How Floptle works, 69 pages of it.

Getting started: build a walkable scene This is the fast path from an empty project to a level you can walk around in first-person. It ties together the editor, terrain, physics, and scripting. For th... First steps — make something move A cube you spin, tune and drive around, in about fifteen minutes. Floptle for programmers The model, the tick, and the six things that aren't like the engine you came from.

Build a 3D platformer Run, jump, ride a moving platform, collect coins, reach the goal. Build a top-down RPG Walk a village, talk to someone, pick up a key, unlock a door to another scene. Build Flappy One button, endless obstacles, a score, and a game over you can restart. Pathfinding — command a squad Click the ground, and a dozen units find their own way there. Make it multiplayer The platformer, played by two machines at once — and everything that has to change for that to work.

Scripting in Floptle (Lua) Game logic in Floptle is written in Lua. A script is a .lua file in your project's scripts/ folder. Attach it to a node and it runs every frame while the game i... Start here Your first script, the hooks the engine calls, and the globals every script has. Nodes & the scene Moving things, finding things, and swapping the whole world out. Physics Bodies, collisions, and asking the world what is in front of you. Input Keyboard, mouse, and the action map. Assets & materials Models, textures, materials and data files, swapped while the game runs. Animation, particles & sound The three things that make a scene feel alive, driven from a script. Maths & the world Vectors, terrain, water, scattered props, and orbital time. Multiplayer Replication, remote calls, rollback, and voice. Data, time & the outside world Saved games, timers, HTTP, the player's account, and the settings a game offers. Steam Leaderboards, lobbies, and the overlay. Working in the editor The in-engine IDE, the profiler, the gotchas, and why some calls refuse. Lua API reference Every name a script can reach, grouped the way the editor's Docs tab groups them. The same table drives this page, that tab, the hover docs and autocomplete — s... Talking to a web API http.*, json.*, openUrl — new in v0.20.0.

Building levels in the editor — the ▦ Map tool Blockout geometry you draw, cut, texture and paint without leaving Floptle. Map meshes are for LEVELS — walls, floors, stairs, arches, ramps; characters and pro... Making a 2D game Floptle is a 3D engine. A 2D game is a 3D scene you refuse to use the third axis in: everything sits at z = 0 and the camera looks straight down -Z. There is no... Tilemaps Everything for building a 2D level: the ◫ Tiles tab, tilesets (what each tile is), autotiling, collision, and the Lua surface a game reads it all through. The Image editor — one canvas for pixels, paint and vectors Every texture in a game used to be made somewhere else: you leave the engine, draw in Aseprite or Krita, save, alt-tab back, and find out whether it looked righ... Animation in Floptle Floptle's animation system is built around three ideas: Physics & gameplay How to make things move, fall, collide, and be walked on. This is the user-facing guide; the design rationale lives in subsystems/physics.md and the ADRs. Render targets — a camera as a texture A camera with a target name draws the world into a live texture instead of onto the screen. Anything that takes a texture takes it: a material, a UI image.

Packages A package is a folder of things you can drop into any Floptle project: editor tools, scripts, art, prefabs, scenes, shaders — or all of them at once. Anybody ca... Editor scripting Every .lua file in a package's editor/ folder runs in the editor when the project opens. It can add menus, panels, Scene-view overlays and world-space handles;...

The ◫ UI tab Where flat screens get built. UI styles and tokens How to stop typing colours onto elements one at a time. Screens from data — `ui.make` Building UI whose shape depends on data: a roster of four fighters or nine, an inventory of whatever the player is carrying, a lobby list that arrives over the... Keyboard and gamepad navigation Making a menu that isn't mouse-only. The UI demo assets/scenes/ui_demo.ron — open it and press Play.

Exporting a game build File ⏵ Export Game… stamps out a runnable build: Web export File ⏵ Export Game… ⏵ Web (browser) stamps a folder that plays in a browser; export-builds.md is the page for using it. This page is the story behind it — what... Making a multiplayer game This is the build-something guide. It goes from a single-player scene to two machines playing together, then to shipping. For why any of it works the way it doe... Accessibility Four settings, one Lua table, and the engine honours the parts it owns. Updating the Floptle Hub From v0.21.2 the Hub updates itself — a banner offers it, one button downloads and restarts, done. This page is for the one manual update that gets you to v0.21...

