I planning to develop a desktop game for Windows, not a mobile game. and I dont want to travel the whole mass back and forth in the internet to every test. may be it is funny enough in a 100Mb mobile App, but a desktop game’s size can reach a few Gb in the end.
You can already do it locally. Just export your game to folder and use one of these tools to package the HTML5 game for desktop:
NW.js:
Electron:
NW.js is very simple to use, no installation and coding and command line required, you can literally just copy your game in to the same folder as NW.js, create a config file to tell NW.js you want it to open your game and run the NW executable.
The down side is that, your assets are not protected this way.
You can protect the assets, but then you need to use command line to build the app either with NW.js or Electron.
In case you would like to also package for mobile later, you can also do that with Cordova:
https://cordova.apache.org/
And even Xbox using Visual Studio and UWP:
So, I suggest not to worry about it for now, preview should be fine while you are developing the game or even use NW.js if you need to run it “as a desktop app” locally, and once your game is done and you are ready to publish, it is possible to build it locally for any platform so you are not limited in any ways in that regard.
Yes, a 1 click export option that just works would be nice, but as you can see there is a lot of 3rd party tools involved that need to be installed and configured and it is not the focus of GDevelop to teach you how to configure them and use them. So I don’t personally expect any easy 1 click export anytime soon.
why should I use 3rd party software, when GDevelop HAS a compiler!? I don’t ask anyone to code or develop a new feature for me, because it is done! it is there and it works! I just want to use it in my computer locally! make it available, that’s all I ask for.
from my point of view I can’t see any reason or even sense to do it on trough the internet.
of course I’m worried about that! I don’t want to throw a complete game in the trash at the end, because I can’t release it! you have to think about everything!
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It doesn’t compile directly to desktop and mobile app. GDevelop compile to JavaScript and then the online build service using the same 3rd party tools to build the desktop and mobile apps from JavaScript.
So you can choose to export to folder in which case you get the raw HTML5/JS export and you can use the same 3rd party tools as the online build service to build apps locally on your PC.
So you don’t need to use the online build service if you don’t wan to but you do need to use the same 3rd party tools locally.as the online build service uses.