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Leadwerks Game Player enters beta


Josh

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Leadwerks Game Player is now in beta. If you recently posted a game on our site or entered one of the recent game tournaments, you were sent a pre-release Steam key to access the application.

 

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Leadwerks Game Player provides you with a route to self-publish your games to Steam Workshop. Because it is a free application, the entire Steam userbase of 125 million people can access your game. Your Lua game is run in sandboxed mode using an interpreter application we provide, so that Steam users can freely download and play games without fear of computer viruses. Your game is playable on Windows and Linux (including SteamOS), even if you didn't develop it in Linux.

 

Sharing Your Game

Share your game with your friends and fans with a simple link that installs the game player (about 4 MB) and downloads and plays your game automatically:

steam://run/355500//405800821

 

Or the more hyperlink-friendly variation:

http://www.leadwerks.com/run?405800821

 

When running, your game appears as a normal Steam application, shown here with the overlay enabled:

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This allows you to get your game in front of players and start building a community of fans.

 

Publishing

The next update to Leadwerks Game Engine (beta branch only) adds the ability to self-publish games to Steam Workshop. These will appear in the Leadwerks Game Player Workshop, as it is a separate application.

 

To publish your game, first publish a standalone game from the project manager. After that, open the Workshop > Publish File menu item and select the game data zip file as the uploaded file. Be sure to select "Game" as the type of file you are publishing. This process will be streamlined as we near launch.

 

After publishing, I must manually add your game to the interface, as the Steam web API cannot be used while the application is still unreleased. Please contact me to add your game after publishing.

 

You may need to opt into the Steam client beta (not the Leadwerks beta branch) to successfully publish games, as cross-app Workshop publish is a relatively new feature.

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This is very cool. I think a more interesting GUI would make this top notch though. If you think about this you are really building a marketplace here. Look at mobile/console marketplaces and see how they have things structured to get ideas. Categories, searches, more fluid/interesting scrolls. Developer Recommendations etc. You can really turn this into little sub-steam honestly.

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I have a question about the resolution settings. Will that automatically set the games to run at those settings or are they passed onto the game and then it's up to the game to handle the passed on settings?

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Can you use the game player for WIP games or is it only for completed products?

This is tricky. I wonder how the quality control will work. Josh can't spend hours testing games each week. Can users vote on games to bring the best to the top and maybe remove really poor entries?

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It's definitely meant for WIP games. The Workshop has controls for voting, and the ability to flag an incompatible item already built in.

 

It's like IndieDB, but will get your game in front of a wider audience, people who wouldn't normally go looking for games to download.

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