Building and exporting a Narrat game

Building your game as a website

You can build your game as a static website

npm run build

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This will generate a built version of your game as a website in the dist/ folder

Building your game as an app

The narrat template game is setup to use electron and electron-forge to easily build a desktop application out of your game.

Requirements

• Have git installed
• If you're installing git on windows, using the default options for every step in the setup process is fine

You can run your game as an app:

npm run electron

Building the game

Or you can package it as an executable (should work on Windows, Mac, Linux):

npm run package

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This will create an application for your OS in the out/ folder, which you can distribute by zipping it as a folder if desired.

Please look at the electron documentation if you want to customise how your app is built, window sizes and other things (hint: Most of it takes place in the electron-something.js files at the root of the repo)

Important notes on releasing

There are a few things worth noting if you're releasing anything serious and don't want to run into issues:

• Make sure you release the right folder in out if you're releasing an executable, or a zip of dist for web. Don't accidentally include your source code files.
• By default the narrat template package.json file has a license field saying MIT. This is the license for the template itself, but you should delete or change that to not accidentally imply that your game is under MIT license (unless you want it to be). Similarly you should change or delete the LICENSE file at the root.
• If you want to release on Steam, remember to edit the steam_appid.txt file and include it in your final build alongside the executable

Releasing on itch.io

A common platform to release narrat games on is itch.io, as it's a friendly platform for small indie games.

You can either release your game as a web game, or as an executable.

Web game release on itch.io

Itch.io expects you to upload a zip file containing a web application, that is to say a folder containing at least a index.html file that has been zipped up.

When you run the npm run build command, it will generate a dist folder containing a web version of your game. You can zip this dist folder and upload it to itch.io. as a web game, and your game should work on itch.io

Desktop Application release on itch.io

To release your game as a normal desktop application on itch.io, follow the instructions for exporting your game for the OS you want to release on, and then upload that to itch.io following the normal procedure.

Generating a setup or similar package for distributing the game

Electron is able to create release packages of the game for most common platforms. Included in the default setup of narrat are the configs to release for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Creating a distributable (a "setup file")

To create a distributable, you need to run the following command:

npm run make

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This will create a distributable for your OS in a make subfolder of the out folder.

This command uses electron-forge's make command to generate a distributable like a setup for Windows, or a DMG for Mac.

It uses config defined in the config part of the package.json file, which lists the makers available and their config. There you can edit some values, or add new makers.

The options configured by default should help if you want to publish a simple game, but if you have more specific needs like publishing to app stores or in a specific format, see the sections below for more info on the available options.

In some cases, you might need to add a new dependency to your package to use a new maker. For example you might need to run npm install --save-dev @electron-forge/maker-pkg to use the .pkg maker to release on the MacOS App Store.

Windows Distribution

The default (and recommended by Electron) way to create a Windows distributable is to use Squirrel.Windows, which is already configured for you in narrat games and should happen if you run npm run make on Windows. You can see its config in the package.json file.

There is also the option to create a more old school .msi installer with the WiX MSI maker which you can configure in your package.json if desired.

Finally, the AppX maker can create Windows Store releases.

MacOS Distribution

Running npm run package on a Mac should create a file that can be executed on MacOS, but if you want to distribute your app as a dmg or pkg, or on the App Store, then you should add your own config for the DMG maker or pkg maker. This should allow creation of a DMG or PKG file that can be distributed either directly or on the App Store..

Linux Distribution

There are all sorts of ways to distribute Linux applications depending on distributions and their package managers. The list of makers in the electron-forge list a few of the options, including .deb and .snap

Building for Steam (experimental)

Building for Steam