Build It Better: Building And Testing Your Game

You’ve done it. You finished your game or at least you finished as much as you’re going to right now. So now what? We’ll cover building and testing your game in Unity. This a relatively straight forward process so let’s get to it.

Open up your finished project and head over to File >Build Settings this will then open up the Build Settings menu.

In the Build Settings menu you’ll see a few different things but first let’s add the required scenes to the build, you can either drag and drop your scenes from the Project tab or use the Add Open Scenes button to do just that. Make sure they’re in the correct order as this is the order that Unity will build them in. Next, be sure to select the correct platform. In my case this is PC, Mac, & Linux Standalone but it may be different for you, if it is select the correct platform and hit Switch Platform in the bottom right.

After a short period as Unity reimports the assets it should be raring to go. Be sure to look at any warnings/errors in the console as these will inform you of any issues.

Now hit Player Settings in the bottom left. This will bring up the Project Settings window on the Player Settings option which you can use to tweak values such as package versions, rendering, vulkan support, XR integration, etc. There are tons of other values but for now let’s just rename the game name, company name, and the version.

Now with everything set, close the Project Settings window and hit Build. This will bring up a window asking you to select a folder to save the build to. I recommend just creating a dedicated Deployment folder to save your builds in the root of the project.

Next a window will pop up that shows the build progress.

Finally when it’s done compiling it will open up the deployment folder we created earlier and so the completed application (in my case anyway, if this were Android it would be an apk) that you can run.

You should also see a console line like so if it successfully completed.

Assuming all is well, start your game, and see if it works! You should see the Unity logo pop up and then you’ll want to create a checklist of items you want to double check. This is important as this is what your consumers will see so it’s important to thoroughly playtest your game, record any bugs, and keep creating iterative builds.

There you have it. Building, and testing your game in one fell swoop, this was but a very very brief look at doing so. The process of building and testing isn’t final, you will go through this multiple times during the span of the project and typically when you update the game as you add changes. Until next time, happy coding.