arcade2d

A 2D game engine for TypeScript. arcade2d gives you a component-driven world model, prefab-based object spawning, and a batteries-included runtime for rendering, physics, audio, and input — built on the libraries you already reach for, with a fully-typed, thoroughly-documented API.

• Website: https://arcade2d.com
• Demos: https://arcade2d.com/demos
• API reference: https://arcade2d.com/docs

npm install @arcade2d/engine

What it is

arcade2d is the engine at the center of a longer-term engine + editor + dev-server vision. The engine itself is the part you install today: a small, strongly-typed core that organizes a game as a World of WorldObjects, each assembled from composable components, ticked through a single deterministic update loop.

The design goals:

• Composition over inheritance. Behaviour is built by attaching components to world objects, not by deepening a class hierarchy. Components declare their dependencies and own their lifecycle, so systems stay decoupled.
• Prefabs as the unit of content. Objects are described once as a prefab and spawned through the world, so "what a thing is" is separated from "when it exists."
• Wrap, don't reinvent. The engine leans on best-in-class libraries for the hard parts and presents them through one coherent, pixel-native API rather than shipping a weaker home-grown version of each.
• The docs are the product. Every public symbol carries thorough JSDoc and cross-links, surfaced in your editor and rendered to the API reference. The engine is built to be learned from autocomplete.
• Strict by default. The codebase runs under TypeScript's strictest settings and codifies every engine error behind an ErrorCode, so failure modes are part of the typed contract.

Built on

Concern	Building block
Rendering	PixiJS v8 — the scene graph, shapes, sprites, textures, and frame animation
Physics	Rapier (rapier2d-compat) — rigid bodies, colliders, and gravity, wired pixel-native
Audio	The Web Audio API — sound effects and music over master and per-category volume buses
Input	Keyboard and mouse state, sampled per tick

arcade2d's job is to bind these together behind the world/object/component model so you write game logic, not glue code.

Demos

Three demos exercise the engine end-to-end and double as living documentation of idiomatic arcade2d code. Play them in the browser, or read the source:

• Simple Shooter — top-down shooter with player movement, prefab spawning, and a pile of zombies, rendered with basic shapes.
• Dungeon Crawler — texture and sprite rendering with a full tileset and animated characters.
• Physics Playground — a Rapier-backed rigid-body sandbox of falling, colliding, stacking shapes.

Development

This repository is a Yarn 4 workspaces monorepo orchestrated by Turborepo. The published engine lives in packages/engine; everything else is tooling, demos, and the marketing/docs site.

packages/
  engine/           @arcade2d/engine — the published package (ESM + CJS + d.ts)
  tsconfig/         shared TypeScript base configs (private)
  eslint-config/    shared flat ESLint configs (private)
demos/
  simple-shooter/   shapes-based shooter (private)
  dungeon-crawler/  texture & sprite rendering (private)
  physics-playground/ Rapier rigid-body sandbox (private)
apps/
  website/          arcade2d.com — marketing site + generated API reference
  devserver/        in-progress dev-server / editor surface
docker/
  devserver.Dockerfile   builds backend + frontend into a single image

Requirements: Node 22+. Yarn is pinned via Corepack — run corepack enable once.

yarn install                 # install everything
yarn build                   # turbo build (engine -> consumers)
yarn typecheck               # turbo typecheck across all workspaces
yarn lint                    # turbo lint
yarn test                    # turbo test (Jest)
yarn demo:simple-shooter     # run a demo against freshly-built engine dist
yarn demo:dungeon-crawler
yarn demo:physics-playground
yarn website                 # run the arcade2d.com site locally
yarn devserver               # run the dev-server backend + frontend

Publishing

Only @arcade2d/engine is published to npm. Record changes with yarn changeset, bump with yarn version-packages, then tag and publish a GitHub Release — the Release workflow publishes to npm on release: published. The website deploys to Cloudflare from apps/website, and the dev server image is built and pushed to GHCR by the Dev Server Image workflow.

License

MIT © Marty Wallace