MakeCode Arcade Extension for Visual Studio Code

Posted on March 24th, 2023 by Jaqster

What?! You heard that right. What has been a back-burner/hackathon/intern project for the last 4 years is actually shipping! Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular code editors for professional developers supporting a range of languages and platforms via the Extension Marketplace. Now, for more experienced MakeCoders, you can take your MakeCode Arcade games to the next level with Visual Studio Code!

You can now import your games into the Visual Studio Code environment, or even start a MakeCode Arcade game from scratch in VS Code. Why would you want to do this? You might if you:

• Are comfortable writing your MakeCode Arcade games in Typescript/JavaScript.
• Would like access to full language support and intellisense.
• Have a complex game that you might want to split up into multiple code files.
• Want to build skills using a professional development tool.
• Are itching for richer editing tools like syntax highlighting, bracket-matching, auto-indentation, keyboard shortcut mappings and refactoring tools.
• Want to use Live Share or other VS Code extensions.

Here’s a look at a game project opened in the MakeCode Arcade Extension:

Check out the brief video tour:

We are shipping this as a “Preview” because we know there are some improvements we want to make, including an online version with vscode.dev, support for non-named assets, debugging and a bunch of other fixes. To get started, see this brief setup page.

If you have feature requests or run into bugs, please file them here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-makecode/issues

Happy Making, Coding and VS-Coding!

The MakeCode Team