How to publish an HTML game in itch.io

• Cover image art by @gelabert.art

• Play the game now!

Some context

This project started in 2017 as a birthday gift for a friend who studied the History Degree ⏳ and loves strategy historical games, especially the Roman era.

Being a big fan 💓 of games like Risk, Age of Empires, or Advance Wars; I decided to create something similar using some tiles and sprites my good friend @gelabert.art painted.

The first version that I gifted my friend was buggy but playable 😅. Over the years I have been refactoring, adding tests, and removing jquery and other unnecessary and old libraries to have a true minimalist pure JS game 💖.

In my first post 📃 I confessed that I have never published a game before so… this week I decided to change that. So, shall we 👐🏼?

What you’ll need

• An account in itch.io. It's free 💸!
• A zip file or an HTML file that contains all your game logic… in my case I created the zip using the free 💸 7-Zip with my repository as the index.html file present on it will work as an entry point on the itch.io server. Note: There’s a limit of 1000 files 🚯 inside that zip… so make sure to remove testing libraries 📚 and that kind of thing not necessary for production release ⭐.
• The process of publishing a game in HTML format is quite simple and it’s well explained by itch.io itself. Just pick “HTML Game” from the “Kind Of Game” list when in the New Game form 👍🏿.

And now what?

I like that itch.io lets you choose a state for the game. I decided to publish it as “In active development”. The UI is terrible and the mechanics could be improved 🤔. But, who knows, maybe in 4 years more I’ll change to “Released” 🦾.

I started this project when I was a junior developer 👶🏽 and with the pass of time, I have been refactoring it and adding a lot of improvements since I gained expertise using javascript (ES6, functional programming…): it’s like a diary 🗒 of my JS adventure until today!

I’m even using Cypress 🌳 to test it and did you know that this project participated in a Hacktoberfest 🍻? But that’s a story for another day 😏.

Is there a future for this project?

I have a lot, like, A LOT of ideas 💡, improvements, refactors, and bugfixes 🚒 registered on this project. The most interesting new features would be a multiplayer mode 👫, a custom map editor 🗺, a procedural map generator ⚙, a “going back in time” mechanic 🕰, creating a gif with all the turns screenshots at the end of a map 🎞...