Steam (Valve)
This note is typically about developing games for Steam, not about using the platform.
- To find a user’s Steam ID, you can simply paste their URL into https://steamid.io/
- If you need to download your existing assets, it’s easiest through SteamDB (e.g. this link)
- To modify your community icon, use a link like this
- To see this, go to https://steamcommunity.com/ after clicking the hub for a game (e.g. this link)
- To modify your client icon, use a link like this
Steam has a playtest feature (reference). There are two main ways to use this:
- Add a “Request Access” button to your Steam page that will allow people to sign up anonymously. From there, you can allow in some number of people.
- Give out playtest keys to specific people.
Assuming you have a demo online already, playtests takes slightly north of an hour since you have to make a new page, make new depots, upload assets, etc. You could probably speed that up if you recently set up another Steam page.
Note: when setting everything up for the first time, I got this error when uploading from SteamCMD: ERROR! Failed to commit build for AppID 3838630 : Failure. As far as I could tell, the builds were indeed online and I put them in the default branch, but I seemingly had no way to validate this for myself without sending the game to Valve to review. However, the documentation says this:
The store review checklist for a Playtest only consists of capsule images and icons.
…so I don’t think the presence of the build matters as long as the checklist isn’t complaining:
SteamCMD updates instead of running my command
Section titled SteamCMD updates instead of running my commandIf an update is available, then running commands will typically just automatically perform the update and then not run the command. It will exit with code 42 when this happens. What I’ve generally done is to run steamcmd --help just to make sure it’s up-to-date, then run my actual command.