What are some things to consider when publishing to desktop

Hi all, I know there are a lot of users on here who are publishing games to phones/tablets etc but after completing a bunch of smaller projects I'm wanting something more ambitious, not hindered as much by the various limitations of such systems. If I'm aiming to release a game for desktop only - what are some things to consider? If I want to publish the game as an exe I assume it is wrapped with a browser (Chrome?), but will it try to wrap all of the assets into this exe (which would be HUGE) or will it dynamically load images/sounds etc - or is that something I will need to set up manually? Has anyone who has published a desktop only game got any tips for how the development process differs from browser/tablet games? Also, if the game is wrapped in a browser does this mean that there is cross-platform support eg for Mac/Linux? How reliable is this - I would assume if it's running in the same browser it should be identical no matter the OS, but is that a dangerous assumption? Thanks!

NW.js is the current wrapper for Desktop. It's based on Google Chromium, which is also the wrapper for Android.

It is currently barely functional for PC only. Let me explain, its because of serious bugs in Chromium that lead to stutter in all the versions of NW.js except for 0.10.5, which is really old. So NW 0.11 and 0.12 are no-go due to stutter.

However, 0.10.5 (& 0.11 and 0.12) also has a nasty memory leak, so if you make bigger games, it will also stutter after a short play session (mine start to stutter ~1 hr into playing), eventually becoming unplayable. If the game is smaller, this memory leak takes longer to kick in, but it's there, ever-present.

This problem is due to Google messing up Chromium and taking a long time to fix it combined with NW.js's development cycle. We C2 users, especially those making bigger games, are shafted.

There's good news, the current alpha of NW 0.13 has resolved both the stutter and memory leak issue.

But there's also bad news, it's broken, can't save/load, treating saved data as temporary session browser data. It's also incompatible with the NW.js plugin from C2.

Once the issues in the 0.13 alpha is fixed, hopefully NW 0.13 will prove to be stable on both PC & MAC. Linux is a mess.

Wow, ok - that's actually pretty disheartening. I had no idea it was that bad. I really hope they can fix those issues. I'm already pretty far along with the mechanics of my project and was about to really get into the asset creation - do you think it would be folly to continue? I don't want to put all the effort in and then not be able to publish properly, I might as well jump ship to unity of that's how it's going to be I absolutely love the workflow of Construct though.

"do you think it would be folly to continue?"

See how the 0.13 alpha turns out first.

If you are willing to give programming a try, I'd highly suggest moving to Unity.

IMO HTML5 isn't ready for large scale commercial projects yet. It most likely will be in the future, but how far away is that? I certainly don't know, and as it stands working with HTML5 is a big gamble.

I'd have to agree with sqiddster about trying unity, after working full time on a game for over two years, it's pretty devastating to realise that your hard work will be let down by a bad wrapper/chromium bugs. It's also pretty crazy that don't have an official steamworks plugin yet.

That said, smaller projects should be mostly fine, just don't make the mistake of making a point and click like me!