Improving the Publish Game Dialog

Entry posted by Josh · March 17, 2015

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Leadwerks 3.4 (now coming up to 3.5) has retained the core design philosophy from it's inception with Leadwerks 3.0 of easy level design and simple Lua scripting, but has changed quite a lot in other ways.

Publishing of games to Steam Workshop wasn't even a thought until Leadwerks came to Steam in January 2014. Consequently, the current publishing interface isn't quite as intuitive as it could be and requires too many clicks.

To make publishing easier, a Publish menu item has been added in the File menu.

Selecting this will bring up the new Publish Dialog without needing to open the Project Manager. From here you can publish a Lua game to Steam Workshop, update your existing Workshop game, or publish a standalone game that can be run outside of Steam.

Clicking the Next button gives you controls over various options. You can then press the button again to publish your game. This will package your game into an encrypted format and distribute it with the method you have chosen.

If you choose to publish to Steam Workshop, your game will then be playable in the Leadwerks Game Player (games must be manually added to the interface at this time, by me).

Additionally, the Workshop file publish dialog no longer requires that you specify an asset type. It will just read the contents of your zip file and choose the correct category to put it in, based on the files it contains.