Publishing a Flash Game

Publishing your game to Flash is a quick, one-click procedure.

So why is this article so long? We'll cover some topics related to publishing as well as some gotchas that you may run into if you're unlucky.

Contents

• Publish to SWF
• Arcade
• Removing the Splash Screen
• Site Locking
• Recommended Sites
• Troubleshooting (sound, compiler)

Publish to SWF

A SWF (Shockwave Flash) file is the container file for your game. This is the file that you upload to portals such as Kongregate.

1) To export a SWF, click on the Publish button in the toolbar.

2) Then select Flash.

After a brief waiting time, your SWF will export. That's it!

Publish to Stencyl Arcade

In addition to publishing a SWF, you can publish your game directly to our Arcade to share it with the community and receive useful feedback.

1) Click on the Publish button in the toolbar.

2) Select Stencyl Arcade
 

This will generate the SWF behind the scenes and automatically upload it to our site. If you've already published this game in the past, it will update the existing entry by default.

Removing the Splash Screen

Every Flash game published with Stencyl has a choice between a badge on the preloader or a pre-game splash screen.

If you'd like to remove this branding, purchase a Stencyl Pro license, which includes other benefits besides splash screen removal.

Site Locking

If your game is popular, people will snatch it and upload it to other sites, causing you to give others ad revenue off your game without your permission.

This can be deterred through site locking, a feature that prevents the game from starting if it's hosted on a different domain from any on a "whitelist" that you create.

1) In the Settings dialog with your game open, click on Loader button on the left sidebar.

2) Fill in the sites that you want the game to work on. If you have multiple, put a comma between them (the space does not matter either way).

Recommended Sites

When publishing your game, consider the following sites to upload to.

• Kongregate. The king of Flash game portals. Developer-friendly, ad revenue share and a more hardcore audience.
• Newgrounds. A long standing and popular Flash content and games site. The owner particularly is on the lookout for great Stencyl games to sponsor and has sponsored 2 to date and is looking at more.

Troubleshooting

On occasion, your game will fail to export. Sometimes, it will appear to "hang" at around the 25% mark without throwing an error in the application itself.
 

If this is happening, in over 90% of cases, it's due to an incompatible sound.

If you remove sounds from your game until it successfully exports, you can identify which sound is at fault. Once you do, a safe solution is simply to re-export it from a program such as Audacity while taking heed of the basic requirements of sounds that we talked about in the Sounds article.

• 44.1 KHz
• 16-bit
• Constant bitrate (versus VBR)
• No metadata

If you have removed all sounds, and your game still fails to export (silently), let us know on the forums
 

No Write Permissions

A second, less common cause is that the game is able to export to a SWF (you get a file chooser dialog) but fails to write the SWF out to the location you picked. This can be caused by insufficient file permissions. Choose a directory to which you can save files out to.

frankbwalsh
How do i adjust images for smooth resizing. Easy to do in flash, but I don't see a setting in stencyl that allows me to publish to a flash file that has smooth resizing.
0 9 months, 2 weeks ago

Tikiana
How do I remove the site locking?
0 1 year, 5 days ago

Kasofa
This article is informative, but having the solution to the Stencyl Arcade failing to update would be good to include, and also reduce possible redundant forum posts. Could someone please add this, or explain a little bit more?
0 1 year, 2 weeks ago

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