Distributing Web games

Web games have several advantages:

• They're easily accessible from web browsers
• They're less of a security threat than native games
• They work on all three platforms out of the box

However, they also tend to perform more poorly, and to have worse platform integration.

Since version v0.14.0, the itch app supports installing and launching web games. Like the website, it will look for an index.html file to show.

Note: game pages that aren't of type web won't work as web games even if they ship an executable-less archive with an index.html somewhere. (Twine compilations are particularly affected by that, you can work around it by shipping an app manifest)

Fullscreen

As long as your game renders to a canvas, you should be fine.

Describe behavior of the app in fullscreen, mention influence of 'width/height' settings in edit game page (it tries to keep the ratio)

Engine-specific notes

Unity WebGL

The default Unity WebGL export includes an interface around the canvas, with the project's name and its own fullscreen button. The itch app attempts to hide that so that the game fills the entire window.

Pico-8

Pico-8 web exports have their own interface and fullscreen mode, so the app doesn't attempt to resize their canvases.

Unity plug-in

So-called Unity plug-in games aren't web games. They require a proprietary browser plug-in to run, and aren't supported by the app. They're also being actively phased out by Unity, and incompatible with at least one major browser (Google Chrome).