Installation & setup

A dacha project is an ordinary npm project with two dependencies and one configuration file. The editor’s command line interface scaffolds the initial structure for you.

Prerequisites

Node 22.12 or newer.

Your game will also need a bundler. dacha does not provide one, and the engine is distributed as ESM without a CommonJS build, so it is consumed by a bundler rather than by Node directly. The project template uses webpack, and the auto-registration convention assumes it.

Install

npm init -y
npm i dacha dacha-workbench

dacha is the engine your game imports. dacha-workbench provides both the editor application and the decorators your project uses to describe its classes to that editor.

Installing dacha-workbench runs a postinstall step that packages the Electron application. If you only need the library exports, for instance in a continuous integration job that just typechecks, skip it:

DACHA_SKIP_APP_BUILD=1 npm i dacha dacha-workbench

Scaffold the project

npx dacha-workbench init

This creates four things:

Path	What it is
data/	Everything the engine reads at runtime
data/assets/	Textures, audio and fonts
data/data.json	The game configuration, seeded empty
dacha-workbench.config.js	Tells the editor where to find the above

The generated data.json has no scenes and no start scene yet. That is expected; you create the first scene in the editor.

Launch the editor

npx dacha-workbench

The editor looks for dacha-workbench.config.js in the directory you run it from. If the file is somewhere else, point at it:

npx dacha-workbench --config ./config/workbench.config.js

Without a configuration file the command exits with an error naming that flag. See the configuration reference for every key the file accepts.

Note

init and the bare launch are the only commands the interface provides. There is no separate build, upgrade or validation command.

Serving the game

The engine relies on browser APIs that are only available in a secure context. Your game must be served over HTTPS or from localhost. Opening the built index.html directly from the filesystem will not work.

Next

• Your first scene builds something you can run.
• Project structure explains the layout and the conventions that go with it.