Requirements for Winnitron Games
For now, the we've been running Winnitrons under Windows 7, 8, or 10 so make sure your build is for Windows. We're hoping to support other platforms soon, but most people build for Windows anyways, so we figured that would be the best place to start.
Your game should:
- be fullscreen
-
not show the user a dialog box first.
- Unity games in particular often show a config dialog box on startup. When building your game for the Winnitron, be sure to change
Player Settings > Inspector > Display Resolution DialogtoDisabled.
- Unity games in particular often show a config dialog box on startup. When building your game for the Winnitron, be sure to change
Each player on a Winnitron gets a joystick and two buttons (if you need more buttons, it could be your game is too complex for a casual arcade setting 😜), and there are both 2- and 4-player Winnitrons in the world. Key bindings for the controls are completely configurable as part of the website submission process, but we do supply a default setup:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ESC | Back/Home/Quit |
| Player | Movement | Button 1 | Button 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arrow Keys | . | / |
| 2 | WASD | ` | 1 |
| 3 | IJKL | G | H |
| 4 | Numpad 8456 | Numpad 1 | Numpad 2 |
The Winnitron Launcher uses a back button instead of a home button, each press of the back button bringing the players out of the game they're playing and closer to the main Winnitron Launcher Menu.
This way we've found it's simpler to implement on the launcher side of things, and it also gives the game developers a little freedom on how to implement it. But each game will need to make sure to utilize it properly or it won't make it onto any of the Official Winnitron Playlists.
The back button will be mapped to the ESC key on a keyboard, so you need to absolutely make sure your game will quit when the ESC key is hit.
Optionally, you can make the ESC key operate like a back button. So, if players are currently playing a game and they hit the back button, it takes them back to your game's main menu. Press it again and it quits the game.
You are not limited to how many of these layers your game will have, but the more you have, chances are greater that it will be frustrating to the player and they may not play your game again. So the fewer times players need to press ESC to get back to the Winnitron Launcher the better.
If you want to add in a confirmation box when players hit the back button while in game, e.g. "Are you sure you want to quit to main menu?", make sure that you can select it via Player 1 controls and confirm with Button 1.
Once the game quits, the launcher will automatically go back to the launcher.
The easiest way to make sure your game gets recognized properly is by making a user account and uploading it to the Winnitron Network and making sure the game has an executable and at least one screenshot.
One common gotcha right now is that the game cannot be in a folder inside the zip: your executable etc must be at the root/top directory of the zip. e.g.:
Don't worry; we'll fix this someday 😅
If you're making this to be put on a local machine (i.e. not uploading it to the Winnitron Network), you'll just need to include this JSON file with some information about your game. Again, you will need at least one screenshot and one executable with case-sensitive names in the JSON file.
Again, if you're uploading your game to the website, you don't need this step because the metadata file will be automatically generated.
This is totally subjective, but there are a few game designs and tips we've discovered that work well on arcade machines. Check out more on that here.