Joystick Engine

Joystick is a 2D/3D game engine with a built-in editor. You build scenes from entities and components, keep your assets in the project folder, and write gameplay in C#.

Building a game

Scenes

The Scene Hierarchy panel: organizing entities, turning things on and off, and opening scenes — including editing more than one at once.

Assets

Getting images, audio and fonts into your project, what the import settings do, and how to organize a project that keeps working as it grows.

2D Animation

Animate sprites two ways: flipbooks that cycle through frames of an image, and keyframes that move, rotate, scale or fade an entity.

• Overview — what the pieces are and what works today
• Getting started — your first animation, step by step
• Asset files — the settings you can put in each file
• Scripting — drive animation from C#
• Troubleshooting — when nothing moves

UI

Menus, HUDs, and everything else that sits on top of your game: canvases, anchored layout, and widgets like Button, Slider, Toggle, and Progress Bar.

• Overview — what the pieces are and what works today
• Getting started — a HUD and a pause menu, step by step
• Components — every field on every UI component
• Scripting — drive UI from C#, and what's not scriptable yet
• Troubleshooting — when a button won't click or a layout looks wrong

Input

Keyboard, mouse, gamepad and touch, read through named actions so one piece of gameplay code works everywhere. Rumble, haptics, and on-screen controls for phones.

Audio

Sound effects and music: audio sources, listeners, master volume, and what streams versus what's kept in memory.

2D Physics

Colliders, rigid bodies, triggers, collision layers, and the physics queries a character controller is built out of.

Tilemaps

Grid-based levels: building a tileset, painting with the palette tools, generating collision from solid tiles, and changing tiles at runtime.

Making it look right

Particle effects

Explosions, fire, smoke and sparks — authored once as an effect and emitted from as many entities as you like.

Materials and shaders

Custom looks: glows, dissolves, outlines. What a .mat is, what a .jmaterial is, and which one you edit.

Rendering

Draw order and sorting layers, texture atlases, culling, and the Renderer Stats panel.

Shipping it

Saving and settings

Player preferences and save games — two different systems, on purpose — plus versioning and migrations.

Localization

Multiple languages: text catalogs, plurals, localized artwork, and checking your translations before you ship.

Performance

The four things that decide whether your game runs well on a phone, and the profiler that tells you which one is your problem.

Publishing

Getting a build onto real hardware. Exporting to iOS.

Reference

Node graphs

The graph canvas behind Joystick's visual editors — and an honest account of what works today.

API Reference

Looking for a specific C# class or method? Every scriptable type, method by method — entities and components, gameplay systems, content and data, performance, and what isn't scriptable yet.

Added a file outside the editor?

If you drop a file into the Assets/ folder yourself (through Finder or Explorer, say, instead of an editor panel's Save), close and reopen the project afterward so the editor picks it up properly.