Getting Started

The fastest way to understand Dryad Engine is to play with it before you try to build anything.

1. Play the Tutorial Game

Dryad Engine comes with a Tutorial game that walks you through the core ideas:

  • Moving through dungeons and scenes
  • Interacting with choices, quests, and dialogue
  • Seeing characters, inventories, and UI in action

If you haven’t already, start by playing the Tutorial from beginning to end.

2. Open the Tutorial in the Editor

Once you’ve played it, the next step is to open the Tutorial game in the editor and see how it’s put together:

  • Browse characters, items, stats, abilities, dungeons, and quests as data.
  • Click through different tabs to see how everything connects.
  • Notice how much of the game is defined through structured content, not code.

You don’t have to understand every panel yet. The goal is just to see that the whole game lives in one place, and the editor understands it.

3. The Game Editor: Your Power House

The Game Editor is where you’ll spend most of your time:

  • It manages all of your game data and how different systems connect.
  • You can create and tweak stats, abilities, item slots, characters, dungeons, quests, and more without writing code.
  • As your project grows, the editor keeps your content organized so you don’t get lost.

It’s completely possible to build a fully playable game by staying inside the editor the whole time.

4. Optional: Where Else You Might Work

While the editor can take you very far on its own, there are a few optional “extra power” tools you might want to use during development:

  • Google Docs (strongly recommended for story‑heavy games)
    • Great for writing and reviewing long scenes, dialogue, and branching storylines.
    • You draft and iterate in Google Docs, then import the content into your game with a click of a button.
  • Code editor (for advanced use cases)
    • Used for writing custom JavaScript logic and CSS when you want to go beyond what the editor offers out of the box.
    • Ideal for special mechanics, unique UI widgets, or one‑off behaviors that are specific to your game.
  • Community plugins
    • Look for community‑made plugins and content packs to add or change data, logic, or UI without reinventing the wheel.
    • Dryad Engine is designed like Lego bricks – you can snap in new pieces, remove them, or mix and match them to create exactly the game you want.

Most devs will:

  • Do structure and systems work in the Game Editor,
  • Do writing in Google Docs,
  • And only touch the code editor like VS Code when there's no plugins for it and they want to add a truly unique mechanic.