Where to Put a Game Made for a Game Jam
Easy and free online site to host, play and maybe sell your game
So you’ve made a game. You had an idea. You have overcome your doubts and worked hard. Or, not so hard, it depends on you, amirite? Not all of my games are so-called “masterpieces,” sometimes I just like to have fun with what I can do and check how people react.
Last time I posted a story on being a lonely island when creating games at home. If you’re interested in getting a job in this industry, this is also an article for you.
Anyway, coming back to your work. Now you have to show The Game to the world somehow. In this article, I’ll present you with my favorite site to showcase my work results.
Itch.io
There is this site called itch.io. It was released in 2013 by Leaf Corcoran and is highly popular in the world of games. You can search for games you’d like to play based on their genre, target platform, and price. Because, YES, you can earn money on your game. We’ll get to that later.
Game page
You can personalize your game page, choosing colors, font, and adding some screenshots to attract more players.
Peacemaker page, game hosted on itch.io. Provided by the author.
Profile page
Some creators have great profile pages. For example, take a look at the Stranga Games profile. He’s one of my favorite game developers of all time. Check his Twitter page if you’re interested.
There is also a possibility to create lists with games you’d like to recommend to other people. You can present which products you’ve supported on itch.io. In my case, it’s Aseprite, a great and cheap tool to create pixel art.
Because, YES, you can also buy tools and game assets there on itch.io.
Not convinced yet?
That’s okay. Let’s move on to the best feature.
HTML5 Games
When choosing WebGL in Unity 3D as the target platform, you can build a game and upload it directly to its itch.io site to be playable there.
Here’s the example, but be aware that this game wasn’t prepared to be played on mobile devices, so you’d need a computer to fully check it out.
You can see the site and click some buttons anyway. And listen to the music created by Not Superhero, highly recommended.
Scrolling down, you can also see this is possible to download this game directly to your computer, depending on the operating system you use.
Using Unity, you need to build the game separately for each target if you want to make it playable.
If you’re in a rush during a jam, there’s no need to choose all of them.
Our games, explicitly created for game jams, weren’t so popular when it came to downloading them. Most people just played them using the itch.io HTML5 version.
Analytics
As you can see on the screenshot below, most people just played the game in the browser. There are 122 browser plays and only 12 downloads.
I didn’t make any money on this game, and that wasn’t my intent. However, if you’d like to earn some coins, you can choose by yourself how much your artwork should cost.
Just Ignore Them: Brea’s Story page, game hosted on itch.io. Provided by the author.
You can also, like me, make it free. There is always a possibility someone will pay if they like to.
If you want to make money, your game should be downloadable. There is no possibility of paying for a game with only an HTML5 version posted.
Obviously it’s not a good idea to make your game not free during a game jam. But if it went well, then later, after all the bugs are fixed, why not?
What about the “regular” devices?
A few years ago, we created a game that we couldn’t post as a WebGL build. Our game contained a video as a Texture, and this was not supported in Unity HTML builds at that time. I’m not sure if it was changed by now.
You can see the downloads data on the screenshot below.
Most people use Windows. But most-most people just search for games to play in a browser and rate during a game jam.
This is just easier, faster, and you can opinion on more games this way.
Sometimes I just go to the itch.io page and search for some browser games to have a bit of fun. You can try it too, it’s free!
Connection to game jam page
Ludum Dare is always my first choice if I want to create a game for a game jam. To be honest, this is the only one game jam I’ve ever taken part in. I just like it so much. There was ever no need for me to try something else, although I’d like to in the future.
Itch.io has this great feature that allows you to connect your masterpiece to the game jam you participate in if the organizers agree on that. This makes it faster for players to find your game jam page and rate it.
It is possible to check out the list of Game Jams supported by itch.io.
There’s also a calendar containing all of them, so you can make your plans for the next few months just today.
Great, right?
What’s next?
This is already a kind-of-a-long story, so let’s stop there. Next time, I’ll cover up the topics about finding a team for your game jam and the advantages and disadvantages of participating in them.
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