Building and Testing with Unity (2D Space Shooter)
This is just a quick article on how we can build out a playable prototype for Windows from the Unity Editor.
Once your prototype’s set up and working as intended, head over into the Build Settings window via File > Build Settings. From here, you can check to see which scenes (if any) are currently in your build. You can click ‘Add Open Scenes’ to add in a scene you’re working on, or you can drag scenes from your Project view into this list. You can re-order them as you’d like and should ensure the tickboxes are checked if you wish to include them within the build.
There are a few options on this page which you might want to consider, but in most cases the majority of the settings you’ll be interested in will be in the Player Settings window. Click the button in the bottom left to head to this page, and from here you can set a default resolution, change the game’s title, icon, and version number, and much more. There’s too much to go through here right now, but needless to say there are a lot of important settings in some of these other tabs (particularly in ‘Other Settings’ from my experience), but for our purposes we won’t need to worry about these at the moment.
By returning to the Build Settings window, we can now hit build, create and/or select a folder for the build to go in, and then leave Unity to build out an executable.
Assuming no errors have been run into during the process, you should end up with something you can open up on your computer and play about with. You can also zip the folder this version is contained in, upload it to GDrive or perhaps to a storepage on itch.io and share the project with other members of your team for testing.
For a lot of the games I work on myself, I tend to prefer sending out simpler WebGL prototypes so members of the team can play it on Mac, Windows, and even mobile devices (although that’s not especially recommended) without needing to download and unzip files to their device. But I’ll touch on this in the next article 😉
