Initial Setup

Before we begin building our first game, we need to setup our local developer environment and a sample project. Follow these steps.

Optional Prerequisite

We strongly recommend you join our developer Discord server! Our developer server is a great place to showcase your work, chat with other developers, quickly get technical questions answered, and much more.

You can join our developer Discord server here: https://discord.gg/hytopia

1. Install Bun

HYTOPIA uses Bun as its JavaScript runtime.

Mac or Linux - Bun Install

# Open your terminal and run:
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Windows - Bun Install

# Open your terminal and run:
powershell -c "irm bun.sh/install.ps1 | iex"

2. Create and initialize your project

Open your terminal and run:

# Install the HYTOPIA SDK package globally (If you haven't already)
bun install -g hytopia

# Navigate to your desired directory
cd ~/Desktop

# Create a new project directory
mkdir hytopia-demo
cd hytopia-demo

# Make sure we have the latest Bun version
bun upgrade

# Initialize a HYTOPIA project from the SDK
bunx hytopia init

You should see a log confirming successful initialization. If you received an error on the bunx step to initialize the project, you likely need to upgrade your bun installation, run bun upgrade in your terminal.

3. Run the project

Start your HYTOPIA game server with:

# Run our game, --watch hot reloads the server on code changes.
bun --watch index.ts

This runs index.ts, the entry point of your game. Your server is now live at https://localhost:8080.

4. Play!

  • When prompted for a server URL, enter https://localhost:8080.

  • Explore and enjoy your first HYTOPIA game!

Next Steps

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