Video Game Design/Developers

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  • 1.  Publishing on Itch.io

    Posted 05-17-2024 11:18 AM

    Does anyone publish to Itch? I would like at my senior Capstone projects to publish to Itch next year. Do they have a training course or tutorial on how to do it? I'm looking to add more content for business and marketing of games. There is a senior Gov/Econ teacher in my pathway who is willing to do more integrated projects and have their final projects be business and marketing plans for the games they are building.

    I will learn how to do it over the summer, but does anyone have a good starting point they can recommend?



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    Owen Peery k12teacher
    SAN FRANCISCO CA
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  • 2.  RE: Publishing on Itch.io

    Posted 05-17-2024 11:33 AM
    I publish to itch.io pretty frequently.

    1. I have the students create a WebGL build with a few important things in mind:
      1. Any red error will crash your game so get rid of them all
      2. Sometimes the compression type (brotli vs something else) can cause errors and need some tweaking. This can show up as the game only loading to like 80-90% and getting stuck when trying to play in the browser. Opening up web browser Dev tools console will sometimes show you the error
      3. Make sure Canvas UI is set to scale with screen size
      4. Make sure UI elements are anchored to positions
      5. Make sure students chose an aspect ratio and put that in their player build settings
    2. Then the students upload these to Google Drive:
      1. Google Doc with game title and instructions
      2. Screenshot / splash screen image
      3. Zipped up WebGL build
    3. I have a single itch.io account for our class. I take each student project and upload them. It takes just a few minutes. Then I give them the live link <mvhs.itch.io/game-name> and have them playtest it
      1. Go to your itch.io account dashboard and create a new game (button at the bottom)
      2. Put in title and upload image
      3. Change kind of project from downloadable to HTML
      4. Upload the zip file
      5. Check some of the boxes under the zip (I forget what they are atm), something like automatically load on start or misc
      6. Change resolution to match your aspect ratio. It is fine to just guess and check this a few times to find what works.
    That's pretty much it. Unity Play only hosts games for a number of months before taking them down. This is my permanent way to host final builds of student projects.

    Cheers,
    Brendan



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    Brendan Dilloughery
    Mathematics & Computer Science Teacher
    National Board Certified Teacher
    Mountain View High School