Distributing a Sphere game

Made a game? Want to release it and make other people enjoy your game? There's several ways to do it!

Packaging your game

Just release it as-is

This one is easy, but people who don't have Sphere would need to get Sphere in order to play your game.

• Browse to your game directory (in sphere/games/MyGameName).
• Zip/archive your game's folder.
• Release the zip on Spherical.

People who have Sphere can just copy the game into their games/ folder and open it with the startup game, or they can open the game.sgm straight with the engine/editor.

Include Sphere with your game

Note: these are instructions for including the Windows version of Sphere. Instructions might also be slightly messy.

• Make a copy of the Sphere folder, but exclude the games and startup folders.
• In the copied version, create empty directories for startup and games.
• Put your game in the startup folder without the game folder name (so like Sphere_copy/startup/game.sgm and NOT Sphere_copy/startup/MyGameProject/game.sgm)
• OPTIONAL: delete editor.exe if you don't want non-Sphere users to be able to open the project (or if you want to remove an element of confusion).
• OPTIONAL: rename engine.exe to something appropriate. Like your game's name.
• OPTIONAL: run config.exe and change the settings to how you want to release the game (for example, 2x zoomed with OpenGL renderer).
• Zip up the game and upload/distribute it! :)

Release it as an SPK game package

An SPK is a packaged version of a Sphere game, in an alternative format that's a bit more tricky to extract the game out of. It allows you to distribute the game as a single file, though it's not used often as current Sphere has some issues dealing with SPK files.

<Instructions coming soon>

Uploading your game

• If the game is small (< 128 KB), you can upload it straight on the forums.
• You can also upload your game on the Spherical Downloads Drive.