During the Game Development for Beginners course we will use a few specific pieces of software to help us work with JavaScript. It would be great if you could spend some time installing these before heading to Barcelona, as it means we will be able to jump straight into coding on Monday morning.

Laptop Setup

  1. Install Google Chrome
  2. Install Brackets
  3. Install GitHub Desktop Client
  4. Download Phaser Library
  5. Sign-up for a GitHub Account

1. Install Google Chrome

We are going to be using a text-editor called “Brackets” which has special integration with Google Chrome. While your finished game will work perfectly fine in any browser, the course will assume you are using Google Chrome during the week. We will also go through how to use Google Chrome to debug JavaScript.

  1. Head over to the Chrome Download Page and click Download Chrome.
  2. Run the installer after downloading it.

2. Install Brackets

Brackets is a modern, light-weight text editor that’s been built from the ground up for working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It offers special features when working alongside Chrome to develop faster for the web. Brackets is also incredibly useful for working with Phaser as it also comes with a built-in web-server so that you can preview your website as if it were hosted on the internet. Some features of Phaser work better when the page is hosted on a web-server and brackets handles all of that for you with a single button click.

Brackets is available for Windows, macOS and Linux and you can install it by…

  1. Go to the Brackets Download Page and click Download Brackets.
  2. On Windows - run the installer to install Brackets.
  3. On macOS - copy the application to your Applications folder.
  4. On Linux - you are on your own I’m afraid!

3. Install GitHub Desktop Client

We will be using “Source Control Software” in order to keep track of the changes we make throughout the week, which will make it easy to roll-back any changes we make that break our game or we don’t really like. There are many Git clients available, but we will be using the GitHub Desktop Client.

  1. Go to the GitHub Desktop Client Page and click Download.
  2. On Windows - run the installer .exe file that you downloaded.
  3. On macOS - double click to unzip the download file and copy it to your Applications folder.

4. Download Phaser Library

Phaser is a JavaScript library specifically designed for making games using HTML5 for the web and/or mobile. You don’t need to do anything to install Phaser at this point in time, but it would be good if you could download the zip file containing the library onto your hard-drive, just incase we have any issues with connecting to the internet on Monday morning.

  1. Go to the Phaser Download Page.
  2. Download the .zip file containing the Phaser Javascript files.
  3. Keep this file somewhere you can access it during the week. There is no need to do anything more with it yet.

5. Sign up for a GitHub Account

GitHub is a centralised location for hosting your project when you work with Git. We will use GitHub to store our progress during the week and it’s free to sign up for an account.

  1. Go to GitHub.
  2. Click ‘Sign Up’ in the top right of the page.
  3. Create an account with your Username and Email - select the ‘Free’ plan when asked.