Make your first game in five steps

Name it, and list the screens players will move through.

Start a new game from the games screen: New game, then Blank game. Call it Coin Dash in the name box at the top, then make four screens:

1. Click + Add screen three times, so you have four in total.
2. Click each name and rename them: Title, Level 1, You win, Game over.
3. On Title, press Start here — that's the screen players open on, and it stays marked from now on.

Each card shows what's on that screen ("12 things · 3 rules"), so an empty screen is obvious at a glance. All four are empty right now. That's fine — screens come first because every rule you write later needs somewhere to send the player.

Everyone and everything that appears in your game, and what each can do.

Drop your picture files into the Pictures & sounds box at the bottom of this step. Each picture becomes a cast member you can rename and give abilities to. Download the six pictures this guide uses, one per row of the table: Hero · Ground block · Ledge · Coin · Spikes · Flag. Or skip the files: the ready-made pieces under Add someone at the top of this step (Hero, Ground, Ledge, Pickup, Spikes) work just as well — the Hero one already walks and jumps, and Ground and Ledge are already solid.

Give the Hero the Platformer ability (click + ability on its card): it walks with the arrow keys, jumps with Space, and falls. Then tick Solid on Ground block and Ledge — that's what makes them things you stand on rather than things you fall through.

Put the cast on the screen. Drag from the left; the right shows what's selected.

Pick Level 1 from the Screen row at the top of step 3. Press ▶ Play this screen at the top of the tools whenever you want to try the level — it plays just this screen, before the title and the rules exist, and Stop brings you back. Then drag cast members from Drop in onto the level. Select anything you've placed to nudge its position in the panel on the right.

The level is 1280 wide and 720 tall. Here is the exact layout in the picture above:

The one number that decides your whole level

The Hero's jump rises about 92 pixels and carries it roughly 160 across. Every ledge in this level is 60 pixels above the surface below it, and the gap is 144 pixels wide. Both sit comfortably inside what the jump can do.

Make ledges out of two blocks side by side. One block is 96 wide, which is about as far as the hero travels while jumping — so a single-block ledge means landing on a target the same size as your margin for error. Two blocks turns a stunt into a step.

Hold the jump button

The 92 pixels above are a held jump. Tapping the key cuts the rise to roughly a third of that, because the height is meant to be yours to choose — a tap to hop a spike, a hold to reach a ledge. Worth knowing before you decide a ledge of yours is unreachable and lower it: try holding the key first.

Distance: backgrounds that drift

A sky that slides past at the same speed as the floor reads as a wall. Give it its own layer and slow it down, and the level suddenly has depth.

One catch before you try it here: Coin Dash's level is 1280 wide — exactly one screen, so the camera never travels and nothing can drift against anything. Parallax only shows itself on a level wider than the screen. So make Level 1 wider first: in step 3, the Level size box (just under Layers) has 2 screens and 3 screens buttons, and the gold frame on the canvas grows to show the new edge. Stretch the floor out to meet it, then come back.

In the Layers box in the tools column (under Drop in, Stamps and Paint):

• + Add makes a layer — but it arrives in front of everything. Press ↓ until it sits below your main layer. Top of that list is nearest the player.
• ⋯ → Scroll speed is the whole trick. 1 moves with the camera, 0.5 drifts behind it, 0 is pinned to the screen. A far vista likes about 0.6 sideways and 0.25 up and down — hills far away barely rise when you jump.
• Click the layer's name to work on it, then drag your backdrop in from Drop in. "Lands on …" tells you which layer you are about to drop onto.

Working faster

Placing forty ground blocks one at a time is nobody's idea of a game. Everything here works on one thing or on a whole crowd.

Drag any one of a group you have picked and the whole group moves, keeping its spacing. The same list is in the editor under Keyboard shortcuts, at the bottom of the tools column.

One sentence each: when something happens, then something else does.

First, the number the game keeps track of. In Numbers your game keeps track of, add one called coins and leave it set to kept between screens — the count has to survive the trip to the "You win" screen.

On Level 1

That third rule is the whole game design in one line: reaching the flag isn't enough, you have to have collected everything. Because the two conditions sit on the same rule, touching the flag with four coins does nothing at all — the player just walks past it and goes looking.

On Title, You win, and Game over

Add one more on Title: when the scene starts → set coins to 0. Without it, your second play-through starts with the coins from your first, and the flag opens immediately.

Show the count on screen

Switch to On-screen stats at the top of this step and add a text readout with the label Coins: reading the coins number. That's the box in the corner of the picture at the top of this guide.

Play it the way a player will, then send it out as one file.

Press the big ▶. The game starts on your Title screen, exactly as a player would see it — not on whichever screen you were last editing.

The checklist beside the game catches the things that only bite after you've shared it: a screen nothing leads to, a screen with nothing on it, art that never uploaded, no starting screen. Each one links back to the step that fixes it. Get four ticks, then Download as one HTML file — that file is your whole game, and it runs in any browser with nothing else installed.