Now that the comp's over, are authors supposed to host their own games?

Competitions IFComp
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So, @Spike asked me where to play my game now that the comp’s over and the Play Online has apparently vanished, and my answer was “Wait, what?”

Does anybody have any best practices on how or where to host the game files, or is it basically a free for all and I need to put it on itch.io or something?

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I think that’s got to be a bug if Play Online vanished without a download link. I’m not sure if ChoiceOfGames files can be downloaded locally and still work. I’d assume your entry would be in the big 600MB (or whatever size) comp zip file.

But in any case I’m putting my stuff on itch.io. The more I see of it, the more I appreciate its flexibility and convenience.

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The organizers upload them to the IF Archive - here’s yours! You might want to make sure it’s linked from the IFDB page too.

Edit: anyone can also upload to the Archive, too, so that’s a good option if you do a post-Comp release. Also, congrats again!

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Yeah, all of the games are in Index of /if-archive/games/competition2021/Games. The walkthroughs are in https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2021/Games/<game>/Walkthrough/

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Hi, Travis.

Your game has a play online button over on IFDB… some images don’t show up (I’m not sure about that part) but the game itself is currently playable. We’ll work on adding something about this in the author FAQ or something for next year…

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As far as I know, you can put your game on itch.io or any other platform in addition to the IFDB and IF Archive links, should you wish for more visibility of your game.

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I want to plug Borogove.io here. It’s amazingly useful as a hosting platform, and was designed for the IF community. It’s much better than itch’s weird windows.

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Huh! Okay, good to know, thanks all. I’d like the images to work, so I’ll put it on itch.io I think.

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How do I update games on IFDB? It looks like the original version is on there, I have about four updates and another still to do. I have an account on IFDB, but I suspect it is not linked to the game. I guess I am not alone in that.

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It doesn’t need to be; anyone can edit IFDB pages, so you should be able to change the links on the game’s page. You can also set its author field to link to your user profile, which AFAIK is the closest IFDB gets to “tying” an author to a user.

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