Floptle — Architecture Floptle is a Rust workspace of small crates arranged in dependency layers. Lower layers never depend on higher ones. This keeps the engine modular, fast to comp... Floptle — Renderer (`floptle-render`) The job here is one reaction — "I've never seen anything like this, it's from another dimension" — surreal, dreamlike, and willing to break the laws of light an... Scene & Nodes (`floptle-core`) The authoring model: a friendly Node tree you build and script, sitting on a data-oriented archetype ECS that actually runs. One scene, two views. Floptle — The Editor (`floptle-editor`) floptle-editor is one of two binaries (ARCHITECTURE §1). Built on egui + egui_dock (ADR-0004) — pure Rust, immediate-mode, rendered through the same wgpu device... Floptle — Physics (`floptle-physics`) Custom, SDF-first collision: collide against the same distance function the renderer draws, so morphing fractal worlds are interactable without ever re-meshing. Floptle — Navigation (`floptle-nav`) Where a character can stand, how it gets from here to there, and the thing that actually walks it. Floptle — Deformable Matter (`floptle-matter`) Make geometry a physical material — morphing, blending, sticky, breakable — that stays renderable and collidable for free because it is always the same implicit... Floptle — Materials & Textures (`floptle-assets` + `floptle-shader`) The pain we're solving: in most engines, tiling a texture onto a non-UV-mapped object means writing a shader. Floptle says no. Tiling, clamping, mirroring, offs... Floptle — Shader IR (`floptle-shader`) This is Floptle's biggest lever for visuals nobody else can make. We own the representation, so we can add non-standard nodes — raymarch/SDF warps, feedback, im... Floptle — Shadows (field-marched sun shadows) Status: IMPLEMENTED · 2026-07-02 — field-first SDF sun shadows, per scene, on everything: terrain/blobs cast from the field itself, raster meshes receive by mar... Floptle — Programmable Light (`floptle-render` + shader-IR light nodes) Light is not a fixed renderer feature — it is a composable transport rule sampled along the rays the marcher already shoots, the fourth peer field (space · matt... Global illumination — the bounce Status: shipped in v0.45.0 (baked irradiance volumes). Per-surface lightmaps and a real-time SDFGI mode are both still ahead; the render graph is shaped so they... Volumetrics — light in the air Status: shipped in v0.46.0 (single-scattering fog with light injection). The media is one global height layer; per-node fog volumes and multiple-scattering are... Area lights — lights with a size Status: shipped in v0.47.0. Diffuse direction is analytic; the terminator wrap and the specular representative point are fitted approximations, and this page sa... Floptle — Post-Processing (the per-scene PostProcess node) Post-processing is tuned per scene, not per project: every scene carries a mandatory ✨ Post Processing node (self-healed on load, exactly like the Skybox and t... Particles & VFX (`floptle-vfx`) Timeline-driven particle authoring: name an effect, give it a lifetime, lay tracks down a video-editor timeline, and shape every property with a constant, a ran... Animation (`floptle-anim`) Skeletal clips from Blender, driven by a small state machine, blended into a final pose, with timeline events that fire gameplay. Built for dreamlike adventure... Audio (`floptle-audio`) Everything audible: decoded clips, playing voices (spatial or flat), and the project mixer — tracks with faders, effect chains, and routing, all folding down in... Input & action mapping (`floptle-input`) Bind a named Action to many inputs at once — any keyboard key, any mouse button, sticks/triggers/buttons on a gamepad — then decide what the action does in a no... In-game UI (`floptle-ui`) The game's HUD/menu system — not the editor (that's egui, ADR-0004). One promise: arrange elements, then script what they do. Drag a panel, anchor it, attach a... Floptle — Assets & the Blender Pipeline (`floptle-assets`) floptle-assets is the bridge from files on disk to engine resources on the GPU and in the ECS. It imports glTF, decodes textures, assigns stable ids, tracks dep... Object Pooling (`floptle-core::pool`) Pooling is built into the engine, not bolted onto every project. Declare a pool, take() an instance, return() it (or just drop the guard) — the engine handles a... Floptle — Large-world space (`floptle-core`) Default-on, behind-the-scenes coordinate space: the world moves around the player, the player never actually moves — so a galaxy-scale or infinitely-deep world... Floptle — Gravity & Density (`floptle-physics::gravity`) Gravity is not a global constant — it is a composable vector field g(p) you sample as "down," and density is a first-class material property from which mass, th... Floptle — Field Interaction (`floptle-rules` data + runtime executor) A typed graph where "field A modulates field B" is an authored edge — the seam that lets gravity, density, light, time, and geometry affect each other, turning... Floptle — World Rules: the Lawset / Realm meta-spine (`floptle-rules`) A game is a simulated universe whose developer-defined laws compose; this doc designs the single object that says which laws hold where — a serializable, inheri... Floptle — Time (`floptle-core::time` + `floptle-rules`) Promote time from a single global scalar to a rate field r(p), so a region can slow, freeze, or dilate the flow of time the same way a region already bends grav... Cameras & Dialogue (`floptle-core` cameras · `floptle-ui` dialogue) Two subsystems that constantly work together. Cameras: a lightweight virtual-camera + brain model (Cinemachine-ish) so first-person, third-person, and cutscene...