Customize the window players see before your game — art, news, carousel and links — and how the client keeps itself up to date.
The Game Launcher
When a player opens your desktop game, they land on a launcher before the world: your key art, your wordmark, your news, and a Play button. It is also the patcher — it quietly keeps the game client on their machine current, so a fix you never asked them to download is already there the next time they play.
Browser players never see it. They go straight to your login screen.
Where to author it#
UI Editor → Launcher, in the same place as your login and loading screens. Everything you set here is served by your game server, so it reaches your players on their next launch — you never re-export to change the news.
Setting it up#
- Open the UI Editor and pick the Launcher tab.
- Leave Custom launcher on. (Off gives every player the plain PLAY screen.)
- Click a look under Start from a look — Key art if you have a splash image, Gradient if you don't.
- Under Backdrop, pick your image from the media library and set Darken until your news column is comfortable to read over it.
- Under Wordmark, add your logo — or type a Title and Title accent to get a two-tone wordmark — plus a tagline.
- Add News posts, newest first. Two or three sentences each — the body has a formatting toolbar, so bold a patch number or bullet what changed.
- Add Links for your Discord, wiki or store.
- Save. Open your game's launcher and check it — the layout preview beside the editor is approximate.
Fields#
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Custom launcher | Off = the plain PLAY screen. Everything else here is ignored while it's off. |
| Backdrop → Kind | Theme uses your colors, Image a full-bleed splash, Gradient two colors of your choosing. |
| Backdrop → Darken | A black scrim over the art. Raise it until your news is readable; art-heavy backdrops usually want 60–75%. |
| Backdrop → Blur | Softens the art so text sits on top of it comfortably. |
| Logo | Replaces the text wordmark entirely. Set Logo width to taste. |
| Title / Title accent | Used when there's no logo. The accent half is drawn in your accent color. |
| Tagline | One line under the wordmark. |
| Accent | The Play button, progress bar and highlights. Falls back to your theme accent. |
| Play button text | Defaults to PLAY. Up to 24 characters. |
| Featured carousel | Up to 8 slides — image, caption, optional link. Advance sets the seconds between slides; drag it to 0 for manual-only. |
| News | Up to 12 posts — title, optional tag, date, body, thumbnail and link. Reorder with the arrows. The body is a rich-text editor, the same one the forum uses: bold, italic, underline, bulleted and numbered lists, quotes and links. |
| Links | Up to 8 buttons in the footer. They open in the player's own browser, never inside the game. |
| Server status | The dot and label showing whether your world is reachable. |
| Players online | The live count from your game server. |
| Footer text | Small print along the bottom — a copyright line, usually. |
| Terms players must accept → Heading | The title of the acceptance screen shown once before the first Play. Defaults to "Before you play". |
| Terms players must accept → Summary | A few plain-text sentences on what the player is agreeing to. Up to 800 characters. |
| Terms players must accept → Terms of Service / Privacy Policy link | Your documents. Each opens in the player's own browser. http(s) only. |
| Terms players must accept → Accept button | Defaults to "I Agree". |
| Terms players must accept → Version | What acceptance is remembered against on the player's machine. Bump it to ask everyone again. Leave it blank and the launcher derives one from your text and links, so editing them re-asks too. |
| Discord status → Discord Application ID | Your own Discord application's id. Set = players' Discord profiles show your game while it runs ("Lv 12 · Highfire"). Empty = off. See Discord for Your Players. |
Terms players must accept#
This is your gate, in front of your players, under your branding — the engine never shows its own terms to them. Fill in a link or a summary and the launcher shows the screen once before the first Play; leave every field empty and no screen is shown. A player who accepted an earlier version is asked again when the version changes. The launcher reads it from your game server with the rest of this screen, so a revision reaches players at their next launch with no update on their side.
Languages#
With two or more languages turned on in Database → Localization, the launcher shows a language menu in the bottom-right corner, listing each language by its own name (Español, Deutsch…). It is the same list your login screen offers.
- The player's pick is remembered on their machine, and the game opens in it: the login screen and everything after use that language.
- The launcher's own words (PLAY, News, Ready to play, Check for Updates, the terms screen's defaults) are in Database → Localization under the UI namespace, keys starting with
launcher.. Translate them there like any other text. Words nobody translated stay in English. - Text you author in this tab (news, the Play button text, the terms heading and summary) is shown exactly as you wrote it, whatever the language.
- With a single language there is no menu. A game server from before this release sends no languages, so its launcher shows none either.
How the client stays up to date#
The client is the part that draws your world. It is the same client for every game made with the studio, which is what lets us keep it current for your players instead of leaving that to you.
Two things can happen when a client update is waiting:
| Situation | What your players see |
|---|---|
| Your game is also playable in a browser (you set a Client URL) | Nothing. They play immediately from the browser version while the update installs behind them, and it takes effect next launch. |
| There is no browser version to fall back on, and their client is too old to join your server | A progress bar, then Play. This is the only case where anyone waits. |
The second row is why Client URL matters if you host your own server. Fill it in — in Build → Export Game → Config, next to Server URL — and your players get the first row instead of the second. The export warns you when you've left it blank on a self-hosted profile, for exactly this reason.
Only your update needs downloading, not the whole client: the bulk of it changes rarely and is re-used off local disk, so a typical update is a fraction of the original download.
Gotchas#
- News needs no publish, but it does need a reachable server. The launcher asks your game server for this screen. If it's down, players see the copy the launcher saved last time — never an empty window.
- Images must be in your media library. The launcher loads art from your game server by media id, so pasting an external image URL won't work. This is deliberate: it also means your key art is cached on the player's machine after the first launch.
- Links must start with
http://orhttps://. Anything else is flagged in the editor and dropped when the launcher renders. - News formatting is limited on purpose. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, lists, quotes, inline code and links survive; anything else (images, tables, headings, colours, custom styling) is stripped when you save. Post art goes in the post's own thumbnail field, which is why images are not allowed in the body — an image in a launcher news post would let the page fetch from an outside host.
- Links inside a post open in the player's browser, same as the footer links, and must be http(s).
- The launcher reads the screen from the server it connects to. Saving here writes the design to your project and pushes it to the game server the editor is connected to. If the launcher your players run points at a different server — a managed server while you edit locally, say — that server serves what its own database holds, and it re-reads it when it restarts. The editor now warns you when a save reaches no live server, or reaches one running on a different database; if you see that warning, the screen you just designed is not the one your players will get.
- Pick images the server can actually serve. An image imported from a folder on your machine is stored as a reference to that file. Its thumbnail shows in the editor, but a server that does not have that file (a managed server, or a second machine) has nothing to send, and players get a blank space. Upload the image in the Media Manager and pick it again — the save warns you by name when a picked image cannot be served.
- The launcher app itself updates separately. That's the Update URL on your build profile — see Desktop, Web & Mobile Exports.
- Two switches, not one. World → Features → Desktop Launcher turns the whole thing on or off for your game; Custom launcher in this tab is the per-design toggle. With the world flag off, your server stops serving this screen at all and every player falls back to the plain PLAY screen — including players who already had your art cached. Client updates are unaffected either way.