Editor Overview

Now the fun begins: creating our first game. If you’re still in the Question Manager, click on the Dashboard link at the top of freestyle to return to your Game List. If you’re not, you can click here to get there.

Opening Your First Game

Your Game List is your portal for creating new games and managing your existing games. We’ll automatically turn on your ability to create new games when you finish this tutorial. Until then, we’ve created your first game for you.

Look for “Learning freestyle: Platformer” in the sidebar of your Game List, then click on it.

After you’ve clicked on your game, you’ll see a handful of options in the right-hand column.

freestyle supports collaborating editing, so you and another creator can work on a game together. You can even work on the same game at the same time! To share your game with another creator, you’ll click “Share this game”, then enter the email address associated with their medley account.

For now, though, we’re just going to edit our game on our own. Click the “Edit” button in the top-left corner of the right-hand pane to open the editor.

Finding Our Way Around the Editor

When you open your new game, you’ll see the freestyle editor. Before we start creating our game, let’s walk through the pieces that make up our game: using the left-hand navigation to guide us.

Each freestyle game is made up of several parts:

• Scenes are what the player sees as they play your game. You can consider each Scene to be a “screen” in the game – although it’s possible for a Scene to be bigger than a single screen, with a camera that moves as the player does. We’ll see that in action when we play our platformer.
• Elements are the pieces that make up our game. We place Elements in each Scene to make the player see something. An Element represents a “Thing” in our game, like a platformer, a cloud, or the image the player controls.
• Behaviors give our game life. They tell freestyle to make things happen. They also tell freestyle what to do if something occurs: like if the user taps on the screen or if two Elements collide. Freestyle comes with a library of pre-made behaviors to help you make your games faster, but you can create your own custom Behaviors too.
• Global Variables store data in our game, like the player’s health or score.
• Questions prompt the player to practice their skills as they play our game. You create and manage questions in the Question Manager (the last section of this tutorial). This screen contains settings related to how Questions are used in our game.
• Sounds add a level of premium polish to each of our games. It’s remarkable how different a game feels when it has sounds versus when it’s quiet. This section enables you to upload sounds to use in your game.

Next, let’s get started by creating the Elements we need for our game.