Distributing your game🔗

Work in Progress

The documentation below currently describes how we want to implement the distribution of our game. As of right now it is not yet implemented.

Overview🔗

Broadly speaking, distributing your game involves the following steps:

Register your game on experiment.games.
Download the game configuration scripts to your game's directory.
Compress your game.
Upload the zip file to experiment.games.
Share the link to your game with your players.

Registering your game🔗

We envision Experiment as a platform for developers to create and distribute their games. To this end, we will provide a web interface for developers to register their games.

Registration involves providing some basic information about your game, such as its name, description, and the game's directory. Furthermore you describe the game directory name.

Downloading the game configuration file🔗

After registering your game, you will be able to download configuration scripts from the Experiment website. These scripts will be placed next to hl2.exe in your game's directory.

The following scripts will be available:

Start <your_game>.bat: This script will ensure your game is started with the correct parameters. It will call the hl2.exe with -steam -game experiment -config game.json.

Note: we eventually hope to create a generic Start <your_game>.exe that is signed (so it doesn't trigger Windows Defender) and can be customized with your game's icon.
game.json: This file contains metadata about your game, like what the path is to the experiment.games API and update server. This will help the game to automatically update itself when you upload a new version to the website.

Experiment checks for the game.json file in the game's directory and reads the update_url field to determine where to look for updates.
```
{
    "update_url": "https://api.experiment.games/v1/games/<your_game_id>/update"
}
```

Compressing your game🔗

Seeing how you've developed your game with Lua, all the game files are already inside the script and asset directories, like: experiment/gamemodes, experiment/addons, experiment/materials, etc.

To distribute your game, you will need to compress the folder above experiment into a zip file. Meaning the zip file directly contains hl2.exe, Start <your_game>.bat and game.json, with the experiment folder next to them.

Uploading your game🔗

After compressing your game, you can upload the zip file to the Experiment website. You will be able to upload new versions of your game at any time.

After uploading your game, you will receive a link to your game's page on the Experiment website. You can share this link with your players, who will be able to download and play your game.

Not using the Experiment platform for distribution🔗

We hope that you will use the Experiment platform to distribute your game. We will charge a fee for hosting your game and keeping the platform up-to-date.

However, if you prefer to distribute your game yourself, you can still use the same configuration scripts to distribute your game for free. The update URL in the game.json file can point to your own server, and you can create and distribute the configuration scripts with your game yourself.