3. Workflow & Tools Setup
Let's get familiar with the workflow and common tools you'll use while building your HYTOPIA game.
World Building & Game Coding
HYTOPIA separates development into 2 distinct workflows. These are world building, and game coding.
World building is done through our world editor at https://build.hytopia.com. This tool is what you'll use to create the look and feel of the world that your game takes place in. You can learn more about how to use it in Build Your First World Map.
Game coding is how you create the behaviors, features, etc of your game. We recommend you use the Cursor IDE you installed in initial setup: 0. Install Cursor (Optional, Highly Recommended).
1. Open Your Project
Launch the Cursor code editor you installed during 1. Initial Setup.
Now, open up the project directory in your code editor that we create in the 1. Initial Setup.
Your file tree should look something like this:
Great! You've learned how to open a HYTOPIA project in the Cursor code editor.
2. Using HYTOPIA AI Tools
HYTOPIA's tools plug right into Cursor automatically. The most powerful tool is our MCP (model context protocol) that if you enabled it during the 1. Initial Setup step, the AI Agent of Cursor has access to it.
This gives Cursor's already powerful AI Agent feature superpowers for building with HYTOPIA. It will have full understanding of all of the HYTOPIA SDK details, can answer any questions you have, debug issues in your game, and more. It can even write full features for your game just by explaining what you want!
You can use the AI Agent in cursor by opening it:
Now, just to demonstrate it's capabilities, let's ask it to update our game so that players spawn with a sword in their right hand when they join our game.
We'll enter Spawn my player with a sword in their right hand in the agent text box.
You'll see the agent ask to access tools from the HYTOPIA MCP, confirm/allow each tool as it requests it. If you'd rather not confirm each tool the agent asks to use, you can go into Cursor's Settings -> Chat and enable Auto-Run Mode.
Once finished, you'll likely see something like this (It may not be exactly the same, but works nonetheless).
Your game should now have your players spawning with a sword in their hand, and you didn't even have to code anything!
This is one of the fastest ways to understand the ins-and-outs of the HYTOPIA SDK and get familiar with how to program different types of game behaviors, ask questions, and more.
3. Asking SDK Questions & Giving Context
Oftentimes you'll have pieces of code while building your HYTOPIA game that may be problematic, confusing, or that you've forgotten how they work.
You can quickly ask the AI Agent to answer any questions you might have by highlighting a block of code in the editor and pressing Command + L on Mac, or Ctrl + L on Linux/Windows.
Next Steps
Great work! You should have an initial understanding of the core pieces of how to build a game with HYTOPIA's SDK now.
Next, we recommend you check out some of the following resources to learn more:
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