Exporting and Publishing Your Game

When publishing your game, you have several options.

  1. You can apply to publish your game under our Choice of Games label or our Heart’s Choice label.
  2. Anyone can publish a game under our Hosted Games label. Hosted Games can make your game available as mobile apps and on Steam.
  3. You can publish the game yourself, privately, to a selected group of trusted testers.
  4. You can publish the game yourself, publicly, so anyone can play it for free.

When you publish a game under our Hosted Games label, the game must first undergo beta testing on our forum at forum.choiceofgames.com, so, even if you want to publish with us, you’ll need to learn how to self-publish in order to publish with Hosted Games.

Exporting to HTML

If you followed the ChoiceScript introduction, you’ll see an “Export to HTML” link at the bottom of the page. When you click it, it will take you to the Export page, which will end with a link like this: “Click here to download your compiled game.”

When you click that link, you’ll download an HTML file containing your game. You can upload that HTML file to any website that supports HTML, but we especially recommend distributing HTML files on our forum.

Add an IFID to allow saving progress

“WARNING: No *ifid. Refreshing the browser tab will erase all progress.”

If you see this warning in the exporter, then you may have forgotten to set an IFID. If players use an HTML file like this, and they play your game for a while, and then close or refresh their browser tab, they’ll lose their progress.

The export page will offer you a randomized IFID that you can use. Just copy and paste the *ifid command to the top of your startup.txt file, and the warning will go away. Then, when users refresh the page, progress will be saved locally in their browser.

Distributing HTML files on our forum

When you go to our forum at https://forum.choiceofgames.com/, you can start a thread there about your game, and attach your HTML file as an attachment.

Note: New users aren’t allowed to create attachments until you earn a level of trust on the forum. You can earn trust by entering topics, reading posts, and replying to other people’s posts. (Playing and replying to other people’s threads is a great way to develop your own craft as a writer!)

Once you have the trust level to create an attachment, you can just drag the HTML file into your post to attach it. When you want to post updates, delete the old attachment and upload the new attachment, and post a reply on your post, so people can see that you’ve edited it.

Distributing HTML files on Google Drive (users must download the file first!)

Upload the HTML file to Google Drive, click the Share button, and share it with anyone you like.

Consider setting “General Access” to “anyone with the link.”

When you do that, you can “Copy link” to send a link to your file. But, when users open it, it will display the code of your HTML file, which might be confusing. Users have to click the Download button (the little box with an arrow) to download your file and then open it.

To save them the trouble, you can use this Google Drive Direct Link Generator. Paste your Google Drive link there, and it will give you a link that you can share on our forum, email, etc.

Sending HTML as an email attachment (users must download the attachment first!)

You can also just send an HTML file to anybody you want as an email attachment, but users will typically have to download the file and double-click it, rather than opening it directly from their email.

Gmail, in particular, tends to mess up HTML attachments when you view them in Gmail.

Thus, it’s typically more user friendly to make HTML files available on a website instead, like our forum, or Google Drive.

Next: Achievements in ChoiceScript

Questions?

Please post on the ChoiceScript forum if you have questions about this document.