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Make your first game ​

Coin Garden is a small, complete game you can change. Tap star coins in a moonlit garden, earn points, and reach a score of five. The art, sound, Flow graphs, and score display are already connected.

Allow about five minutes for your first changes. You do not need to write code or find assets.

1. Open the tutorial and play ​

  1. Open Opal and sign in if asked.
  2. In the project launcher, choose Open Tutorial Project under Make your first game.
  3. In the guide, choose Play the game, or use the editor's Play in viewport button.
  4. Tap the five star coins. Watch the score increase and listen for the pickup sound. At five points, a completion message appears.
  5. Use Play again inside the game to restart.

Opal creates your own editable copy named Coin Garden. The guide stays beside the editor; Hide guide collapses it, and Show guide expands it. Next and Back move through the instructions. Your place saves with the project.

On a later visit, Continue Tutorial opens your existing copy, including your changes. Renaming the project does not disconnect it from the tutorial. You can also reopen it from Your Projects or Recent, and use Help → Tutorial guide to expand the guide.

To try the latest garden from the beginning, choose New tutorial copy in the launcher. This creates another project and keeps your existing edits and guide progress.

The tutorial launcher entry is currently available in the browser editor. To continue in Desktop, export your game and open its .opal package there.

2. Move a coin ​

  1. Choose Next in the guide, then Select Coin 1. This stops Play and selects the coin in Arrange.
  2. Drag the selected coin to a new position.
  3. Press Play in viewport again and tap the coin in its new position.
  4. Press Stop to return to editing.

You have changed the level. Play uses a separate copy of the scene, so collecting a coin during Play does not delete the coin you are editing. Your authored changes save automatically.

3. Change the reward ​

  1. Choose Next, then Open coin Flow in the guide.
  2. Find Add to variable in Coin 1's Object Flow. It adds to the GameState variable named score.
  3. Change its Value from 1 to 2 and press Enter.
  4. Press Play in viewport and tap Coin 1. The score should increase by two.
  5. Press Stop when you are ready to edit again.

The coin's graph runs from left to right:

text
On Tap → Add to variable (score, 1) → Play Audio → Spawn VFX → Destroy object (Self)

Changing the Value changes the reward. The chime plays next, a burst of sparkles appears, and the coin removes itself. Each coin owns its own graph, so your edit to Coin 1 does not change the other coins. The gentle shimmer is an ordinary looping Motion clip; it does not change the position you authored.

The score label is an ordinary UI Text element. Its Data bindings → Text reads the GameState score field, formats it as an integer, and uses the template {value} / 5 points. The five progress marks fill as you earn points, and a completion card with Play again appears at five points. You can inspect both in the UI workspace.

The Scene Camera uses Player framing → Fit whole stage, so the garden stays visible when the exported game runs on a different screen size.

4. Make your own garden ​

  1. Choose Next, then Open Arrange.
  2. Select a coin and press Cmd+D on Mac or Ctrl+D on Windows/Linux to duplicate it.
  3. Move the duplicate. Its collection graph comes with it.
  4. Arrange the coins into a pattern, then play your level.
  5. Choose Finish guide when you are ready to keep creating.

Finishing or reviewing the guide never resets your game. Try making one coin worth more, placing coins along the garden path, or changing the score label's appearance in UI.

Share it or keep a backup ​

When you want someone else to play:

  1. Use File → Publish to Arcade….
  2. Choose a title and visibility, then publish when you are ready.
  3. Open the resulting player link and test your game outside the editor.

Use File → Export Game to download a .opal backup. It contains your scenes, artwork, audio, and rules. See Sharing and publishing for the full workflow.

Keep learning ​

If a step behaves differently, open Problems in the bottom dock. For the reward exercise, check that you edited Coin 1's graph and tapped that same coin during Play.