Publish to ByteDance Mini Games

Note: some platforms only have Chinese documentation available when visiting the platform’s website. It may be necessary to use Google Translate in-order to review the documentation.

ByteDance Mini Games are developed based on ByteDance full products, which do not require users to download. This is a brand-new game type that can be played on tap.

The game submission, review and release process of a mini-game needs to comply with the requirements and standard processes of the Byte official specification. For specific information, please refer to the links at the end of this document.

Publish to ByteDance with Cocos Creator

1. Download the ByteDance DevTools [cn].

2. Log in to Developer Platform [cn]to find your mini game appid. For details, please refer to the official Access Guide [cn] documentation.

   

3. Select the ByteDance Mini Game in the Platform in the Build panel, fill in the mini game appid, and then click Build

   

4. Preview game

   Following this process, a bytedance-mini-game folder will be generated in the project’s build directory (the name of the folder is based on the Build Task Name), then you can open your game with the ByteDance DevTools.

   

Build Options

Asset Management for ByteDance Mini Game Environment

In a ByteDance Mini Game environment, asset management is the most special part. It differs from the browser in the following four points:

1. The size of the ByteDance Mini Game package cannot exceed 4MB, including all the code and assets. Additional assets must be downloaded via web request.

2. For files downloaded from a remote server, the ByteDance Mini Game environment does not have the browser’s caching and outdated update mechanism.

3. For the assets in the ByteDance Mini Game package, they are not loaded on demand in the mini game environment, but rather all the assets in the package are loaded at once, and then the game page is launched.

4. You cannot download script files from a remote server.

This brings up two key issues, home page loading speed and remote asset caching and version management. For the home page loading speed, we recommend that developers only save the script file in the ByteDance Mini Game package, and all other assets are downloaded from the remote server. As for downloading, caching and version management of remote assets, Cocos Creator has done the job for developers.

Specifically, developers need to do the following:

1. When building, enable the MD5 Cache in the Build config panel.
2. Set the Remote service address, and then click Build.
3. When the build is complete, upload the res folder in the mini game release package to the server.
4. Delete the res folder inside the local release package.
5. For the test phase, you may not be able to deploy to the official server, you need to use the local server to test, then open the details page in the WeChat DevTools, check the Does not verify valid domain names, web-view (business domain names), TLS versions and HTTPS certificates option in the Local Settings.

Subpackage Loading

The ByteDance Mini Game requires a specific version to support the subpackage feature, and the version requirements for the ByteDance product are as follows:

For ByteDance DevTools, please use v2.0.6 or above, but below v3.0.0. After updating the DevTools, don’t forget to modify the Debug Base library to 1.88.0 or above in the ByteDance DevTools.

Note: if the product version does not support subpackage loading, the engine will load the subpackage as a normal asset bundle.

Currently, the size of the ByteDance Mini Game subpackage has following restrictions:

• The size of all subpackages of the entire mini game cannot exceed 16 M
• The size of a single subpackage/main package cannot exceed 4 M

For details, please refer to the ByteDance Subpackage Loading Official Documentation [zh]

Reference documentation

Note: some platforms only have Chinese documentation available when visiting the platforms website. It may be necessary to use Google Translate in-order to review the documentation.

• ByteDance Mini Game Developer Document Guide [cn]
• ByteDance Developer Platform [cn]
• ByteDance Mini Game API Documentation [cn]
• ByteDance DevTools Download [cn]
• ByteDance DevTools Documentation [cn]