Mini-games that live
inside WeChat & Douyin

Cocos Creator is the engine behind the world's biggest instant-game platforms — games that run inside the apps a billion people already have, with no install at all. This lab builds that tier the BuildMidas way: agents drive the whole toolchain headlessly, every byte is budgeted against the platforms' hard 4 MB gate, and nothing ships unverified.

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A billion-user distribution channel

WeChat and Douyin mini-games open instantly from a chat message, a feed card or a QR code — no app store, no download screen, no install. It's a reach no other engine tier in the Game Lab has natively, and Cocos Creator is the dominant engine serving it, with an open-source (Apache-2.0) runtime.

Mini-game tierinstant open
WeChat mini-gameopens in-chat · share cards · no install
Douyin mini-gamefeed-native · same engine runtime
Web-mobilethe same build, playable in any browser

Headless, on Linux, from source

No editor GUI anywhere in the loop: the lab builds cocos-cli from source and drives project scaffold, engine compile and release packaging entirely from scripts — the same way the AI Game Builder would. The full runbook, including every non-obvious trap we hit, is recorded so any agent can reproduce a build from a clean machine.

Toolchain auditboot: 0 errors
Build from sourcecocos-cli + bundled engine, vendored Node
Headless release buildxvfb GL · offline · no cloud calls, no CDN
Playwright boot auditdesktop + mobile · zero console/page errors

Budgeted to the 4 MB gate

WeChat rejects any mini-game whose main package exceeds 4 MB, so size discipline is the whole game. The default engine ships 33 modules at 5.94 MiB — 1.49× over the cap before a single asset exists. The lab trims it to the 15 modules a 2D piece actually needs: 2.80 MiB, leaving 1.2 MiB of headroom for real game content.

Main package vs 4 MB cap-30%
Default engine (33 modules)6,230,282 bytes — 1.49× OVER the cap
Trimmed 2D core (15 modules)2,935,161 bytes — 30% under, 1.2 MiB headroom
Physics, spine, 3D blobs droppedevery module earns its bytes or goes

We built the missing build target

The open-source CLI ships no WeChat or Douyin build platform — the engine carries the mini-game adapters, but the builder-side plugin doesn't exist. So the lab authored the plugins itself: against the documented platform contract: manifest generation, subpackage mapping, adapter injection, verified headlessly to its limit.

packages/platforms/wechatgameboth targets pass
Engine adapters vendoredwechat · bytedance · alipay already in-tree
Plugin contract documented12-hook builder lifecycle · config + hooks
game.json / project.config.json emitwechatgame + bytedance both build & boot clean

How a piece gets made

01

Concept pack

Key art, sprite sheets and an element inventory production must satisfy.

02

Blockout

The loop plays in gray boxes first — feel fixed before any art exists.

03

Authored assets

Sprites and models drawn or Blender-built to the concept, never generated slop.

04

Headless Cocos build

Trimmed engine, offline build, every byte counted against the 4 MB gate.

05

Verify until clean

Boot-audited on desktop and mobile, judged against its own concepts.

Pieces

KarezPASS Cocos · WeChat mini-game

Karez

For two thousand years Turpan has drunk from tunnels dug by hand under the desert — the 坎儿井, which carry mountain meltwater tens of kilometres without losing a drop to the sun. Dig one. Water runs downhill only, so a tunnel that rises anywhere is a tunnel it stops in; dig too wide a span and the roof comes down on what you have made. The map is a real cc.TiledMap and every mechanic writes to it — digging, water and collapse are all tile edits, not sprites over a grid — and the whole main package lands at 2.23 MB, 55.8% of the 4 MB WeChat gate.

Red PaperPASS Cocos · WeChat mini-game

Red Paper

A New Year window-flower is cut folded, so you never see what you are making until you open it. Every stroke is copied two, four or eight times by the folds — which multiplies your skill and your mistakes at exactly the same rate. Cut through a bridge and that piece drops off the sheet; cut through the middle and the whole thing falls apart. The paper is not a sprite: it is a bitmap generated and re-uploaded to the GPU as you cut it, which is also why the whole main package lands at 2.14 MB — 53.6% of the 4 MB WeChat gate, the lab's lightest piece.

Nine BendsPASS Cocos · WeChat mini-game

Nine Bends

A bamboo raft is not one boat — it is six poles lashed together, and the river takes them one at a time. Clip a limestone boulder hard enough and a lashing parts: you lose a pole, the raft gets narrower and twitchier, and the only way back is to run down floating bamboo and lash a fresh one on. Built on real Box2D rigid bodies with hinge joints as the ropes, so the flex, the twist and the break are simulation rather than animation — and the whole main package lands at 2.77 MB against the 4 MB WeChat gate, 69.2% of the cap.

Lantern RisePASS Cocos · WeChat mini-game

Lantern Rise

A paper sky-lantern climbs a festival night on the breath of its own flame — and that flame is both your only light and your only fuel. Stoke to rise and see the cables coming; coast to save it and fly nearly blind. A custom Cocos shader lights Blender-baked normal maps from the lantern's live position, mocap crowds watch from the rooftops, and the tier above the clouds ships as a WeChat subpackage so the main package lands at 3.38 MB against the 4 MB gate.

Questions, answered

What exactly is a mini-game?

A game that runs inside WeChat or Douyin itself — opened from a chat, a feed card or a QR code, with no app-store install. The platform imposes a hard 4 MB main-package limit, which is why engine trimming and asset budgets are the core discipline of this lab.

Why Cocos and not one of the other lab engines?

Because the mini-game platforms are Cocos Creator's home turf: it's the dominant engine there, its runtime is open source, and its adapters for WeChat and Douyin ship with the engine. The other labs cover web, desktop and native tiers; this lab adds the instant-game tier they can't reach.

Has the toolchain actually been proven?

Yes — with receipts in the lab ledger: cocos-cli built from source, a fully headless Linux release build, a Playwright boot audit with zero console, page or network errors on desktop and mobile viewports, and a trimmed engine core measured at 2,935,161 bytes against the 4,194,304-byte cap. The lab authored the WeChat and Douyin build targets itself, and the first shipped piece builds through them — a 3.32 MiB main package against the 4 MB cap.

Will these games need a Chinese licence to publish?

Publishing on WeChat and Douyin runs through their developer programs and regional requirements. The lab builds and verifies the packages; store-side registration and review are handled per title at release time, the same way the platform's other store pipelines work.

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