Introduction and Getting Started with Cocos Creator

Welcome to the second ever tutorial series here on DevGa.me. In this series, we are going to be covering everything you need to know to get started with the Cocos Creator game engine. Cocos Creator is built on top of the Cocos2d-x open-source game framework and makes it easy to create cross-platform 2D games using the JavaScript and TypeScript programming languages. It provides a full level editor, complete programming API, animation editor, UI widgets, and is completely free to download.

Getting Started with Cocos Creator

Cocos Creator is available for download at https://cocos2d-x.org/download. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS, sorry Linux developers there is no official download, although there is an unofficial Linux port available here. Pick the most recent version for your platform of choice, as of writing that’s 1.9.2.

Cocos Creator download

The downloaded file is a zip file containing the installer. Simply extract the file out to a folder on your machine and run the installer executable. If you get a security warning, you can dismiss it, this is normal. First, start by selecting your language.

Cocos Creator Setup

Next select the location where you want Cocos Creator to install, tick the checkbox to agree to the terms and conditions (after carefully reading them and sending them off to your lawyers of course…), then click the Install button.

Cocos Creator Setup 2 - devga.me Tutorial

On Windows, you may be prompted to install Visual Studio 2017. This is required when packaging your game for deployment, but not before that. Ticking this will download and install Visual Studio 2017 community, the free version of Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2017 Installer

Now run CocosCreator.exe. Unfortunately, Cocos Creator requires you to log in, therefore if you haven’t already done so, create an account using the sign-up link.

Cocos Developer Login - Devga.me Tutorial

Thankfully the sign-up process is pretty straight forward, simply put in an email address and password. You will be sent a confirmation email so be sure to use a valid email address. Once registered and your email address is verified, log in using the email address and password.

You will now be brought to the Dashboard. This is where you would load an existing project, or in our case, we are creating a new one. Click on the New Project tab, select Empty Project, enter the directory where you want the project to be created (or click Browse to find an existing directory) and finally click the Create button.

Cocos Creator Dashboard - devga.me Tutorial

Your project is created and ready to go! Now let’s start making a game! Welcome to the Cocos Creator editor. Here’s a quick overview of the different parts of the editor.

Cocos Creator Editor - devga.me Tutorial

Now that we’ve got Cocos Creator installed and our first project created, let’s now walk step by step through using CocosCreator to create games.

2 thoughts on “Introduction and Getting Started with Cocos Creator”

  1. Getting error 500 when trying to down load version 1.93 windows version. Can you fix this?

  2. Hi Janet, unfortunately error 500 is an error from Cocos web server. We just tried and got the same error, so we’ve reported it to the Cocos team. Hopefully it will be fixed soon!

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