting Started
This guide explains how to get started using the narrat game engine in a minute
Getting started with narrat is very quick. There is a ready-to-use template that can get you running your game in a minute
This one minute video shows the entire setup from start to having the game running
How to install narrat and create a game
Open a terminal in a folder of your choice (on Windows, you can shift-right-click in your folder and choose "Open PowerShell window here")
Once opened, you can run the following command:
npm create [email protected]
This will download narrat and ask you some questions to configure your project. You can choose between a few game templates to get started. You can now follow the instructions from the tool to run the game, or follow the "Running the game" guide below
The narrat template is essentially a template for a mostly empty web project, with narrat as a library.
node.js is the JavaScript engine used to run our project (and build it or export it to an executable game later).
We use npm to install libraries into the game. npm is simply a package manager for installing JS libraries with node.js
There is a package.json file at the root of the template, which is a standard node.js file for defining a project and its dependencies, which get installed via npm. Inside the
dependencies part of this file, you can find narrat with a version number. This is what tells the project to install a specific version of narrat.Our template uses npm to download and install narrat (and other dependencies) and get the game ready to go. Then using npm scripts, we can use run commands to build/export the game (which all use node.js under the hood one way or another).
There is a first command to install the dependencies (libraries) on first use:
npm install
Unless you see actual errors, warnings can generally be ignored
Security issues warning
You will probably see npm complain about "security issues". Those are false positives and can be ignored caused by a very careless implementation of security by NPM. Those security issues are irrelevant to the use case of narrat. Feel free to read more about why npm security warnings are broken in this article by Dan Abramov, creator of React
npm start
This should open a browser tab with the game running after a short build time. The game can be accessed at https://localhost:8080
The game is ready to edit!
Those
npm commands come from node.js. If the commands aren't recognised, you probably didn't install node.js correctly. More about npm installIt is now easy to make a game by editing the narrat scripts and config files!
Last modified 3mo ago