2D Game Base Readme

A best-in-class TypeScript boilerplate for shipping high-quality 2D HTML5 games — built on PixiJS, Rapier physics, Howler audio, and tween.js — so you can build at the speed of thought with AI, ship a polished game, and rank #1 on Google.

⚡ Demo: 2d-game-base.gallop.software
🎨 Template: gallop.software/templates
📦 Repository: github.com/gallop-software/2d-game-base-pro
🏷️ Category: 2D Game Boilerplate

Why Use Gallop Templates?

Just chat with AI inside your code editor using our Gallop templates, and you will never want to wrestle with a 3D engine, a heavyweight game framework, or a bloated visual editor again. Simply describe the game you want, and AI writes the code. No Unity, no GameMaker, no level editors, and no design limitations. Just type and watch. Build fun and crisp gameplay, add smooth physics-driven animations, configure your SEO and AI discoverability instantly, expand endlessly, and get prompting tips from our Gallop community. Go live in minutes.

Features

• 🚀 PixiJS 8 — industry-standard WebGL/WebGPU 2D renderer with native high-DPI support
• ⚛️ Rapier 2D physics — Rust → WASM, deterministic, blazing fast
• 🔊 Howler.js audio with Web Audio + HTML5 fallback
• 🌀 tween.js for smooth animations
• 🎯 Responsive scene system that adapts to any viewport, including live window resize
• 🧩 Modular architecture — core/, scenes/, systems/, objects/, ui/ separation
• 📱 PWA-ready with service worker, manifest, and offline support
• 🔍 SEO and AI optimized with meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter cards, and JSON-LD VideoGame schema
• 🤖 AI-friendly codebase structure with TypeScript strict mode
• ⚡ Vite for instant hot reload and lightning-fast production builds
• 🛡️ Type-safe end-to-end with strict: true
• 🎮 Placeholder mini-game included so the project runs out of the box

Getting Started

New to this? No problem. You'll have AI guiding you the entire way. Choose your editor below and follow the steps.

Choose Your Editor

We recommend the Gallop AI Editor for the best experience with Gallop templates — whether you're a beginner or an advanced game developer who wants AI-assisted iteration. It was purpose-built for this workflow and requires zero configuration. VS Code is also a fine choice if you prefer to work without AI assistance.

Option A: Gallop AI Editor (Recommended)

The Gallop AI Editor is a desktop app built specifically for AI-powered web development. It includes everything you need — code editor, AI assistant, Git, terminal, media manager, font manager, SEO & structured data scanner, and a template marketplace — all in one window with nothing to configure.

Available for Mac and Windows.

Step 1: Install Gallop AI Editor

1. Go to gallop.software and download the installer for your platform
2. Open the installer and follow the prompts
3. Launch the Gallop AI Editor
4. If prompted, the editor will walk you through installing Node.js automatically — just follow the on-screen steps

Step 2: Open This Template

From the built-in template marketplace:

1. Click the Templates tab in the sidebar
2. Find 2D Game Base and click Clone
3. Choose a folder on your computer (like your Desktop)
4. The editor will download and set up the project for you

Or from a ZIP download:

1. Click the green Code button at the top of this GitHub page, then click Download ZIP
2. Unzip the folder somewhere easy to find (like your Desktop)
3. In the Gallop AI Editor, click Open Project and select the unzipped 2d-game-base folder

Step 3: Start the Dev Server

1. Click the Terminal tab at the bottom of the editor
2. Click Install to install dependencies, then click Start to run the dev server
3. Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser to see your game

Step 4: Chat with AI

Click the AI Chat panel (or press Cmd+E on Mac / Ctrl+E on Windows) to open the AI assistant. Now just ask:

I'm new to this. Help me turn this template into my own 2D game.

The AI assistant can read and edit your project files, run commands, and explain anything you're confused about. Just describe what you want in plain English:

Replace the placeholder with a side-scrolling platformer

Add jump physics with a double-jump unlock

Make the player sprite a pixel-art knight

Wire up a game-over screen with a high-score table

Tip: Press Cmd+Ctrl+3 (Mac) to take a screenshot of your running game and attach it to the chat. The AI can see exactly what you see and suggest changes visually.

Option B: VS Code

VS Code is a good choice if you prefer to work without AI assistance. You'll need to install a few things manually.

