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:
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:
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 game. To do this, perform the following steps:
Select HTML5 website and then click on Next. You'll be asked where you want to put the exported game files. By default, this goes to a new folder on the desktop screen, but you can change it to wherever you like.
You can also change the default name for image files and other game files, such as the audio files. You can also choose how Construct 2 compresses the image; better compression means smaller image files but a slower exporting process. If you're not sure which to pick, always choose the recommended option.
Unfortunately, just exporting your game won't ensure that other people will be able to play it; you need to upload it somewhere. The easiest place to upload it is to Dropbox, because you just need to upload it to the public folder, and everyone can play the game. I assume that you already have a Dropbox account and a Dropbox folder on your computer; if you don't, then you can just go to https://www.dropbox.com/ to sign up and install a Dropbox
folder on your PC.
Once installed, open your Dropbox
folder. In this folder, you can create folders to save your files on the cloud. However, the only folder that other people have access to is the Public
folder, so we will put our games here.
As of October 2012, new Dropbox accounts no longer have a Public
folder. You can enable the Public
folder by following the steps at https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4224.
Now, perform the following steps:
Public
folder. After that, open your game folder and right-click on the HTML index file; this is the file that people will access if they want to play your game.As the people who made a game-making tool, it'd be strange if Scirra didn't provide a place where people can upload their games for the world to play. Scirra has an arcade site located at http://www.scirra.com/arcade, where you can upload your HTML5 games.
There are several limitations for the game to be uploaded there. First, the game size must not be more than 10 MB, and second, the game's width can't be more than 800 pixels. There are also plugins and behavior limitations in the arcade; not all plugins and behaviors are supported by the Scirra Arcade.
To be accepted by the arcade, your game must only use these plugins:
AJAX |
Array |
Audio |
Button |
Browser |
C2Websocket |
Dictionary |
|
Function |
Gamepad |
Geolocation |
GooglePlay |
IAP |
List |
Keyboard |
Mouse |
NinePatch |
NodeWebKit |
Particles |
ProgressBar |
ScirraArcade |
Shadowlight |
Sliderbar |
Sprite |
Spritefont2 |
Text |
Textbox |
TiledBG |
Tilemap |
Touch |
|
UserMedia |
Video |
WebStorage |
Win8 |
XML |
Similarly, with behavior, your game can only use these:
EightDir |
Anchor |
Bound |
Bullet |
Car |
Custom |
Destroy |
DragnDrop |
Fade |
Flash |
Jumpthru |
LOS |
NoSave |
Pathfinding |
Persist |
Physics |
Pin |
Platform |
Rotate |
ScrollTo |
ShadowCaster |
Sin |
Solid |
Timer |
Turret |
Wrap |
So, if you try to publish to Scirra's arcade and your game is rejected, check what plugins and behaviors you use. Basically, the plugins that are accepted by the Scirra Arcade are the ones made by Scirra, and not third-party plugins.
Now, we'll export our game to be published on Scirra's Arcade.
game.zip
file. This is the file you'll upload to Scirra's Arcade site. To upload it, just go to http://www.scirra.com/arcade/submit and click on the big Upload game button.game.zip
is located and select it.That is all; you only need to wait for a moderator to approve your game, and after that, your game is published!
You might have noticed that in the exported folder, there are icon files in different sizes, such as 16 x 16, 32 x 32, and so on. These are the default icons that Construct 2 prepared for you every time you started a new project; you can change them before exporting your game. To do this, follow these steps:
Files
folder. You'll see an Icons
subfolder inside it; this is where all the icons are stored.icon-32.png
, an image of size 128 x 128 is loaded to icon-128.png
, and so on.