My son is a budding game developer learning unity to make web games. He uses a windows desktop at home but would like to share his creations with his friends at school. Most of them only have school provided Chromebooks that have the web browser and app store locked down tight.
We tried to export his unity game to HTML 5 and share the files through their google drive but none of the games run in the kids browsers, it does appear to load the html file somewhat but the game never loads. It seems like it needs some kind of web hosting to make it work.
Does anyone know of work around or a different game engine that can export games as an html file to be downloaded as an offline local web file that would be able to run games in the browser without having any kind of web hosting?
Thanks!
I’ve never used a Chromebook, but I think the main issue with running an html5 game locally on a chromebook is going to be loading the assets – images, sounds, etc., but it should be doable if you can open files from a thumbdrive in a browser (assuming there aren’t too many restrictions on running js code from the filesystem in the browser. You’ll just need to make sure to load assets using the file:/// protocol instead of http://. Phaser, Pixi, CreateJS could all work depending on what you’re making, or possibly even your Unity WebGL export could be modified to work if you’re able to track down where it’s failing.
If it’s not blocked, try itch.io?
If the Chromebooks are locked down for school purposes, my guess is that any known game engine website will be blocked, especially ones capable of exporting for your use case… Probably not a whole lot you can do other than suggest that they get their own computer.
This post appears to be soliciting work/collaboration, if this is not the case you can ignore this message.
Remember that soliciting work/collaboration no matter paid or free is against the rules here.
If this is the case then please remove your post and put it on r/inat and r/gamedevclassifieds instead. There are also channels for this in our discord, invite is in the sidebar. Make sure to follow and respect the rules of these subreddits and servers when you advertise for work or collaboration.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Give Construct 3 a shot. It is a game engine designed for this purpose explicitly.
Development is done in the browser, testing is done in the browser, remote preview is done in a browser (just send a link or scan a QR code), and exports are HTML5 only, so they run in a browser. You can even skip the external web hosting and just upload your finished projects directly to the Construct Arcade.
Your son could even share the C3 project with their friends, and they could modify it on their Chromebooks if they are interested in that sort of thing.
Scratch can do all of the above, but it is more limited.
Almost all websites are blocked unfortunately
We are looking for creative ways to share his games with his friends, who use Chromebooks.
He would be open to changing game engines from unity to something else to make that happen.
OP says in the post that the web browsers in the chromebooks are locked down tight. Would this work with no access to the construct 3 website?
That’s the tough part. Google disabled hosting back in 2017 or so.
The easiest way to check is to try the Chromebook at home and see if construct.net is accessible. If not then OP needs to check with IT to see what the options are.
If all else fails, then the easiest path forward is to make HTML5 games for mobile: just enable “Touch”, and most of the coding just works. Publish to the Construct Arcade to share with friends.