We recommend you only publish your games on Itch if you have a good reason for doing so, and after checking it is legal for you to have a Itch account for your age and where you live. You can already share your visual novel with friends by hitting the publish button on the script and sending them the link to play here on the VisualInk website.
Publish to Itch
If you're taking part in a game jam, or if you want to build a community around your VisualInk game, you may want to publish it at Itch.io. VisualInk allows you to specify websites that are allowed to "embed" your published novels on their domain and we can use that to make a published novel playable on Itch.
Important note: while this technique allows your novel to be played on the itch.io website, your novel is still stored and being run here at VisualInk. This means that your novel cannot be played offline, if you unpublish the script the Itch version will become unplayable, and if you change the script and assets used in your published novel the game that is available on Itch will change immediately to match. Be careful making changes to published scripts or the assets they use!
Create an Itch account
Before we can publish on Itch, you will need to set up an account and confirm that you want to publish games as well as play them. Once your account is created, head over to the account settings and select the "Profile" page. Here you can see your username and the public url for your account that has been generated for you based on your username (normally https://{username}.itch.io). All of your games will be published under this "domain", so this is the domain we need to tell VisualInk to allow to embed your novels.
VisualInk setup
Copy the domain name from the url from your Itch profile settings (the bit after https://) and head back to the VisualInk website. Go to your user settings - you must have an account and be logged in - and add the domain to the list of "Allow embed domains". Optionally, you can set a display name here as well. If you add a name here, a "by {this name}" line will be added on the entry page of your published visual novels under the title.
Now go to the script you want to publish, make sure that you have hit the Publish button, and copy the url shown at the top of the editor.
Create your web wrapper
Your Itch game will consist of a single HTML document that embeds the published VisualInk novel. If you know how to create websites you can customise this as you wish to do things like add a border around your game or links back to your Itch page. Alternatively, you can copy the simple template below that will just show your VisualInk novel filling the whole game window. Cut and paste the text into a file called something like game.html and update the title and the link to the published script where marked.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>{Your game title here}</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<style media="screen">
html {
height: 100%;
}
body {
margin: 0px;
height: 100%;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="{your published link here}" width="100%" height="100%" frameBorder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen *; cross-origin-isolated; web-share;"></iframe>
</body>
</html>
Upload to Itch
Head to Itch and in the "CREATE" section of the menu select "Upload new project". Fill in the name and description options for your novel, and in the "Kind of project" section select "HTML - You have a ZIP or HTML file that will be played in the browser".
Pricing note: Itch do not currently offer an option to charge for online play, and any game you publish on VisualInk will be available at the published link for free anyway. Nothing prevents you from asking for donations, but do not select the "Paid" option or you will not be able to publish the game.
In the "Uploads" section, upload the file you created in the previous step and tick the option that says "This file will be played in the browser". All of the other options after this point are up to you to choose, although VisualInk novels generally work best if you set the "Embed options" to "Click to launch in fullscreen".
Save and view the page for your new game!
That's all
You should now have a working Itch game page where you can click "Run" to start a new game, and which you can share or submit to game jams and other contests happening on Itch. Players on itch will be able to continue their most recent playthrough as well as save at specific points in the novel, but (as with most Itch web games) remember these will only be saved on the browser they are using to play at the time. There is currently no way to log in to VisualInk while playing an embedded game, so if you want players to be able to save games and play across multiple devices and will need to suggest that they create an account at VisualInk itself and play the game via the direct publish url.