How do I use Lectote to publish my Inform 7 game on Steam?

[Steve]

I want to publish my Inform 7 game on Steam. So Andrew Plotkin typed a solution. He said:

Hadean Lands and Anchorhead use the Lectrote interpreter, customized to play a single game. The information on this is here: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote. (The “Packaging a bound game” section.) But it’s not a one-step process, I’m afraid.

So I went to the above link and downloaded the interpreter Lectrote. But where is the “Packaging a bound game” section in the above link? He says it’s not a one step process. But what and where are the steps?

I can play my Inform 7 game on Lectote. But how do I bind it into a single (but big) playable file I could submit to Steam?

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

It’s further down on the page. You’ll also want to read the previous sections under “For developers”.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

The instructions may not be entirely correct any more. It’s been several years since I went over them.

[jkj_yuio]

I don’t know the answer, but you don’t need one big file for steam, instead you put it all in a depot.

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

@severedhand describes having done this successfully as recently as 2022 here:

trying to make standalone game w/ Lectrote

Okay, I’ve succeeded. I took David C’s 2017 script, put it alongside the current (May 2022) version of makedist.py from Zarf’s Lectrote project, and hacked the latter using the former to produce a script with which you can create the win32 Lectrote builds of games on a PC, from the command line, today. (The bold isn’t for ego purposes, it’s to make clear what this does at a glance for future readers.) NOTE: The script as is is tailored to only produce the win32 builds, using a PC. I can’t vouch…

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

I’ve done this recently. It’s a lot easier on mac than windows. If you do use windows, you’ll have to fix a few issues like commenting out the mac-only builds, using an absolute path name instead of relative path name, and changing one syntax line. That link above is a good start; if you end up trying it out on windows and get stuck, feel free to post exactly where you got stuck. Here’s another thread I made when I was trying it on windows:

Lectrote bundling file not found

@mathbrush I took notes on getting the PC process working for my WIP back in 2022. My starting place for a working script was back in this thread, working from something David Cornelson originally provided in 2017. If you go to the last post of the thread, you’ll see my updated script. You’ve got yours working already, but you can compare and find out if your script is better or ‘worse’ (since I’d definitely prefer the better one!) The process I have never handles the tempapp folder contents c…

I wonder if it might be easier to just release with an interpreter (an html file) and look up tutorials for converting html into an app through Electron. That’s exactly what Lectrote is doing, but I imagine there will be more support online for the ‘html->Electron’ pipeline than there is for Lectrote bundling.

Edit: Someone posted a useful thread here about using Electron and just the Steam process in general: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronjs/comments/17nyqqp/post_mortem_of_creating_a_game_for_steam_with/

[severedhand]

@mathbrush

That’s exactly what Lectrote is doing, but I imagine there will be more support online for the ‘html->Electron’ pipeline than there is for Lectrote bundling.

Edit: Someone posted a useful thread here about using Electron and just the Steam process in general: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronjs/comments/17nyqqp/post_mortem_of_creating_a_game_for_steam_with/

That’s cool. I had no idea you could try a different way because you just don’t know what you don’t know. I’ll keep this up my sleeve for when I have to go through this process again.

-Wade