Creating self-hosted hints

There are many examples of game developers publishing their own hint pages for the players to read. Good example is the hintbook of Crimson Diamon.

And writing these kinds of page is easy, you just write HTML and then put the single page, or pages, somewhere available. Now, if you want to change the look or contents of the page you start facing the trouble. Changing every h1 tag to h2 tag will be slow and error prone. That's why websites are developed using web frameworks that separate the presentation logic from the content. Now, learning a web framework (I recommend Vue) would in itself be a useful skill, but there is an easier alternative.

Nice Game Hints has an in-browser editor that can be used to write hints for my site. But it can also be used to generate an html page from the hints written with it. Follow this tutorial:

Start with empty project

Open the editor with this address: https://www.nicegamehints.com/edit/new. Come up with a game slug (like, "my-test-game") and write in the game title. You will be directed to the editor with one single file created: index.

Write some hints

From the "Add your first guide" you can create the first guide. If your game is divided in chapters, a good first guide would be "Chapter 1" guide. Under that guide you can then add the actual first guide, that will help the player solve a single puzzle in your game. Add some hints to the guide.

Set the HTML sync and preview

Open the sync sidebar from the "Sync" button. As current remote select "Generate HTML". Now, close the sidebar and open the "Preview" sidebar from the button with the same name. It opens a big white canvas and a textarea. You can download ready made templates from the dropdown. Try them out. Load something onto the textarea and click "update HTML". You will see your hints rendered as an HTML page.

You can now edit the XSLT file shown on the right to make the web page look more like what you want.

Download the hint page

From the sync menu you can now download your HTML page. Click the "Generate HTML" button and it will generate a zip for you containing all the hints files (.md files), the XSLT file and the html file(s). You only need to publish the single index.html file in your own hosting environment.