Step 1: Install Prerequisites

1. Install VS Code
2. Install Node.js (version 20 or higher)
3. Install Git

Step 2: Download This Template

Click the green Code button at the top of this GitHub page, then click Download ZIP. Unzip the folder somewhere easy to find (like your Desktop).

Step 3: Open in VS Code

1. Open VS Code
2. Click File → Open Folder
3. Select the unzipped 2d-game-base folder
4. Click Open

Step 4: Install and Run

Open the terminal in VS Code (Ctrl+` on Mac/Windows) and run:

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 to see your game. Press Ctrl+C to stop the server.

Step 5: Start Building

Edit files directly in VS Code. Refer to the Project Structure and Available Scripts sections below for guidance.

Join the Community

Connect with other Gallop users on Slack. Share your progress, swap AI prompting tips, and see what indie devs are shipping with the help of AI.

Put Your Game Online

When you're ready to share your game with the world, you'll need a free GitHub account to store your code and a free Vercel account to host your build.

The Easy Way

Just ask your AI assistant:

Help me create a GitHub account, push this project to GitHub, and deploy to Vercel

The AI will walk you through every step. When you're done, your game will be live with a URL you can share.

For Technical Users

If you're comfortable with Git:

Step 1: Create Your Repository

Step 2: Clone Your Repository

Ask your AI assistant:

Help me clone my new GitHub repository and run it locally

Or run these commands in your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-REPO-NAME.git
cd YOUR-REPO-NAME
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 to view your game. Press Ctrl+C to stop the server. When ready to test the production build, run npm run build then npm run preview.

Step 3: Deploy to Vercel

Select your repository, and Vercel will automatically deploy whenever you push changes.

Congratulations! Your game is now live to the world. Share your new URL and start growing your audience. Ready for a custom domain? See Vercel's domain setup guide.

About Gallop Templates

2D Game Base is part of the Gallop template ecosystem. Gallop templates are designed to be built with AI — just describe what you want in plain English and watch your project come to life.

Gallop AI Editor

The Gallop AI Editor is a desktop code editor built specifically for AI-powered development. It combines a full code editor, Claude AI assistant, visual Git interface, integrated terminal, media manager, and template marketplace into one app. Everything is preconfigured to work with Gallop templates out of the box — no extensions, no plugins, no setup.

Key highlights:

• Claude AI built in — Chat with Claude to write gameplay, debug physics, and learn engine APIs as you go. Supports Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5 models
• Agent and Plan modes — Agent mode lets AI apply changes automatically. Plan mode shows you what AI wants to do before it does it, so you stay in control
• Screenshot capture — Press Cmd+Ctrl+3 to screenshot your running game and share it with AI for visual feedback
• Built-in template marketplace — Browse and clone Gallop templates without leaving the editor
• Visual Git — Stage, commit, and merge with a 3-column visual interface. No command line required
• Studio media manager — Manage sprites, audio, and assets with thumbnail previews and CDN sync
• Node.js manager — Install and switch Node.js versions without touching the terminal
• Auto-updates — The editor keeps itself up to date automatically

Built for SEO and AI Discoverability

This template was crafted from the ground up to get your game ranked #1 on Google and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Canvas-rendered games are invisible to crawlers by default, so the HTML shell ships with semantic landmarks, complete metadata, Open Graph, Twitter cards, and a JSON-LD VideoGame schema block that search engines and AI models actually parse.

AI mentions are becoming more important than traditional SEO. When someone asks an AI assistant for "fun browser games like X," you want yours in that answer. Gallop templates are built with the structured data and semantic markup that AI models rely on to understand and recommend your work. Games using this template are already ranking on Google and getting discovered by AI assistants.

What You Can Build

• Build games with AI — Let AI do the technical heavy lifting while you provide creative direction
• Skip the boring work — Let AI scaffold scenes, wire up input, generate placeholder art, and handle physics setup
• Pixel-perfect rendering — PixiJS v8 with native high-DPI support so text and sprites stay crisp on Retina and 4K displays
• Real physics from day one — Rapier 2D ships with the boilerplate; deterministic, fast, and ready for replays or networking
• Get found online — Battle-tested SEO foundation with structured data for search engines and AI assistants
• Deploy instantly — Static-build output that drops onto Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or any static host

Built by Industry Veterans

The team behind Gallop has decades of combined experience building websites, apps, and web applications for top global brands. We've helped projects achieve #1 Google rankings in competitive markets and understand what it takes to ship something polished. That expertise is baked into every template, every component and every line of code.

