The Art of Sharing Arcade Games

If you’ve ever made something extraordinary in MakeCode Arcade (and let’s face it, who hasn’t?) then you’re likely to want to share with as many people as you can.

We have many different ways to share in MakeCode, depending on whether you’re following a tutorial, following a skillmap, or making a game in our project editor.

Don’t share the URL

No matter which type of activity you’re doing, the URL will not hold the address of your game (but I’m trying to convince the team to change that!)

Instead, you need to look for a button that exists only for the purpose of sharing. That process is different between skillmaps, tutorials, and projects so I’ll break it down for each type.

Share a Project

To share a project from the project editor, look for this icon in the top bar.

When you click this button, you’ll get a modal window that will ask for permission to make your project public. Don’t let that scare you. This is required for Microsoft to be allowed to make your project accessible to others.

After that, you’ll be shown a link that starts with an S if you are signed in or an _ if you’re not signed in. That’s the link that you can give to friends!

Two Types of Share Links

As I mentioned, there are different links depending on whether you are signed in or not. We’ll call these the “s-link” and the “snapshot.”

An s-link allows users who are signed in to update projects whenever they like. When using the s-link, friends can always see the updated version of your project.

As the project creator, you have the ability to turn the updates on or off with each share, so you’re not modifying links when you want to send someone a one-time snapshot.

When you uncheck that box, logged-in users can also create a snapshot link that will not be updated.

Users who aren’t logged in can’t update previous links. They’ll only have the option to provide snapshot links, which allow you to share the state of the game only at the moment that the “Share Project” button was clicked.

Sharing Tutorial vs Sharing Tutorial Game

Sharing tutorials is actually quite difficult in MakeCode Arcade.

Say you wanted to play one of these tutorials on the Arcade homepage:

The only sure way to get find it is to navigate to arcade.makecode.com and select it from the row where it lives.

If, however, someone has made a shortcut (like aka.ms/valentine or aka.ms/froggy) then you should be able to send that to friends as long as the shortcut remains active.

Otherwise, there is a long URL that can be used to access these (like https://arcade.makecode.com/#tutorial:/tutorials/valentine) but there’s really no way to guess what that’s going to be for a given tutorial, and it’s not exposed anywhere in the MakeCode Arcade process, so it’s left to trial and error.

Sharing Tutorial Games

On the other hand, sharing the games that come from finishing a tutorial is quite easy! All you have to do is click “Done” when you’ve finished the tutorial and you’ll be presented with a share modal!

Voila!

Sharing Skillmaps vs Sharing Skillmap Games

Sharing skillmaps is much easier than sharing tutorials. This is the only time that you *can* copy the URL and expect that the person that you’ve sent it to will see the same thing that you did.

This url will be the same throughout every step of the tutorial, and it will always send the user to the base skillmap rather than a specific level.

Sharing Skillmap Games

Finally, we have skillmap games. Sharing these is a bit more awkward since there’s no share button inside the tutorial window, and the modal doesn’t pop-up automatically when you click “Done”.

Instead, you need to return to the base skillmap and click on the level you want to share. At that point, you’ll see a button marked “Share” in the side panel.

And there you go! Now you know everything you need in order to share your games with friends and family!