what do i need to publish a game?

[leonziyo]

hi guys I'm about to finish a game that I've been working for the past few weeks it is a pretty basic game, I didn't use any framework, it was purely made using SFML, all the graphics where made by me, it does not has sound, and I'm not planning on including any sound material. Now, I would like to publish it to get a little bit of feedback from the public, but I'm not sure how to publish it i want to let you guys know i am pretty new in the field of programing, actually this is the second game I'm gonna be developing and I have about 7 months of experience with c++ and well I'm learning everything from the internet. Back to the point what do i need to publish it??? is it OK if i just upload it? or do i need some sort of license ?? any help will be appreciated.

now do i need to include a read-me file or something like that if so, how can i create one i mean i have no idea what is is suppose to be in a read-me file but I've seen that all game usually have one.

[keyforge]

Hello!

Some of the options you have are uploading it to Surgeforce or a site like Github. People love to read source code! You can put a license on the game and source code so people won't steal it, but they can read it for educational value. If the project is very complete and nice you can put it on Steam for free or sale under the Indie section, but you have to get accepted in to Steam. Not sure how helpful my post is, since I don't have much experience with publishing... but for a pretty basic game I would just put it on Surgeforce.

[MorleyDev]

Well depends. As with anything you create, own and release, a license tends to make what people are allowed to do with it clear.

If you want people to be able to see the code, there are a lot of sites that exist for hosting open source software and a lot of licenses targeted around open source. From the MIT (do what you like and don't blame me if stuff goes wrong) to the GPL (basically others can use the code but only in a GPL'd project...I dislike GPL for it's viral nature and even wrote a university essay on it but let's not go into that).

To be honest, for a simple game with no intent to sell a common solution is either Sourceforge or an alternative such as Google Code, Codeplex etc. (for Open Source) or even to just upload it to a hosting site such as Mediafire and post it on a few forums you frequent for critiques with some screenshots and the like.

[Nexus]

or even to just upload it to a hosting site such as Mediafire

Or use SFMLUploads, then there are no ads or download delays.