While there are many platforms to distribute my game, I felt I needed a way to directly distribute updates and be able to more easily communicate with the players. I might want to announce events, maintenance, patches, and so on. So a launcher feels like a natural solution, as the first layer before playing the game.

I took a look at some existing solutions, and there are amazing solutions already done. However, as much as I can, I am avoiding adding extra costs, besides my own time. This is important because at this stage I want to minimize costs as much as possible. So I explored another way, which is to make it myself. Granted, this means some dev time away from the game. But on the other hand, I will have full control over the features I want to provide without incurring added cost per player.

I need only a few features:

• Distribute builds
• Distribute patches
• Launch the game
• Communications
• Links relevant to the project

So I took a look at electron, since I had previous experience with nwjs, and it was very simple to get things going. Not only that, but it has self update too, so not only I could update the game but also the launcher, hassle free. At this stage, the only feature missing is patching, which I will get to later. The final result is sufficient for what I need. And here it is, ready for the alpha test release! :-)