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🏠 HW 7: Publishing Builds

Assignment Deadline

Gradescope assignment due Friday, February 23rd, 2024

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Builds

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During class, we have been running our projects within the Unity Editor. This is a great way to quickly test things and iterate. Now we want players to experience our games! In order to publish your game or any program you create, we will need to take our compiled program. Then, we want to put it into the form we want to deliver it in and make it available to other playeers. The form you publish your game as is heavily depenedntly on what type of project you are working on. In Unity, a WebGL build allows you to publish to a web server like a website so that players can access it through their browsers. A mobile app typically goes through a store like Google Play or Apple's App Store. A desktop build might be published on Steam. The starting point shares a common theme - complile the code and then package the compiled code and files together.

What is a build? A build is a standalone version of your game, so our players don't need to open our projects in Unity. They can double-click on the program to run the game. The term Build is used interchangeably with application or executable. They all mean the same thing.

It isn't possible to run a Windows application on an OSX device. Same goes for a PlayStation game on an iPhone. Each requires its own special format. The operating system the player is using is referred to as a platform or within Unity, a build target. Some examples include:

  • PS5
  • Windows 10
  • Oculus Quest 2
  • Android 11
  • iOS16

Unity allows developers to build games for a variety of platforms. Exporting your game to some platform is an important part of game development, a task that every game developer will have to do at least once during their career! To test your projects, create a build. To release your game to the public, create development builds by checking the Development Builds box.

Important notes:

  • Install optional modules in Unity Hub
  • Easily switch between different platforms but code may look different for each platform
  • Must accomodate designing for different platforms and adjust the input system to reflect so
  • Create a new folder for your builds. Do not push these buils to GitHub and Perforce
  • Sometimes the game within your editor will not look and feel the same as your built game
  • It is not recommended to rename the folder name that was automatically generated for you. It might break things. If you want to change the name, make a whole new and separate build
  • Be careful and precise as you follow the steps, including all punctuation and capitalization

After you build your Unity game, don't forget to publish and deploy! Publishing assembles the ouutput into the desired format but does not deploy the prog ram. Deployment doesn't have to be complicatd. Putting everything into a .zip file or another archive format and then email the file or place it on a website for people to download is a fast way of deploying your gae.

Rendering Quality

For each device or platform you build to, it is important to consider the quality and the rendering settings of the game. Feel free to adjust and set a certain quality level for different platforms and levels within the game. This will take some experimentation to get to a setting that works best for your game. Edit the settings under Edit/Project Settings/Quality.

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Player Settings

You may also have different build settings for each player. Under Edit/Project Settings/Player, you may modify player icons, cursors, and names. You can also modify the splash screen animation!

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Marketing

In 2022, Unity merged with ironSource. ironSource helps bring apps and user experiences by focusing on the app's business expansion in relation to the app economy. ironSource helps with monetization, marketing, analytics, and discovery capabilities that help developers scale their app-based businesses. Unity recommends ironSource to help you monetize and market your game.

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