Chapter 10. Publishing Your Game

This is it! This is the big moment; it is the time when your game gets its way out of your PC/laptop and into other people's machines, to be played. Construct 2 can export your game to a lot of different platforms, from mobile to desktop to the Web. I'm going to help you to publish it to all these platforms.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How to export your game to popular web-hosting sites and Dropbox

• How to export your game to the desktop

• How to publish your game to the mobile platform

Exporting to the Web

Alright, the first thing I want to show you is how to upload the game you made to the Web. Uploading your game to the Web means that you're packing your game in an HTML5 game format and want to let other people play it. There are two kinds of websites you can upload your game to:

• Sites that you control/own: Sites that you own are those that you have control over; for example, your own site or a file-hosting site where you have an account, such as your Dropbox account.

• Sites that are owned by publishers: Sites that are owned by publishers are sites where people go to play games. Some of them allow their users to upload their own game to be played by other people; examples of this are Kongregate and the Scirra Arcade.

Exporting as an HTML5 game

Before we upload our game to any of these sites, let's export our game to the appropriate format, the HTML5 game. In this example, we will export the game we made in Chapter 6, Creating a Space-shooter Game, which is the space-shooter...

Publishing to desktop

The second platform that Construct 2 can export your game to is the desktop. In publishing to the desktop, Construct 2 has a very straightforward way of exporting. The easiest way is exporting using the node-webkit; node-webkit is just like a Chrome web browser, but it is designed as standalone software. Being a standalone version, it doesn't have an address bar, a back button, and tabs.

Exporting using node-webkit

An advantage of exporting using node-webkit is that your final game file can be played on all the major desktop operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. You only need to perform one export process for all three platforms as follows:

1. Publishing using node-webkit is also easy; as usual click, on the File menu and then on Export project. Scroll down to the bottom, select node-webkit, and click on Next.

   The export options that you will see next are just the same as when you export to the Web. After deciding where to put the exported files, just click...

Publishing to mobile platforms

Even though Construct 2 has great support for various mobile platforms, exporting to these platforms won't be easy. You still need to download additional software called development kit from each platform holder and use it to build your mobile game. The easiest way to publish for mobile is, perhaps, to export as an Open Web App and submit the game to the Firefox marketplace, only supporting mobile devices.

Note

If you want to read a lengthy tutorial on it, there's one on Scirra's website at https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/74/publishing-and-promoting-your-construct-2-game.

Another way to export a game for mobile platforms is to use the PhoneGap export option. PhoneGap is a framework that builds your HTML5 game to be ready for the three major platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It also has a service called PhoneGap build service that builds our game in their cloud server; we only need to supply the HTML5 files.

Preparing your PhoneGap game

So, just like usual...

Summary

And we're done! In this book, I taught you how to make games using Construct 2, and in this chapter, I taught you how to publish your games out there. Now, you know how to export to the desktop using node-webkit or Open Web App. You can also publish to mobile using PhoneGap or, again, Open Web App.

What next? Now is the time to make your awesome game and let the world play it!