Go online: publish your game for free

Your mission

Publish your neon dodge game on the internet for free, get a link, open it on your phone, and send it to a friend. Flex on your friends, officially.

Why it’s worth it

A game on your laptop is cool. A game anyone can play from a link is a whole different level. It’s proof that you built something real, and it’s the first thing you can put in a portfolio.

You’ll use two tools that pros use every day. GitHub stores your git project online (a copy of your repository, with all its save points). GitHub Pages takes the web files in that repository and serves them as a real website, for free. Your game becomes https://your-username.github.io/neon-dodge/.

Before you start

• A GitHub account: sign up free at github.com.
• Your game in git with at least one commit (lesson 4.1).
• The GitHub CLI (gh), which lets Claude talk to GitHub from the terminal. Install it from cli.github.com, or with winget install --id GitHub.cli on Windows or brew install gh on a Mac. Then open a new terminal and log in:

gh auth login

Choose GitHub.com, then HTTPS, say yes to authenticating git with your GitHub credentials, and log in with your browser. What you’ll see: ✓ Logged in as your-username.

Build it

1. Keep your email private. On GitHub, go to Settings → Emails, tick Keep my email addresses private, and copy the address it shows (it ends in @users.noreply.github.com). Then start Claude in your neon-dodge folder and ask:

Set my git email for all projects to <paste your noreply address>. From now
on my commits use that address.

What you’ll see: Claude runs git config --global user.email …. Your future commits use the private address. (Earlier commits keep the placeholder email from lesson 4.1, which is harmless.)

2. Privacy check.

Check every file in this project for personal information, passwords or API
keys before I make it public. List anything you find, don't change anything.

What you’ll see: a short report, hopefully “nothing found”. Fix anything it flags before going on.

3. Create the repository and push.

Create a public GitHub repository called neon-dodge from this folder with
the gh CLI, and push my commits to it.

What you’ll see: Claude runs something like gh repo create neon-dodge --public --source . --push, then gives you the repository’s URL. Open it: your files and commit history are on GitHub.

4. Turn on GitHub Pages.

Turn on GitHub Pages for this repository, serving from the root of my
current branch, using the gh CLI. Then tell me the site URL.

What you’ll see: Claude enables Pages through GitHub’s API and gives you a URL like https://your-username.github.io/neon-dodge/. The first publish usually takes a minute or two. Open the link.

If Claude can’t enable it, do it by hand: on your repository’s page, go to Settings → Pages, set Source to Deploy from a branch, pick your branch (main or master) and / (root), then Save.

5. Play it everywhere. Open the link on your phone. Send it to a friend.

Look at you go. You just shipped a game to the internet.

6. Ship an update. Make a change, like a new colour scheme, then:

Commit this and push it to GitHub.

What you’ll see: a commit and a push. Wait a minute, refresh the live site, and your update is out. That’s how real deploys work: change, commit, push.

When Claude gets confused

• The link shows a 404 page. The first publish takes a little while: wait two minutes and refresh. Also check the URL includes the repository name (/neon-dodge/) and that index.html is in the top folder of the repository, not inside a subfolder.
• The game loads but shows a blank screen online. Open the browser console (lesson 3.3). A common cause is a file name with different capital letters (Game.js vs game.js): your computer may not care, but the web server does.
• gh says you’re not logged in, or the push is rejected. Run gh auth status to check, and gh auth login again if needed.
• The repository name is taken. You already have one with that name. Pick another, like neon-dodge-2, and the URL changes to match.

Did it work?

• Your commits use your private noreply email
• Your repository is on GitHub with your commit history
• Your game plays at your GitHub Pages link, including on your phone
• You pushed an update and saw it go live