Project Structure

2d-game-base/
├── src/
│   ├── main.ts                # Async bootstrap: creates Game, switches to PreloadScene
│   ├── constants.ts           # COLORS, ASSETS, gameplay tunables
│   ├── types.ts               # Shared scene-data interfaces
│   ├── core/                  # Engine glue
│   │   ├── Game.ts            # PIXI app + systems + scene manager + frame loop
│   │   ├── Scene.ts           # Abstract base extending PIXI.Container
│   │   └── SceneManager.ts    # Active-scene management with safe transitions
│   ├── systems/               # Reusable subsystems
│   │   ├── InputManager.ts    # Keyboard + pointer + onPress() helpers
│   │   ├── AudioManager.ts    # Howler wrapper
│   │   ├── PhysicsWorld.ts    # Rapier wrapper: bodies, sensors, collision events
│   │   └── AssetManager.ts    # PIXI.Assets wrapper
│   ├── scenes/                # Game flow
│   │   ├── PreloadScene.ts    # Loads assets, shows progress, hands off to Menu
│   │   ├── MenuScene.ts       # Title + Start button
│   │   ├── GameScene.ts       # Placeholder mini-game (REPLACE THIS)
│   │   └── GameOverScene.ts   # End screen + restart
│   ├── objects/               # Per-entity classes (Pixi display + Rapier body)
│   │   ├── Player.ts
│   │   └── Coin.ts
│   ├── ui/                    # Persistent UI overlays
│   │   └── HUD.ts
│   └── utils/                 # Shared helpers
│       └── math.ts            # clamp, lerp, randRange, randInt
├── public/
│   ├── screenshot.jpg         # Featured image for OG / template marketplaces
│   ├── favicon.svg            # Vector favicon
│   ├── manifest.webmanifest   # PWA manifest
│   ├── robots.txt             # Crawler directives
│   ├── sitemap.xml            # Sitemap (single URL by default)
│   └── assets/                # Game assets
│       ├── sprites/           # Drop sprite sheets here
│       ├── audio/             # Audio files (e.g. pickup.wav)
│       └── tilemaps/          # Tilemap JSON / images
├── _data/
│   └── _studio.json           # Studio/image metadata
├── index.html                 # SEO-rich HTML shell + JSON-LD VideoGame schema
├── vite.config.ts             # Vite + vite-plugin-pwa configuration
├── tsconfig.json              # TypeScript config (strict: true)
├── eslint.config / .eslintrc.cjs
├── .prettierrc.json
├── package.json
└── README.md

Available Scripts

Development

• npm run dev — Start development server at http://localhost:5173 with hot reload
• npm run build — Type-check, then bundle to dist/ for production
• npm run preview — Serve the production build locally for testing
• npm run typecheck — TypeScript type checking without emitting
• npm run lint — Run ESLint on all source files
• npm run format — Format all source files with Prettier

Technologies

Frontend (Runtime)

Every dependency is battle-tested in production and chosen for stability, performance, and long-term maintainability.

• PixiJS 8.5.1 — WebGL/WebGPU 2D renderer with native high-DPI support
• Rapier 2D 0.14.0 — Rust → WASM physics engine (@dimforge/rapier2d-compat)
• Howler.js 2.2.4 — Web Audio with HTML5 fallback, sprite slicing, master volume/mute
• tween.js 25.0.0 — Lightweight animation library (@tweenjs/tween.js)

Build & Tooling

Tools for building and developing the game:

• Vite 5.4 — Dev server and bundler with instant HMR
• vite-plugin-pwa 0.20.1 — Service worker + manifest generation
• TypeScript 5.5 — Type safety and IntelliSense (strict: true)
• ESLint 8.57 — Code linting (with @typescript-eslint)
• Prettier 3.3 — Code formatting
• @types/howler 2.2.11 — TypeScript types for Howler

Support & Community

• Documentation: gallop.software
• Issues: GitHub Issues
• Slack: Join Community
• Professional Services: Web Plant Media, LLC

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details

Credits

Contributors:

• Chris Baldelomar

Built with ❤️ by the team at Gallop

Learn More

• Gallop AI Editor
• Gallop Templates
• PixiJS Documentation
• Rapier 2D Documentation
• Howler.js Documentation
• tween.js Documentation
• Vite Documentation