Polishing and Packaging the Game

Welcome to the last chapter of this book. In the preceding chapters, we worked together and crafted a basically playable Pangaea game. The current stage beckons us to focus on polishing, packaging, and presenting the immersive Pangaea game to players.

We will discuss and explore a range of potential approaches to polishing and improving the game’s quality. This will include incorporating high-quality assets, fixing bugs, and leveraging the engine’s profiling tools to improve performance.

Some useful Unreal Engine console commands will be introduced so that you can use them to start the standalone game with preferred settings.

We will also outline the essential settings required for packaging the Pangaea game, then we will follow the steps to package and generate a standalone game for Windows. By providing this guidance, we aim to assist you in successfully preparing the game for distribution.

This chapter includes the following...

Technical requirements

The code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Unreal-Engine-5-Game-Development-with-C-Scripting/tree/main/Chapter12.

Polishing the game

Having completed the preceding 11 chapters, we have now arrived at a significant milestone where we possess a playable Pangaea game prototype that serves as a foundation for further development. Our next task, polishing the game, involves the following three aspects:

• Importing and using more game content
• Fixing bugs
• Profiling and improving the performance of the game

Let’s get started.

Importing and using high-quality game assets

To enhance the visual quality and create a more immersive player experience, it is possible to incorporate additional assets into the game during the polishing phase. These assets may include high-quality artwork, audio clips, videos, and more. The acquisition of these art assets depends on the specific project requirements and available budget.

Certain types of assets can be used to polish the game, such as characters, structures, props, items, animations, particle effects, sound effects, music clips...

Using Unreal Engine console commands

Unreal Engine allows testers to use console commands to interact with the game while playing. Console commands are widely used to change game settings, view the game status, manipulate game attributes, change game behaviors, tune game parameters, and so on.

Exploring modes and console commands

A pop-up UI called the Debug menu is usually developed to link UI actions (buttons, input boxes, and selections) to certain console commands. Testers can use the Debug menu to quickly jump into a particular game state. If you want to learn more about the Debug menu, you can visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_menu.

Please be aware of the prerequisite for using console commands in standalone games, which requires games to be packaged as Development builds instead of Shipping builds.

To use console commands while playing the game, press the tilde key (~) on your keyboard to toggle between showing the small console, showing the large console...

Packaging the game

During the development process, we extensively played the Pangaea game within Unreal Editor. However, our goal is to make the game accessible to players without requiring them to install Unreal Engine. Luckily, Unreal Engine provides a convenient packaging feature that allows us to create standalone install packages for various platforms. This means we can distribute the Pangaea game as a separate application for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and more. To demonstrate this, we will create a Pangaea Windows game installation package.

Prior to the packaging process for the game, certain project settings need to be configured.

Configuring the project settings for packaging

To successfully package a game, as the bare minimum, there are two tasks you need to complete, as follows:

• The first task involves setting the project defaults, which entails designating the default game mode, player pawn, and so on
• The second task involves including the necessary...

What to do next

This book is structured to provide comprehensive insights and techniques essential for creating and developing Pangaea, a multiplayer game in the top-down genre. It covers a range of topics, including fundamental C++ coding skills, the Unreal Actor class and its subclasses, animation control, player interactions, collision handlers, UI, and multiplayer game fundamentals. However, the book does not delve extensively into each area and could not cover all aspects of techniques for game development as there is a vast and intricate body of knowledge to explore. Becoming an advanced expert in Unreal C++ game development requires continuous learning, practice, and experience accumulation to further refine your skills.

The key to success lies in consistent practice and dedication. You can choose to embark on a new project from scratch or enhance the existing Pangaea game by gradually incorporating additional features and exploring advanced technologies. Aim to gain familiarity...

Summary

What you just learned in the chapter was ways of polishing the Pangaea game by importing new assets, fixing bugs, profiling to improve performance, and using console commands to manipulate and tune the game. You also followed instructional steps to configure the packaging settings and generated a Windows executable game for distribution. The last section of this book also provided my suggestions for your further learning based on the knowledge and skill set you gained from this book.

I hope this book can help to accelerate your learning experience and be the starting point for your Unreal Engine C++ game development career. I wish you all the best with your future professional game development career and I hope you make your dream games come true!