Overview
What Vastopia is, the four parts that make up the platform, and how a game goes from a local project to a live multiplayer server.
5 min read
What Vastopia is#
Vastopia is a platform for building and publishing multiplayer 3D games. You author the whole game in a desktop editor: sculpt terrain, place NPCs and objects, define items, skills, loot, shops, quests and dialogue as data, and drop in server-side C# scripts when you need custom behavior. When the game is ready, the editor packs it into a build, and the Creator Dashboard launches it on a hosted multiplayer server that players reach through the Vastopia client.
You do not write netcode, run infrastructure, or ship a client. Vastopia owns those. Your job is the content, and the content is a folder of plain files on your disk.
The four parts#
| Part | What it is | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Vastopia Editor | A desktop application (Windows) with a Map Editor, GUI Editor, Data Editors, Script Editor, Asset Manager, Tools hub and Game Settings. It reads and writes your project folder and uploads builds. | You, the creator |
| Game server | An authoritative C# (.NET 8) server. It loads your project's server/ data and scripts, runs combat, inventory, drops, dialogue and every other rule, and sends state to clients. Vastopia hosts it for live games. | Runs on the platform; you never deploy it yourself |
| Client and launcher | The Vastopia client players install. It opens on a launcher (game browser, social features, sign-in) and then loads the game you published: your maps, models, interfaces and data. | Players, and you when you playtest |
| Creator Dashboard | The web app at /dashboard. Builds appear here after the editor uploads them; this is where you fill in the store listing, launch the game, push updates and patches, run beta tests, and manage hosting, players and billing. | You and your team |
The editor can also be driven by an AI agent through the Vastopia MCP server, which exposes the same authoring operations as tools. See AI-Accelerated Creation.
A project is a folder#
Everything about a game lives in one project directory. There is no database. The folder splits into two halves that mirror the two runtime halves of the platform:
| Folder | Consumed by | Holds |
|---|---|---|
assets/ | The client | What things look like: maps, models, icons, animations, interface scenes, and the client copies of the data files |
server/ | The game server | What things do: combat stats, drops, prices, spawn positions, collision, scripts, schemas |
Most entities are written to both sides. An item, for example, has a row in assets/data/items.json (name, icon, model) and a row in server/data/items.json (stats, effects), sharing the same item_id. The Data Editors keep the two in sync for you. Alongside the two folders sit project.vastopia (the project descriptor) and game_config.json (the metadata shown in the launcher). The full layout is documented in Project structure.
Templates and the three genres#
Every new game starts from a template. Templates are grouped into three categories, and you must pick one before the New Project wizard lets you continue:
| Category | Bundled starter | What it enables |
|---|---|---|
| Diversion | Arena Starter | A combat sandbox: Combat, NPC Aggression, Special Attacks, Buffs & Effects, Loot & Drops, Skills & Experience. The lightest project to start from. |
| Quest | Quest Starter | Built for stories: Dialogue, Quests, Tasks, Wisdom, Skills, Crafting, Shops, Banking, Combat, Loot, Bosses. No player trading or clans. |
| MMO | MMO Starter | Every gameplay system switched on. |
The three bundled starters share the same base project and differ in which gameplay systems survive creation. Switching a system off deletes its files from the project, so an Arena Starter really has no quest module or shop schema. Additional templates can be published to the platform catalog and show up in the same gallery, downloading on demand. See Templates and gameplay systems.
From project to live game#
A game moves through four stages. Each one is a section of these docs.
1. Build the project#
Create the project with the New Project wizard (Create your first game), then work across the editors:
- Map Editor for terrain, elevated floors, props, NPC spawns, objects, locations and walkability.
- Data Editor for items, NPCs, objects, animations and VFX.
- Game Tools for loot tables, skills, shops, recipes, tasks and dialogue.
- Interfaces & HUD for the in-game screens, tab bar and HUD.
- Assets for importing models, textures and audio.
- Scripting for server-side C# commands, events and systems.
2. Test it#
The top bar of the editor has Play Local, which packages your server data, provisions a temporary test server on the platform, builds the client content pack on your machine and launches the Vastopia client connected to it. Developers running the editor from source also get Dev Test, which runs the server locally. Beta builds with share codes let outside players test from the dashboard. See Test your game.
3. Publish a build#
The Publish button in the editor packs the project into a build: a PCK of client content, a zip of the server/ folder, and game_config.json. The build uploads to the platform and appears on the dashboard's Builds page. See Publish your game and Builds and versions.
4. Launch and update#
On the dashboard you select a build, fill in the listing, pick a hosting plan and region, and launch. From then on each new build can be pushed as an update (a new major version, v2, with an optional release post) or a hotfix (a patch that bumps only the patch number, v1.1), scheduled, rolled back, or sent to a beta server. See Launch and hosting and Updates, patches and rollback.
Where to go next#
| If you want to... | Read |
|---|---|
| Install the editor and sign in | Install the editor |
| Create a project and understand what the wizard writes | Create your first game |
| Learn the window, menus, tabs and shortcuts | Editor tour |
| Look up a term | Glossary |
| Understand project files | Projects |
| Manage a launched game | Creator Dashboard |
| Find every file format and shortcut | Reference |
| Fix something that went wrong | Troubleshooting |