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The Architect

Let’s get started with Murder’s Architect system.

Build and run

Now, let’s fire up the Architect and see what this game engine looks like! Pick either Option A or Option B below.

Option A: To run the Architect with Visual Studio:

  1. Open the HelloMurder.sln solution.

  2. Along the top bar you will see the Debug and Any CPU dropdown menus. To the right of Any CPU you will see a dropdown box for selecting the Startup Project.

    Click the Startup Project dropdown box and select HelloMurder.Editor.

  3. Press F5, or the green arrow next to HelloMurder.Editor.

  4. After compilation, you should then see the editor window pop up.

Option B: To run the Architect from the command line:

  1. Navigate to the folder we created during the clone process, e.g. myhellomurder:

    cd myhellomurder

  2. Navigate into the src/HelloMurder.Editor folder: 

    cd src/HelloMurder.Editor

  3. Type the dotnet build command: 

    dotnet build

  4. If everything was built without errors, type dotnet run: 

    dotnet run

Asset editors

The Architect window, HelloMurder.Editor, should now appear:

Editor Start

In most or all cases, the Architect interface is resizable -- if your panes are too small, you should be able to click and drag the dividing lines between panes to resize them.

The Assets tab contains a treeview of the Asset folders in the game. Clicking a folder will expand or collapse the folder’s contents.

The project starts with the following asset folders:

  • Features - Collections of Systems
  • Fonts - Fonts
  • Generated - Assets generated as part of an Atlas
  • Localization - Assets that will be localized for the end-user
  • Prefabs - Entities re-used across the game
  • Story - Assets pertaining to the “story”, including character graphics and dialogues
  • Tilesets - Tileset assets used in World creation
  • World - The game “levels” incorporating Features, and Entities

The project also contains two unique assets:

  • Editor Settings - Settings to customize the Architect Editor
  • Game Profile - Settings to customize the Game

Play

Now that we’ve seen the Architect, let’s get to the game itself:

  1. Press F5 or select Play to start the game. The game will start in the “Main Menu” world, as specified in the Game Profile.

New Game screen

  1. Select the New Game option by pressing Space, Enter, or a gamepad button. Gameplay will branch to the “Hello World” world.

First launch screen

  1. There’s a little yellow guy and a level. Seems like everything’s working – but there’s no way to make the little yellow guy move. There’s not much to do now, so press F5 to return to the Architect.

One step at a time.

Next steps

Next, we’ll leave the Architect behind and start adding code to make our player movable.