Quick start
From signing up to a published game in five minutes.
This guide walks you from zero to a playable, shareable game in about five minutes. No prior game-dev experience needed.
1 — Sign up
Open docs.umicat.ai in a fresh browser tab. Click Get started in the header and pick either path:
- Continue with Google — one click, no password.
- Email + password — confirm via a six-digit code sent to your inbox.
Either path lands you on Onboarding: pick a display name and a username.
Both are visible on your profile and on any game you publish. The username
must be [a-z][a-z0-9_]{2,19} — lowercase, no spaces, three to twenty chars.
Full details: Create your account.
2 — Create your first project
After onboarding you land on the home page. Click the pill-shaped + Create button in the top header. The form asks for three things:
Title — what your game is called. Doesn't have to be final.
Description — one sentence about the game. The agent reads this as its initial brief.
Orientation — Portrait (taller than wide, mobile-friendly) or Landscape (wider than tall, desktop-friendly). This choice is permanent for the project, so pick the shape your game actually wants.
Submit. You'll see "Creating your project…" while Umicat provisions a workspace, then the editor opens.
3 — Describe the game
The left panel is a chat window. Type what you want and press Send:
A top-down adventure where the player walks around a grassy field
and can collect coins. Use a green tileset. Player is a small wizard
in a blue robe. Show a coin counter at the top-left.The agent will:
- Acknowledge what it heard.
- Maybe ask one or two clarifying questions (pick the obvious answer — you can always tell it to do something else later).
- Generate sprites if you didn't provide them.
- Write the game code.
- Build and load the preview into the right pane.
Most first-pass games take 1–3 minutes to appear.
4 — Play and iterate
The preview pane has a top-bar with Edit / Play on the left. You'll land in Play by default — click the canvas, the game receives focus, and you can move the wizard around with WASD or arrow keys (the agent picks reasonable defaults).
Anything off? Just tell the agent:
Make the wizard faster. And the coins should make a sound when collected.Or screenshot the preview (📷 in the toolbar) and paste it into chat to point at something visually.
More on iteration: Iterating with the agent.
5 — Publish
When you're happy with how it plays:
Click the Publish badge in the preview toolbar (top-right). The
badge label is Ready to publish (amber) when there are unpublished
changes.
Confirm in the modal. The build runs server-side (~10–15s) — the confirm button shows a spinner while it works.
Success toast appears. The Publish badge flips to Published (green).
The game is now live at a public URL of the form <Domain />/play/{gameId}.
Anyone with that link can play, regardless of whether they have an account.
More: Publishing your game.
6 — Share
In the play page, the Share button opens a modal with WhatsApp, X, Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Email, and a copyable URL.
That's the full loop. Make → iterate → publish → share.