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krlz
krlz

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Sharing your Godot game online for free using Surge.sh

As the title said, is all you need, export your game as HTML5 and then use the command line tool Surge to publish it, the end... but if you wish to continue reading I will share some of my experience with this.

I am a beginner at what game development means, but I've been making some progress in the last months with some great tutorials online. Some of them are in the top tier probably of suggested tutorials. In order to start your journey as a game dev with Godot, I fully recommend the one made by heartbeast "Make an RPG Game in Godot", this is a great tutorial to start getting into the basics and play around with them in order to get a small fun game.

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As soon as I finished with it, I started to wonder how am I going to share this thing, not just for what I made in the moment but also for future idea. There are great sites where is possible to share your games and receive some feedback, and is a really useful to have it accessible (itch.io). For this, I found Surge, an excellent tool and service to publish some draft games made with Godot.

Surge is a static web publishing platform. It allows developers to deploy their web project(s) with a command line interface(CLI) using a single command. It allows users to publish static websites and web applications to a global content delivery network (CDN).

I've been using Surge in the past to share some frontend applications with members of my working team or with clients who need to take a look on the draft of what I am actually coding currently, this tool matches perfectly with Godot and. This only takes a couple of steps.

  1. Install Surge following the website instructions. This is a command line tool, so it eventually becomes straight forward
  2. When creating a project in Godot, it is not a bad thing to follow the suggestion of making it compatible with opengl ES 2.0, is the most stable way of having our game fully compatible on the web browser.
  3. When the game is ready to export, choose to do it in HTML5 or use any HTML5 that Godot brings by default. This will create an HTML5 folder where you want to store the published version of the game.
  4. On the command line, now you can go to the place where the published version of the game is. In the root folder there should also be an Index.html that Godot made as a single page application. This is all we need to run and publish with surge a draft of the game.
  5. Following the instructions of surge (which in my case was just to run the command surge at the root of my project where the index.html is), your game will be published and ready to be shared

Surge is a powerful tool made for frontend developers, but it turns out to also be a great tool to share your game ideas in a simple way. By the way, I tried to do it with Unity and it also works in the same way.

Thanks for reading. I leave in the bottom some links of some awesome Godot resources too.

-A curated list of free resources for Godot
-Heartbeast tutorial and channel

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