Your first scene

This page walks you from a blank project to a saved scene with one cube in it. Five minutes, give or take.

Pick a starting point

The launcher has two starting paths:

• + New Project with the game-static template. You get a lib.rs with a MyGamePlugin, a bin/editor.rs that hosts the editor, and a main.rs that runs the standalone game. Pick this if you want to ship a real binary later.
• + New Scene inside an already-open project. Use this if you just want to author a .jsn next to ones you have.

If you used the static template, the launcher offers to build the editor binary on first open. Say yes; subsequent opens are fast incremental rebuilds.

Place a cube

Once the editor is open:

1. In the Hierarchy panel, right-click and pick Add > Cube.
2. The cube appears at the origin. Click it in the viewport or in the hierarchy to select.
3. With the cube selected, drag a translation arrow on the gizmo. The default mode is translate; press R for rotate, T for scale, Esc to return to translate. Arrow keys nudge on the grid.

That cube is a brush, not a .glb import, so you can edit its faces in place. See the Brushes chapter when you want to do that.

Save the scene

File > Save (or Ctrl+S). The first save asks where to put the file; pick assets/scene.jsn to match what the static template’s standalone binary expects.

Open that .jsn in your text editor if you want to peek. It is plain JSON-ish text, with one entry per entity and reflect component data inline. The format is documented in JSN Format.

See it run outside the editor

If you scaffolded with game-static:

cargo run

This launches the standalone binary. It loads assets/scene.jsn from disk and runs your MyGamePlugin. No editor in the loop. The cube sits where you placed it, and any components you attached in the inspector are alive on the entity.

What you have now

A project with one scene, one cube, and a save/load round trip you can iterate on. Next steps:

• Viewport Navigation for getting around the 3D view.
• Custom Components to attach your own behaviour to the cube.
• Migrating an Existing Project if you already have a Bevy game and want to wire jackdaw into it.