Distribution

There are two main ways you can share your game made with Spry. On desktop, you can combine your game files with the Spry executable. On the web, you can serve your game files on a web server.

Spry on the Desktop

You can send a copy of your game to others as a single program by packaging your game files into a zip file, and combine it into the Spry executable. The zip file should contain all of the files in your game's directory, where main.lua is in the root of the zip archive.

Windows

On Windows, create a zip file of your game by right clicking the selected files, Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.

Once you have a zip file of your game, combine it with spry.exe to create a new executable my_game.exe using the command prompt:

copy /b spry.exe+my_game.zip my_game.exe

Linux

On Linux, navigate to your game's folder and then zip all of the contents in the current directory:

zip -9 -r my_game.zip .

Once you have a zip file of your game, combine it with spry to create a new executable my_game:

cat spry my_game.zip > my_game
chmod +x my_game

Spry on the Web

To run Spry in a web browser, you need to download the HTML5 version of Spry. The web version of Spry should contain the files: index.html, spry.js, and spry.wasm.

Inside index.html, you'll see the following JavaScript code:

var spryMount = 'data';
var spryFiles = {
  'data': {
    'main.lua': 1,
  },
};

Spry provides two methods to load your project for the web. The first method is to list out all of the files your game requires in the spryFiles variable. The second method is to package up your project as a zip file. You would need to change spryMount to point to the zip file's location.

Load from Files

spryFiles lists files in a tree structure. It is a collection of files that should be immediately fetched from the server before the game is loaded. In the provided example, only /data/main.lua will be requested from the server. spryMount is the working directory for the game.

Update spryFiles and spryMount for your project. A more involved spryFiles structure might look like this:

var spryMount = 'projects/game';
var spryFiles = {
  'projects': {
    'game': {
      'assets': {
        'atlas.png': 1,
        'atlas.rtpa': 1,
        'player.ase': 1,
      },
      'entities': {
        'player.lua': 1,
        'platform.lua': 1,
        'spikes.lua': 1,
      },
      'camera.lua': 1,
      'main.lua': 1,
    },
  },
};

For the example above, the project lives in the game directory. Inside, there are two directories: assets and entities.

Load from Zip

If you choose to serve your game from a zip file, the spryFiles variable won't be used and can be removed.

Change the spryMount variable to the location of the zip file:

var spryMount = 'site-content/game.zip';

Run in the Browser

To run your game locally in the browser, you'll need a local web server. If you don't know how to set up a local server, you can run the following Node.js command in the terminal:

npx live-server

Make sure that index.html is in the current working directory before you run the command.

Below are a few other ways to serve a local web server if you don't have Node.js:

python -m http.server 8080
php -S localhost:8080
caddy file-server