Level Up Your Unity Skills: Building and Testing Your Game

Over the course of the last 30+ articles I have been discussing how I have gone about developing a space shooter. These journey has including installing Unity and starting this project. A project that now includes a Player ship that moves and shoots lasers, Enemies that spawn and explode when hit by Player or Lasers, and different Power-Ups for the Player to collect. In addition, animated Sprites, Visual effects, and Sound Effects rounded the project.

The project is now a functional game. It is a very basic game, that will be improved later. You can say, it is now ready for Alpha testing. Every developer gets to this point. So, in this article I am going to show the process of build your game into a executable game for a Windows PC. The process for Mac and Linux is similar in nature.

The first step is open your Build Settings. This is done by Left-Clicking File > Build Settings or just pressing CTRL + Shift + B.

The Build Settings let’s you pick the Target Platform and Architecture. I am keeping mine at Windows and Intel 64-bit.

From here you click on the Player Settings to open the Project Settings. Here you can set the Company Name, Product Name, and Version.

Within the Player Settings, you can choose the Resolution and Presentation you want. Because I haven’t yet programmed a way to Escape (Exit) the game, I switched the Fullscreen Mode to Windowed and kept the defaults for Screen Width and Screen Height:

After you make these selection you can close the Project Settings window. From here you click on the Build button. This will bring up a save dialog window. It is advised to save your Build in a separate folder than your Unity Project folder for the game, if you are using Github. This is to prevent large file sizes.

With that you can launch the executable file to test it or copy on a USB stick to give to trust friends or family members to test. Until next time, Happy Developing!