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Eventra is a scripting language made for beginners, with its own editor to write and run it in. You write a few lines, press Run, and see what happens. When something is wrong, Eventra tells you in plain words, with the line number and how to fix it.

These docs explain every piece of the language, one step at a time, with short examples. Every example on this site has been run in Eventra 1.8.0, and the panel under it shows what Eventra really printed.

Get Eventra

• Download Eventra on itch.io. It’s free.
• Join the Discord to ask questions, share what you make, and hear about new versions.

Your first program

1. Open Eventra and press Create project.
2. Give it a name, like My first game, and press Create. Your project appears in the list.
3. Click your project in the list, then press Open.

Eventra opens the editor, and your project already has a program in it. Press Run. The editor switches to the scene view, and the panel at the bottom shows what the program printed, the same as the panel under this example:

run:
system.log:message("Hello World")
close:

What it prints

Hello World

Under your program’s output, the editor adds two lines of its own, in blue: one saying the program finished with no errors, and one reminding you that the session is still going. Press Stop to end it, and you’re back in your code.

Note

There’s no Save button, and you don’t need one. Eventra saves your script a couple of seconds after you stop typing, and every time you press Run.

Change it

Everything between run: and close: is your program. Try changing the message, and add a second line. Press Format (or Ctrl+Shift+F) and Eventra indents it for you, so it’s easy to see what’s inside run::

run:
	system.log:message("Hello! I'm learning Eventra.")
	system.log:message("2 + 3 is", math(_2 + _3))
close:

What it prints

Hello! I'm learning Eventra.
2 + 3 is 5

Press Run again and you’ll see both lines.

Pro tip

Every example on this site has a copy button in its top corner. Copy it, paste it into the editor over your program, and press Run. It’s the quickest way to try things. Copy Code in the editor does the reverse: it copies your whole script, ready to paste into the Discord when you want help.

When something goes wrong

Mistakes are normal, and Eventra is built for them. Say you forget the closing quote:

run:
	system.log:message("Hello World)
close:

What Eventra says

Eventra syntax error (line 2): unterminated string (started at column 21)

The program doesn’t run at all. Eventra tells you which line to look at instead, and the editor stays on your code so you can fix it. Every Learn page ends with the mistakes people make most often, and what Eventra says for each one.

How this site checks itself

Each example here is run in Eventra by a checker before the site is published. The panels aren’t typed by hand: they’re what Eventra printed. Before the site moves to a new version of Eventra, every example is run again in it, and anything that now prints differently is listed for review. So what you read here is what Eventra really does.

Next: Basics →, the shape of a program, and how Eventra marks what you read and what you write.