You finished your game, you debugged everything you faced, and you polished it to the best of your ability. Now it’s time to upload for others around the web to view and play what you’ve created! Here, we’ll walk through how to upload to one of the more popular game hosting site, itch.io by submitting a WebGL build of your game.
What is itch.io?
Itch.io defines themselves as “an open marketplace for independent digital creators with a focus on independent video games.” They serve as a platform that you can upload your games and “charge” the amount you deem necessary: free to play, donations accepted, and fee to play.
Although itch.io is the platform we’ll be talking today, there are other platforms you can upload your game to, including simmer.io, Unity Play, and even GitHub!
Getting Started
First, we must compile all the scenes you want included in the build.
To accomplish this, go to
File -> Build Settings
Now, to add scenes into the build, there are two ways:
* Click on Add Open Scenes to add the opened scene into the build* Drag the scene(s) you want from the Project Panel into the Build Settings Window
Also note that you can click and hold each scene in the Scenes to Build section to move them up or down.
Once you’ve added all your scenes, it’s time to change your platform to WebGL.
Select WebGL under Platform and in the lower right, select Switch Platform.
If your build is already built for the WebGL platform, as seen in my example, you can skip this step.
Finally, in the lower left hand corner, select the Players Setting to open up the Player Settings window.
Changing the Players Settings
In this window, you can change settings to fit the need of your game. Feel free to change the company and product name to your name and the name of the game you’re making.
Although you can change any of the settings to your liking, when uploading a WebGL build to itch.io, you need to change the following setting:
Under the Publishing Settings, there is an option called Compression Format. You’ll need to change the setting to Disabled; this is because itch.io cannot read any compressed file that isn’t a zipped file.
After you’ve change the settings, you can close out of the Player Settings window and click on Build in the lower right of the Build Settings window.
Select a location to save the build and wait until Unity has finished compiling the build of your game.
Final Steps before uploading
For the last step, locate the folder where Unity has compiled your build. Highlight everything in the folder and, on Windows:
Right Click -> Send to -> Compressed (zipped) folderThis in turn will create the compressed file we’ll need to upload onto itch.io
Uploading Your Game
Head over to itch.io and log in or create an account. Once you’re logged in, in the top right corner, there’s an arrow by your user name; click on it to show some of the options you can choose from. Select Upload new project to begin.
Creating Your Project
On the top portion, you can enter related information about your game, like the title, description, classification, released status, and upload cover and screenshots of your game.
However, the only setting you’ll need to change is the Kind of Project setting. Here, you’ll want to select HTML from the dropdown.
In the middle portion, this is where you can set the pricing of your game, set the resolution of the game, and upload the zipped file of the build you’ve created prior to this.
After you’re done setting the pricing, it’s time to upload the zipped file. Click on Upload files and locate the zipped file you created. Select it and wait until it’s done uploading onto itch.io.
Once the upload is complete, check the box next to This file will be played in the browser. This will allow the game you’ve made to play in the browser instead of having the player download the file in order to play it.
Following that, you can modify the Embed options to your liking. For instance, I’ve set the resolution to 960x600 and checked the box next to Fullscreen button.
Finally, the last portion is similar to the top portion as the information here will be related to the game you’ve made (genre, descriptions, tags) and how players can interact with your game (leave comments, require link in order to view the page)
After filling out all the information, it’s time to click on Save and View Page (if you’ve set the visibility to Draft or Restricted)
Let itch.io load your game and click on Run once it’s done loading the game.
Publishing Your Game
If everything loads correctly, click on Edit game on the top
Scroll all the way down to Visibility and Access and choose Public. In addition, feel free to customize the settings by clicking on Configure settings after selecting Public
Finally, your game has been published onto itch.io and be played by anyone, whether given the link by you or, depending on the settings, by locating your game in the itch.io search engine.
