Publishing and promoting your Construct 2 game

Construct 2 games run in a browser using HTML5 technology. This means there are many ways you can publish your games. Here's an overview of the ways to share your games with the world. There are also some other tips and points to consider before publishing your game.

Before you publish

Support touch controls

These days there a lot of people browse the web on touch-screen devices like iPhones, iPads and Android phones and tablets. These devices don't have a mouse or keyboard, so your game will be unplayable if you don't support touch controls! Make sure you support these users. See the tutorial on Touch controls and detecting the input method for more information.

Different screen sizes

HTML5 games can run on almost all modern smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. However, these devices have a wide range of screen sizes, from small to very large. You might want to read the tutorial on supporting multiple screen sizes.

Offline support

Construct 2 games can be played offline. This is important for several publishing options like iOS web apps and Chrome Web Store hosted apps. However, you must set up your server correctly! Your server must be set up to serve .appcache files with the MIME type text/cache-manifest. If this is not done, the offline support won't work and you will be wasting bandwidth! See the tutorial on offline support for more, including how to set up a simple auto-updater.

A note about browsers

HTML5 games run in a browser. However, HTML5 is a relatively new technology, and only the latest browsers support it. You should encourage your users to update their browsers to the latest version, or try a different browser if they're not allowed to update. (Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome can be installed on non-admin accounts.) Newer browsers are also much faster, so you definitely want your users on the latest browsers.

The only browser likely to cause problems is Internet Explorer: versions 8 and earlier cannot play HTML5 games. All other browsers including Internet Explorer 9 and newer will work. However, Internet Explorer 9 cannot be installed on Windows XP. Encourage your XP users to try Firefox or Chrome. If the browser is not supported the page will display a 'not supported' message with some links to newer browsers. (You can see this in the HTML of the exported index.html between the <canvas> and </canvas> tags.)

Construct 2 games should run on any device with a modern browser. This includes Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone 7. So your game can run pretty much anywhere!

Publishing options

On your server

You can upload the exported project to your own web site and embed it in another page like a Flash game. See the comments in the exported index.html for tips, or this tutorial by Kyatric.

If you don't have your own server, these days website hosting is very cheap. You can probably find a low-cost host easily. There are free hosts as well, but they are likely to show a lot of adverts and may be unreliable. Several other publishing options require your own server, so you should definitely consider having your own hosting.

If you have your own server you should make sure the following MIME types are set in order for the game to work properly:

.appcache files: text/cache-manifest
.ogg files: audio/ogg
.m4a files: audio/mp4

Scirra Arcade

You can upload your game to our own online arcade. There's a few restrictions to make sure you read how to upload to the arcade. You can also embed the game on to other websites, similar to embedding YouTube videos!

DropBox

If you don't have your own server and want a quick way to share games, you can try uploading your game to DropBox. However DropBox have bandwidth limits which will prevent you hosting a very large or very popular game there.

Chrome Web Store

You can also publish your games to the Chrome Web Store. Games can be hosted on the Chrome Web Store itself (as a packaged app). Only users of Google Chrome will be able to play it, but you then also have the option of charging for it. You can also publish to the Chrome Web Store even when your game is running on your own server (as a hosted app) - this is a good way to get extra exposure, but make sure your offline support is working!

Facebook

You can also publish your games to Facebook. You can also use the Facebook object to integrate with features like hi-scores. It's another good way to get additional exposure. However, you must have your own hosting - and make sure your offline support is working!

iOS Web Apps

iOS Web Apps are very much like native apps, but they are installed from the web instead of the App Store. You must have your own hosting. See how to make an iOS web app. It's essential your offline support is working! iPhone and iPad users may be offline a lot of the time.

Windows 8 Metro apps

Windows 8 supports touch-screen devices like tablets and allows desktop apps to be made using HTML5. Construct 2 can export your game in a format for Windows 8 Metro - see How to make a Windows 8 Metro app.

Native phone apps via PhoneGap

You can build iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and webOS native phone apps with the PhoneGap Build service. See How to make native phone apps with Construct 2 and PhoneGap. You do not need your own hosting for this. You can publish through the phone provider's app stores, and have the option of charging for the app.

After you publish

Be sure to promote your game! Don't assume any of these options will bring visitors by themselves - although options like the Chrome Web Store and Facebook probably help. Also, publishing through as many of the above means as possible will help people access your game whichever way they find most convenient.

Promoting your game

There's still plenty of work to do to let the world know about your game. Here's a quick list of simple things you can do to promote your game:

- Be sure to update your site or blog if you have one.
- Try sharing it on your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages if you have them.
- Let us know about the game! Sometimes we share our user's games on our official Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages.
- Try submitting to Reddit's GameDev (a game developer audience), IndieGaming (an indie gaming audience) or Gaming (general gaming interest) sections.
- Try submitting to Digg's Gaming section
- Email any notable people you think might be interested in your game - you could get featured on blogs or websites and get a lot of hits
- Don't forget good old word of mouth! If you can get people talking about your game, it might go viral.
- Get your friends to help promote your game!

If you want to go even further, check out PixelProspector's link directories:
The Big List of Indie Game Marketing
The Big List of Indie Game Sites
The Big List of Indie Game Sites (global edition)
The Big List of Indie Game Development Forums
There's enough content and advice there to keep you busy for a long time!

There are some websites you might try to target particularly:
The sites IndieGames.com, TIGSource and PixelProspector are larger general indie gaming sites (not HTML5 specific), but may still be interested in your game. You could get some feedback posting to their forums if you don't get featured.

If your game is particularly novel or technically interesting, you might get some interest on Hacker News. The audience is highly technical and interested in bleeding-edge technologies like HTML5, so while the technology is new you might gain some interest there, but only if there's some aspect of your game that is particularly new or unusual. If you submit there, make sure it mentions it's a HTML5 game in the title.

Good luck!