Building from a template

Templates make it easy to get started building games on Venus. Currently, we have a few basic templates, but we'll offer more over time that give you a bigger head start in popular game genres.

1

Download a template

2D games tend to be easier to build than 3D games. Our 2D template uses Phaser, which is a very powerful and easy to use 2D game engine.

2D game template

Our 3D game template uses Three.js, the most popular and powerful 3D rendering framework on the web.

3D game template

Use our React template if you want to build a game with a lot of interactive UI. React generally helps make complex UI easy to build for both desktop and mobile.

UI-heavy React game template

Use our bare bones template if you want to explore 2D or 3D, without choosing one up front. You can build anything you want with this, using any web technologies that you choose. Using this template still saves you the work of setting up a new HTML project with TypeScript.

Bare bones template

2

Unzip the template

Unzip the template into any location you choose.

3

Open the project in your favorite code editor

Developers, we know that you are most productive when you're using your favorite tools. So, feel free to use any IDE that you prefer for development.

We do recommend Cursor, and we use it ourselves to keep things moving fast. In the Venus CLI docs, we will show how you can install Cursor rules into your project to make the CLI and SDK even easier to use. We think that Cursor's also the best choice for new developers who need help getting started and who are interested in using AI to write code.

Get Cursor

To begin development, simply open the folder you unzipped above in your code editor.

4

Initialize your game

If you didn't already install the Venus CLI, install it first.

Open a Terminal directly inside the editor and type:

venus init

If you prefer using your Terminal/Powershell outside of your IDE:

cd <your project's root folder>
venus init

This will take you through a few basic steps that give your game a name, description, etc, for when it appears on the Venus platform.

5

Install libraries

To install all of the required libraries for your project, type:

npm install

This will fetch all of the libraries and install them to your project.

6

Deploy to Venus

This will give you a link that you can open to verify that everything is working as intended.

npm run deploy

If everything is set up correctly, this will build your game, upload the build to the platform, and then return a shareable link. The link is playable by anyone on web or in the Venus app. This link will be unlisted, so don't worry about other people finding this game on the Venus platform. To make it show in search results on Venus, see publishing instructions.

7

Start coding

If you're new to development, we suggest browsing Cursor's documents, or finding some YouTube videos on vibe coding.