How to Make Your Game Portal Ready

From GPWiki

When submitting your game to a portal, you'll need to ensure that it complies with a number of specific requirements. These requirements change from portal to portal, so we'll just list all of the portal requirements encountered:

Remove all links 

Remove all links displayed within your game. This includes clickable links that activate a browser window, and non-clickable links that are simply displayed as text. Portals do not want to lose their users to other websites, so they are very particular about this requirement.

Logo display 

Wherever you display your company logo, the portal will also want to display its logo. If you have a splash screen that shows your logo, you will either have to add the portal's logo to this screen, or give the portal's logo its own separate splash screen. (NOTE: Do not simply grab the portal's logo from their website and add it! They will send you the assets you need, or give you instructions regarding which logo to use.) To make it easy for you to make builds for multiple portals, it is helpful to have your program handle splash screens dynamically. For example, if the file "splash1.jpg" is present in the game's directory, it should be displayed as the only splash screen. If "splash1.jpg" and "splash2.jpg" are both present, then these two files should be shown as separate splash screens, in succession. By auto-detecting splash screens in this way, you can make one build for all portals, and simply swap in the appropriate JPEG splash screen files, as needed.

"More Games" buttons 

If you have a "More Games" button, make it so that you can change the destination URL without recompiling the game. Have the URL text stored in some external file so that you can modify it easily. This will decrease the work you have to do to create the various portal builds. IMPORTANT: Many portals will want you to remove the "More Games" button entirely! This is because they have a number of websites or affiliates and are not interested in altering the "More Games" destination URL for each website. So, if a portal decides they don't want to use your "More Games" button, make sure you have a simple way of disabling it so that it does not show up in your game.

1-hour limit 

Make sure your game will deal well with a 1-hour time limit; the first hour of play should be compelling. Also, many DRM wrappers will cause your game to forcibly quit when the 1-hour demo has expired, so ensure that this will not disrupt your game's ability to save the player's progress.

High scores 

If your game makes use of online high scores, code it so that this functionality can be removed without affecting other parts of the game. Some portals may want you to remove your online high score functionality, and some may request that you alter your interface to work with their own high score servers. At the very least, you should make it so that your online high scores work entirely within your game's interface. Do not forward players to an external website to view the scores, as portals may worry about "leakage" of their users to your website.

Loss of focus 

When your game loses focus (i.e. in Windows, when the user ALT-TABs away), make sure your game is well behaved. Some portals require that your game's music stops when focus is lost.

ALT-F4 

Some portals require that your game exit immediately when the user hits ALT-F4 (or Command-Q on Mac).

Localization 

Some portals will want your game to be localization-ready when you hand it over. Ensure that your text strings are stored in an external file (not hard-coded!) so that they can easily be translated. You may also want to use a font system capable of rendering unicode fonts, to allow localization to non-ASCII languages.

Beta time bombs 

Portals may want to beta test your game with their users. As a result, they may request that you add in a "time bomb" that will disable the game after a certain date has passed, or after a certain number of days have passed since the game was first run.

Save correctly 

Be sure your game saves state in a way that works with a multi-user operating system (like Mac OS X). You might not have permission to write files next to the application.