Releasing Your Game

This section covers the general steps to take when you want to release your game to players, be it just for playtesting, or for a final release on a platform like Steam or Itch.io.

Release builds🔗

By default Comfy might turn on some debug features, such as the FPS performance window. You can enable a ci-release feature with cargo that should be viewed as do what makes sense for a release build. The reason it's named ci-release is that cargo already has a --release flag, and it's likely you might want to create release builds in CI anyway :)

To build a release build, run the following

cargo run --release --features comfy/ci-release

The --release flag enables release optimizations with the Rust compiler, which will make your game run a bit faster depending on your dev config. If you haven't enabled any optimizations in development (say with opt-level = 1) this will end up being significantly faster than your debug builds. Note that building with --release takes noticably longer.

After this, you should have a game-name.exe under target/release, where game-name is the name of your binary crate.

If you're using include_bytes!(...) or Comfy's parallel asset loader you don't need to distribute any other file, as everything will be packed into the executable :)

If you're loading assets/shaders by hand using std::fs::read or similar you'll have to make sure you pack and distribute your assets with the built binary.

WASM (Web) builds with Itch.io🔗

Comfy does natively support web builds with Web Assembly (WASM) with a little bit of setup. Firstly, you'll need to install the wasm32-unknown-unknown target with rustup

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

After that we need to actually build the game. There's quite a few options for WASM, but the easiest right now seems to be using Trunk. If you have some other preference feel free to use it instead :) If you run into issues, please report it as a bug on GitHub. Everything should mostly "just work". Only thing to note is that Comfy will attach the canvas to a HTML element with the id wasm-body. This will become configurable in the future, but for now this should be good enough for most use cases.

To install trunk run the following:

cargo install --locked trunk

Next up, you'll need to add a index.html to your project. There's a few things that are required, notably Comfy uses a HTML element with the id wasm-body to attach the canvas it renders into.

If you don't want to bother with any of this, you can use the index.html from one of our demo games which already has everything setup. The other nice thing this file does is correctly handle audio sources on the web, since web browsers won't allow websites to play audio until the user has interacted with the page, and the index.html linked above handles this correctly.

Lastly, you just need to use trunk to build the distribution package, which is as simple as

$ trunk build --release --features comfy/ci-release

This will create a dist/ folder that you can just upload to your web server or itch.io. Note that if you're using itch.io you might need to enable SharedArrayBuffer support on itch.io. This page describes some of the common errors.