Opal User Manual
Opal is a 2D game engine: editor, runtime, and arcade. Work in the browser at opal-engine.com, or in Opal Desktop with the same editor and projects in ordinary folders. This manual helps you learn the editor and look topics up. You can read it from start to finish, or use the featured content below as a reference.
If it's your first time using Opal, start here:
- Getting started — open the editor, create a project, press Play
- Build your first game — a tiny coin collector through art, Flow, UI, and export
- Learn — the same ground as a guided lesson path
Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac) to search every page.
Featured content
Open the editor in the browser or in Opal Desktop, create a project, save work, and use play mode.
Workspaces, panels, the top bar, shortcuts, and the asset library.
Project structure, start scenes, scene lists, and scene settings.
Stage objects, parenting, transforms, and selection.
Import images and sounds, keep the library organized, and prepare art in Pixel Studio.
Draw sprites, cut photos, bake PNG or a .ssb, and hand off to Art Canvas.
Slice sheets, assemble frames, and bake .ssb sprite-sequence bundles.
Compose samples, tones, and mic takes, then bake WAV sound effects.
Compose particle plans in FX and bake reusable .pfx effects.
Object Flow and Scene Flow — events, nodes, variables, and graph debugging.
Project-wide fields with session, saved, or scene lifetime — plus object variables.
Reusable behaviors you attach to objects: Health, Physics, Inventory, and your own.
Rigid bodies, colliders, sensors, collision events, and tuning.
Reusable object templates, instances, and runtime spawners.
Sprite motion clips, Motion Machine, and Sprite Animator.
Bones, slots, IK, meshes, skins, and character assets.
In-game interface layers, widgets, and game-state bindings.
Taps, keyboard, gamepad, and multi-touch play.
Imported sounds, speech bubbles, and particle effects.
OpalScript copy-paste classes, Script Studio, and the Flap flyer.
A spinner, a hopper, a coin. Then Flap, a complete gravity-and-gap flyer.
High-level and low-level OpalScript tracks, then every class — Game, Time, Scene, Transform, native components.
Play mode, stats, Flow overlays, Problems, and Graph Explorer.
Arcade publishing and .opal backups.
Folders, Cloud Sync, and publishing from the browser.
Additional resources
- Learn — free step-by-step lessons in build order
- Arcade — play games made with Opal
- Editor — open the editor in the browser
- Desktop — download Opal Desktop
- Changelog — what shipped in each drop
- Troubleshooting — common setup, storage, asset, and publish fixes
- Reference — prefabs, physics, and engine lookup
Try a game
Opal games run in the browser. Play one, then open the editor or download Desktop and build your own.