When exporting your game with TIC-80, a binary specific to your scripting language is downloaded, and your game is injected into it. If you'd like to to fork and customize TIC-80 itself, you need to build those binaries yourself, and host them on your own http server.

This process will explain the steps specific to build TIC-80, but you will have to install some dependencies yourself. It is a step-by-step process that can largely be automated — and actually is through this project's build.yml.

Preparation

• Clone TIC-80 and make your changes
• Change the TIC_WEBSITE & TIC_HOST statics
  • The new host MUST be accessible through http, and MUST NOT redirect to https. It can be a subdomain.

- #define TIC_WEBSITE "https://" TIC_HOST
- #define TIC_HOST "tic80.com"  
+ #define TIC_WEBSITE "https://tic80.com"  
+ #define TIC_HOST "www.yourunsafedomain.com"

• Build the custom editor for your system (see here)

Build the export binaries (Windows 10)

Follow these steps to build the smaller language-specific binaries.

• Execute the following commands:

$ cd <path-to-tic>/build
$ cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -DBUILD_SDLGPU=On -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel -DBUILD_STUB=On ..
$ cmake --build . --config MinSizeRel --parallel

• Upload those binaries to yourunsafedomain.com/export/1.1-dev/
  • The folder name must correspond to TIC-80's version
  • The files must be named tic80[lang]
  • The uploaded binaries must not have a file extension

Export web (Debian)

• Follow these steps to build the .js/.wasm/.html files.
• Note: this does not work on Windows

Setup dependencies

• You'll need make and cmake, there are several resources on internet on how to install these.
• Download and unzip https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk/archive/main.zip on your disk

$ ./emsdk update
$ ./emsdk install latest
$ ./emsdk activate latest

• Read the instructions to setup env vars for future builds

Build the files

• Like the export binaries, build the html files.
• If the process hangs for too long, try to set a small value to the --parallel option.

$ cd <path-to-tic>/build/
$ emcmake cmake -DBUILD_SDLGPU=On -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MinSizeRel -DBUILD_STUB=On ..
$ cmake --build . --config MinSizeRel --parallel
$ mkdir bin/html-export && cp html/export.html bin/html-export/index.html && cp bin/tic80*.js bin/html-export/ && cp bin/tic80*.wasm bin/html-export/

• To make a web build, just put in the same folder

  • index.html
  • tic80<lang>.js > renamed to tic80.js
  • tic80<lang>.wasm (not renamed)
  • cart.tic, you game

• If you want to make a downloadable bundle, zip together:

  • index.html
  • tic80<lang>.js > renamed to tic80.js
  • tic80<lang>.wasm (not renamed)

• Rename the zip html<lang> (without the extension)

• Upload the bundle to yourunsafedomain.com/export/1.1-dev/