Now that we have completed our game, it would be a great idea to share it with the rest of the world, otherwise it is going to languish unloved on our computer's hard drive!
Publishing any game that we have made with Stencyl is a very straightforward process but, as is so often true when it comes to game development, we have many alternatives available to us. In this chapter, we'll examine some of the options available to us when publishing games that we have created for the Flash platform, which will enable us to upload our game to the Internet and share it with our friends, family, and anyone else who chooses to play it.
In addition to making our game available on the Internet, we'll also be taking a look at some of the different choices that are available to us if we would like to make some money from our game—many developers earn a reasonable living from publishing their games, so it's certainly something that we should consider. However, the great news is that even if we just want to develop games for fun, it is incredibly easy to earn some money using the tools that Stencyl makes available to us free of charge.
Completing the development of a game immediately leads us onto some additional, very important steps! In this chapter we'll be learning about:
- Publishing to the Stencyl Arcade
- Making money with in-game advertising
- Obtaining sponsorship
- Improving our opportunities for sponsorship
Before we start, let's discuss how this chapter relates to the Monkey Run game that we have created.
Because we have been learning how to create our game from a book, there are going to be many other developers who have also created a game that is identical, or similar, to our Monkey Run game. For this reason it is inadvisable to attempt to sell or otherwise commercialize Monkey Run in its current form—it will just be one of many similar versions of the same game, with the same graphics, and the same audio. Game publishers will most likely be very unhappy about having their time wasted in considering sponsorship of a game that is already freely and widely available on the Internet!
Although we will be using our Monkey Run game to learn the required skills in this chapter, the author recommends that the information learned here should be put into practice in an original game that you create using the skills that have been learned from this book.
Feel free to substantially modify the Monkey Run game, perhaps improve the gameplay and change the graphics and music, and then publish it or sell it as your own work. If you make substantial modifications to the Monkey Run game, and give it a different name, the author will be happy for you to call the game your own, and he will be very pleased if you are able to earn some income from your new found skills.
Note
It is the game developer's sole responsibility to ensure that they fully understand and adhere to the licensing terms related to any of the assets used in a published game (for example, providing correct attributions for audio and graphics). The game developer must also accept full liability for the incorrect use of such assets. For further information about some of the legal aspects of game development and publication, please see Appendix, Planning, Resources, and Legal Issues.
If you are planning to sell your game, or you are planning to obtain sponsorship for it, you should not upload your game to any location where it can be played by the general public, as this can severely reduce or possibly entirely eliminate the commercial value of your game. This issue is discussed later in this chapter in the section entitled, Obtaining sponsorship.
Now that we have discussed the formalities, let's go ahead and publish our game.
The Stencyl Arcade is an ideal place to publish our first game and, as we might guess from its title, the Stencyl Arcade is part of the stencyl.com website! It has been created for users of Stencyl to upload their creations and can be found at www.stencyl.com/game.
In the following screenshot we can see that the Stencyl Arcade is a curated environment with the most interesting games being marked as Staff Picks:
It's certainly worth taking the time to examine some of the games in the Stencyl Arcade, if only to see the high quality of the productions that can be created with Stencyl. However, don't allow the high standard of many of the games to discourage you—we all have to start somewhere!
While we're looking at these games, it should also be noted that popular and successful games do not necessarily need to have amazing graphics. For example, we can see in the previous screenshot that the excellent game Hex Rotate (created by Robert Alverez) is a puzzle game based on basic hexagonal shapes.
Uploading a game into the Stencyl Arcade is a very straightforward process, so let's get our first game online.