tupicAcademy

The Viewport and Its Tools

·course·2026-06-12

The viewport in the center is where you see and arrange your game. In Edit mode it's a canvas showing your level; in Play mode it runs the real game. This chapter covers Edit mode and its tools — the same kind of scene-editing tools you'd find in Unity's Scene view, Unreal's Viewport, or Godot's 2D editor.

The editing tools

A small toolbar gives you the core tools for manipulating objects. Each has a keyboard shortcut, the way engines map tools to keys (Unity, for example, uses Q/W/E/R for its scene tools):

  • Select (V) — click an object to select it, without moving it. Use this to inspect and choose objects.
  • Move (W) — drag a selected object to reposition it.
  • Resize (E) — drag the handles of a selected object to change its size.
  • Rect-select (R) — drag a rectangle across the scene to select multiple objects at once, so you can act on them as a group.

Selecting several objects with Rect-select lets you perform group operations — the same multi-select-and-edit workflow you'd use in any engine's scene view.

You can move around and zoom the viewport without changing anything:

  • Pan — hold Shift and drag, or use the middle mouse button, to slide the view around. This matches the pan controls in mainstream engines.
  • Zoom — use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out, exactly as you would in Unity or Godot's 2D view.

These let you get a close-up on a small object or pull back to see the whole level.

Collision boxes (AABB)

With the AABB toggle on (from the topbar), the viewport draws the rectangular collision boxes around objects. Because TupicEngine is a 2D engine, it uses axis-aligned bounding boxes — simple rectangles — for collision, just as many 2D engines do. Seeing them helps you predict how objects will interact: where the player can stand, what will block it, what it can collect.

The background in the scene

The viewport shows the level's background image in place, so you're arranging objects against the real backdrop rather than a blank canvas. This gives you an accurate preview of how the level will look, similar to seeing your full scene composited in an engine's viewport.

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