bs-guide.md

Getting the game locally

The first step to doing anything with Blankstorm is to get a clone of the game locally.

Download and install Git from https://git-scm.com/downloads.

You should enable the "Git GUI here" and "Git Bash here" options if you are using Windows 10 as that will make step 2 easier. You must include support for Git LFS.

Find a folder where you would like to put your local clone, then open Git Bash (either using "Git Bash here" or using Windows terminal) from the right-click or context menu. Then, run this command:

git clone https://github.com/blankstorm/blankstorm.git --recursive

By using Source control management (SCM), you can easily update your local clone whenever new changes are made by opening git bash in your local clone's folder and running git fetch --all followed by git pull. If you've made changes and try to update to the new ones, Git will give you an error saying that you have uncommitted changes. You can force pull the new changes by using git reset --hard before running the commands to update your local clone. Doing so will permanently delete any changes you've made.

Building and running the game

You may want to build and run the game (perhaps with some changes you've made).

First, you will need to download and install Node.js (I recommend using NVM, https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm) and Blender 3.5 (https://download.blender.org/release/Blender3.5/, I recommend the 3.5.1 MSI installer).

After that is done, open the game's directory in git bash and run the following commands:

npm install
npm run build

That's it! You can find the build in the dist folder. To run the game, open the folder named blankstorm-client-<version>-<platform> (<version> is the version of the game you built (e.g. alpha-1.4.4) and <platform> is the platform you built for (e.g. win for Windows)) and run the blankstorm-client executable.

Working with the code

If you would like to look at the game's code, you should install an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

You can download my preferred IDE, VS Code here.

You must also download Node.js (see the previous section).

You can then open the game folder in your IDE (the game's source code is in the src folder.

Working with the models

You must have Blender installed to work with the models.

You can find the models in assets/models.

Each file can contain multiple models. Each model is placed into its own GLB file.