Adam tweeted about our uploader/patcher so I guess the cat's out of the bag!
Here's what you need to know:
- As a developer, you won't need to change anything
- the current 'upload via website' method will keep working
- ...but if you do want to take advantage of it, you'll be able to either:
- upload via the app (if you like pretty graphical interfaces)
- use the command-line tool (which is what the app uses anyway)
- which will enable you to only upload what has changed since the last version of your game, instead of reuploading the entire thing.
The command-line tools are especially useful if you have build servers — just slap a `butler push buildfolder user/game:tags` in your build script and it'll automatically push it to itch.io, ready for players to play.
Testing them now
The tools are not yet ready for prime time (backend isn't complete at the time of this writing), but you can always grab the latest version of the tools and start playing around with it — there's inline help that should be descriptive enough for you to create patches & signatures, apply them & verify that it went well.
- OSX 64-bit: https://dl.itch.ovh/butler/darwin-amd64/head/butler
- Linux 64-bit: https://dl.itch.ovh/butler/linux-amd64/head/butler
- Linux 32-bit: https://dl.itch.ovh/butler/linux-386/head/butler
- Windows 64-bit: https://dl.itch.ovh/butler/windows-amd64/head/butler.exe
- Windows 32-bit: https://dl.itch.ovh/butler/windows-386/head/butler.exe
(A good test is to run `butler diff --verify a b` where 'a' and 'b' are two different builds of your game — with some files in common, so you can see how large the patch is, how fast the hashing & diffing are, etc.)
These are bleeding-edge versions of a command-line tool, which means you need to run them in, for example, `cmd.exe` on Windows. If it all seems confusing, don't worry & just wait until it's fully integrated with the app and all you need to do is drag & drop :)
Other technical notes:
- You can verify the integrity of your download by replacing the `/butler` part of the URLs with `SHA1SUMS`
- There's also a `butler.7z` available for each package (much lighter, but you need 7-zip to unpack it).
- The windows executables are signed, right click -> Properties -> Digital Signatures to check it.
- Everything is open-source: https://github.com/itchio/butler
- It's continuously built & deployed on our Gitlab CI instance: https://git.itch.ovh/itchio/butler/builds
I regularly tweet about it, as we're nearing release, so feel free to follow @fasterthanlime on Twitter and ask me about it.