The starter world — what a new project opens to

A fresh vgai project opens to a polished, neutral scene — a procedural daylight sky, a construction grid on soft ground, a single focal object under a real light rig, framed by an orbit camera. Not a grey void, and deliberately not a game: the starter ships no character, no input map, and no mechanics, because a new game should not inherit a genre before its brief supplies one. Rich playable starts live in the example projects instead.

Roots, not one scene

The starter’s vgai.project.json declares its surfaces as roots that mount side by side — a three root whose document is src/world.tsx, and a dev-only dom root for the in-game dev menu:

"roots": [
  { "id": "world",    "adapter": "three", "entry": "src/world.tsx" },
  { "id": "dev-menu", "adapter": "dom",   "entry": "src/dev-menu.tsx", "dev": true }
]

A game root mounts its roots as z-ordered layers — a three canvas beneath a dom layer — under one shared loop and one play control — Roots are peers in one layered stack; your game's own UI joins as another dom root when you add one.

Multi-root is the default shape of a game here, not an advanced feature you graduate into. When your game grows a HUD, it joins this list as an ordinary dom root.

Entrypoint and scene

src/world.tsx is the thin root entrypoint — there is no .json scene format in between. It mounts persistent renderer and development policy, then composes the active complete scene:

Render finish — ACES filmic tonemapping and soft shadows applied to the host renderer, and restored when the world unmounts.
Invisible dev residents — bridges that publish the game’s declared stats/cheats and the resident QA bot’s controls as ordinary providers and commands. They render nothing.
<MainScene> — the complete replaceable composition in src/scenes/MainScene.tsx.

MainScene owns the neutral environment, a camera and orbit controls, and one placeable focal prefab. The editor reads these source-owned component instances as the hierarchy and writes literal prop edits back into the same lines.

Scenes, components, and prefabs — the taxonomy the folders teach

The starter’s folders state what each file is, and the split is the point:

src/scenes/ holds complete replaceable compositions. Each file ends in Scene.tsx; a scene is not a Content prefab and does not have a story.
src/prefabs/ holds PLACEABLE assets — the units a designer selects, drops, or duplicates as one piece. Each has a colocated story that registers it in the editor’s Content tab. The starter ships one: HeroBox, the neutral focal object, meant to be replaced the moment your game finds its subject.
src/components/ holds extracted supporting implementation that is not independently placeable. The starter’s Ground owns both its Surface and its single-node Construction Grid; those inseparable parts do not become misleading Content entries.

Nothing here is special-cased

The starter is an ordinary project. Restyle the HeroBox, swap the sky, or replace MainScene with your own composition — none of it is engine-privileged content, and “blank” is simply deleting the sample JSX.

In the browser editor, opening a project with empty storage seeds this same starter into OPFS after you explicitly choose to create a game. A fresh visit that doesn’t ask for a new project writes nothing.