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WebAssembly demo capabilities?

A topic by Kipt created Jul 29, 2020 Views: 938 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 4

Hello there,

I have an application and a game I'd like to create a page for here at itch.io. Some games that I've played here have a browser version or Unity 3D that runs on the page itself.

Is it possible to add a demo or teaser version of my software so people can try before buy by making a WebAssembly version and add it to the page?

Moderator(+1)

It is possible to have a web version of the demo of a game you’ve made, with the full version being available as a downloadable file (possibly for a price).

I haven’t tried, but I assume WebAssembly is supported (it’s worth giving it a try).

The only thing I’m not sure about, is if the game will show up properly on searches. If the game is not available as a full version for the web, I’m not sure if having a web demo version will classify your game as “available for the web”, and show up in relevant searches.

I already had a Unity web (HTML+WebGL+webassembly) game with pay-what-you-want downloads but just to be sure it works I tried setting it to Paid and the page does explicitly say the web version is still freely available.



https://technicat.itch.io/learnunity

But I've seen anecdotal reports and in my own experience web games generate less contributions than downloadable games-- I don't know  ifthat applies to this scenario, but if it does, an alternative is to have one page just for the web demo and one for the paid download and have them link to each other.

(+1)

I've seen Unity apps have this feature (in particular LittleShopOfJunk). They have a fully playable game on the browser and a Unity app that you can download as well. However, I don't use Unity for my projects so not a possibility for me as I think it's a property of the Unity "Kind of project".

But having two versions, one for the demo and one for the full project, is something I haven't considered, might work as a backup plan!

Just FYI, in case you're not familiar, Unity is a cross-platform engine (like Godot, Unreal...even Ren'py) so in theory most of what you build and script is platform-independent and you can take a single project and tell it to make different builds for the supported platforms which in the case of Unity is web (HTML+WebGL+Javascript+WASM), Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS... and thus you can make the most of your development effort. In practice however, there are platform differences like performance constraints for web, screen size, performance issues and touch input for mobile, etc. and you typically end up writing different code for different platforms distinguished by compiler defines

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PlatformDependentCompilation.html

Also it's a lot of work and expense to test every single platform, so a developer might just focus on one or two.

Moderator

Well... yes. Web games are always free, even if there's a paid download on the same page. So? You said you wanted it to be a demo. Isn't that the whole point?

(+1)

I think you might've confused technicat for me :D

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