... Continued from Complex mechanisms

So you want to publish your game...

This is a quick overview. If you are about to publish your masterpiece, I very much encourage to use the link at the bottom, which goes into more details, discusses beta-testing and other concerns. If you have spent weeks or months creating a game, you want to get the last step right!

The first step in publishing is to go to the settings.js file, and change the "settings.playMode" line to:

settings.playMode = 'play'

Uploading to textadventures.co.uk

Having you game hosted on textadventures.co.uk is great because you do not need your own website, but it has other advantages. It is one of the biggest repositories of interactive fiction on the internet, which means people go there to find games. Furthermore, it has a comment and review system built-in.

Open up you file manager (eg Windows Explorer) to the game directory. You should seen a file called "index.html" (it might just show the "index" part), plus folders called "game", "lib", "lang" and "assets". Select the whole lot, and zip them all into one file (how you do that depends on your PC, I use 7-Zip); make sure it is a .zip file that is produced. You might want to rename it at this point.

Now go to the textadventures.co.uk web site, and click on "Create", then "Upload game". Follow the instructions on the screen, and away you go!

When you upload a new game, it should then be available immediately. If you are updating an existing game, it can take quite a while for the changes to manifest (I think somewhere your old game will be cached, and it takes a while for the cache to expire; if you give the ZIP file a different name it should be instant). If the new version is not there after 24 hours, though, something has gone wrong.

Uploading to your own web site

If you have your own web site you will presumably already have a way to upload web pages (FileZilla and WinSCP are popular tools). The best way to proceed is to create a new folder named after your game (I suggest all lowercase, no spaces or special characters). Then simply upload index.html, together with the folders, to a single location in your web site.

For more details and alternatives, see this page.