How To Upload A Python Game To Steam

What it Takes to Release Your Game on Steam

While creating reaktron (https://reaktron.com — a snaker game on powerups), nosotros not only had to think about how to implement the game, but also where to publish it. In the end, nosotros decided to go with Steam. This article is about the steps nosotros had to take until we could sell our game on Steam.

Signing up

The offset matter nosotros did was creating a Steam partner account (https://partner.steamgames.com/). This involves some paper work because United states of america authorities require you to provide a lot of data. Besides, some NDAs with Valve have to be accepted. Once this is done, you get access to the Steam partner portal which provides 4 important functionalities:

Steam SDK releases
Steam SDK documentation
A portal to configure your app
A portal to create your shop site

Integrating The Steam SDK

The Steam SDK is a well-documented C++ library. It comes with an instance game and there are (unofficial) bindings for many programming languages. Since our game is written in Python, we tried out unofficial Python bindings. Since we didn't like these, we created our ain Python bindings which we may release as open source at some point in the future. It is of import to annotation, that the Steam SDK provides a lot of general purpose functionality that yous tin can use instead of creating your ain solutions. E.g. you can use the Steam SDK to send and receive network packages instead of utilizing low-level socket networking yourself. Also, there are solutions for matchmaking, lobby advice and much more. Therefore you should start integrating the Steam SDK at an early on stage of your evolution to avoid writing code which may be provided by the SDK.

Hint for Linux users: for the Steam Overlay to work with your app, yous have to set LD_PRELOAD="$Abode/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so" when launching from outside Steam. Nevertheless, you should non export this variable since information technology will break various applications in your terminal in a very subtly fashion.

Configuring Your Steam App

To actually run your app after y'all have integrated the Steam SDK, you lot demand a Steam "app id". An app id will be assigned one time yous have created and configured a new app using the Steam partner portal. You will have to provide some graphical assets, texts, paths to executables, and more than. After uploading your game, it will be available on Steam (only to your developers) and can be tested. Read almost how to automate the deployment to Steam. A pitfall can exist that you have to edit various places in the Steam partner portal when adding a new platform. If you run into problems similar your game being zero bytes of download size in the Steam Library or Steam not being able to launch your game, you most likely missed one of the places to configure inside the Steam partner portal.

Creating The Store Page

For your shop page, you have to provide numerous graphical assets and texts. As well, to us it looked like a trailer video is mandatory. Nosotros too marked our game as "Early on Access" which required us to write additional explanations near what to expect in the "Early Access" version of the game and for how long the Early on Access phase should roughly last. You should also think about which toll label to put on your game and whether you want to grant a release discount or not. We likewise noticed, that it is not possible to include external links within your shop folio texts every bit these go stripped out.

Publishing The Game

Before your app can be released to the public, it has to pass an official review past Valve. Likewise, your store site will be reviewed earlier it can go alive. To us, the review procedure was valuable. Not but did the reviewer bring up important issues, but he besides gave some recommendations for improvements. The review was started speedily, seemed to exist done thoroughly, and findings were well-documented (thank you, Tony!). After a few iterations, our app passed the review and we could put the game into the "coming soon" state and set a release date. This release date has to be at least 2 weeks in the future, so the "coming shortly" state has to last at to the lowest degree ii weeks. In one case, these two weeks accept passed, you lot can release your game at whatsoever time. During the two "coming before long" weeks, you lot can edit your store page and deploy new versions of your game without whatsoever trouble.