How to Release your Game

Alpha and Beyond

Bonus Content

In this project you will learn how to release your game, what the next steps are after game release, and additional tips for getting to the end. 

Release your game

Course Introduction and Planning

Game Jams and Skilling Up

Set your goals and find your community

What is the Design Process? 

Scope

Constraints and Our Theme

Concentric Design

Why Prototype? 

Assets shouldn't be liabilities

The Stages of Game Development

Planning your project

CRC Cards

Your First Milestone: Vertical Slice

Why Agile?

Vertical Slice - Part Two

Refactoring

Sprint Planning

Alpha Build

What is Playtesting?

How To Playtest

Sprint Plan

Review and Redesign

In this project you will learn about what's ahead for you on your journey to finishing a game! You'll also get a chance to confirm that you have the right knowledge and skills to get the most out of the course, along with links to useful resources that will help you on your way. You will also learn how to equip yourself for your journey, and meet some of your fellow adventurers.

Goal Setting and Community Building

In this project you will learn about using a design process to take your idea from a broad concept into a finished, polished game, the concept of scope will help you achieve your goal of making a game, how constraints can help you create rules to keep you in scope,  and how to use the specific design process, concentric design.

The Design Process

In this project you will find out if your game idea is fun through Prototyping. You will also learn how to make a plan for assets you will use in your game – the sounds, images, models, animations and other resources that make up a game – to avoid nasty surprises later in development. 

Prototyping

In this project you will learn how to keep a sense of the big picture by dividing the game development process into stages and milestones, hit your first major milestone in the development of a game through creating a vertical slice, and learn two planning tools you can use to plot a course to a finished game. 

Milestones

Agile Development

Professional teams schedule some time for code cleanup after each milestone so their code stays flexible and easy to work with. This project will give you some tips and general principles for this process, known as refactoring. With your vertical slice done and your code in good shape, this is where you’ll start down the road to alpha.

Writing Better Code

Playtesting is more than just asking people if your game is fun. It's a structured process for collecting useful information about specific parts of your design. In this project you will learn why Playtesting helps you collect useful information on your design and how to execute the entire process. 

Playtesting

Lots of people start games, but it’s surprisingly hard to finish one. This course guides you through the process used by professional game makers to develop their ideas, keep their projects on track and deliver a complete, released game. 

 that will help you quickly design and prototype your games. These resources can accelerate your development process and help you achieve your goal of releasing a polished game!

Design and Publish Your Original Game: Unity USC Games Unlocked

6c412089-f0ca-53a7-a8de-dae1d721262d:IJ50VM7ryBj2kIwUvpGqR0

Make_a_Trailer.pdf

About Alpha

Release Like a Pro

Assignment: Release your Game

Optional Assignment: Make a Trailer

Assignment: Release your Game and Postmortem

on Unity Play: https://play.unity.com/en/games/caec7bc9-dcf8-45d4-beac-ff3364ea265b/kat-murr-coffee-gallery

YouTube trailer: https://youtube.com/shorts/F7ohfbghljc?si=DPcX5JnDH6lP2Su-

Kat Murr Coffee Gallery.Trailer

Katmurr

https://play.unity.com/es/games/11e9d8c1-1fec-42ac-a481-5722f1b84a65/equiilibrista

El equilibrista

Agustin Dominguez

intro for talk session.mp4

Jesse Callihan

Attached are also the trailer and the postmortem. Hope this helps anybody!

High Command Trailer.mp4

High Command Released

Arcane_Creator

i don't recomends play in this game everyone me games bad 

game fnaf 5 night in gay museum

safasfafsagj

This is the first game I developed and published it on Itch.io a couple of months ago. I spent around five months developing the game and ran into many many obstacles.

I decided on making a SHMUP with some RPG elements and it got complicated really quickly.

The hardest thing to implement for me was the level up system and save feature. Choosing to make the game 2.5D was also a choice that made the build much more complicated.

I learned that game development is extremely time consuming with a lot of "head desk" moments & that it's not just about getting something to function the way you want but also getting it to not do what you don't want it to do :)

Nomira 2024-06-21 17-31-00.mp4

N.O.M.I.R.A

jbpett19

My first game ever you can find it on https://qwert0.itch.io/the-rabbit-adventure

The Rabbit Adventure Trailer.mp4

The Rabbit Adventure

Qwertto

Released game - "Kura"

kot88murmansk

About Alpha.mp4

Release Like a Pro.mp4

What does it feel like to put a game out into the world and let it go? What do professionals do when they reach the end of a project? In this tutorial you will hear from game developers as well as clean up your latest build. 

Unity + USC Games Unlocked

Games

This is it – you're releasing your game!

The iteration you just finished is considered your alpha release for purposes of this course. So as of right now, you’re done with core development of the game. It’s probably not everything you wanted it to be, but this is the moment where you accept that, and push all those great ideas you didn’t finish into your designer’s diary for your future games.

So this assignment is a little different from the other build assignments. You’re going to do a round of cleanup, and then you’re going to turn in a link to your released game – WebGL, itch.io or whatever other platform you use.

What is cleanup? It’s your last “smoke test” before you release the game, and it consists of only three things.

Do a quick playtest of this build with a player, and read the peer feedback you got. Fix only game-breaking bugs.

Make sure you’ve got a simple credits screen showing any third-party assets you used – and don’t forget to put your own name and itch.io page (or whichever platform you’re going to use to publish your games.)

Make a build and try running your game on a computer that isn’t yours, ideally with a different size of monitor. (Ask a friend if you don’t have access to this.) Does it still work? Do all your UI elements show up in the right place?

When you’ve finished those steps, save your project and make your final build. Upload it to your preferred publishing platform. In your postmortem assignment, you will submit the link to your finished game, and then reward yourself by playing your classmates' games!

This assignment is optional, but making trailers is a professional skill for game makers and it can be a lot of fun!

It should take between 30 minutes and two hours to do, depending on how ambitious you are with your trailer.

The assignment is to make a 30-second trailer for your game. In the Tutorial Materials you’ll find a few options for capturing gameplay. But making a trailer is not just about having the right software – a good trailer tells a story about the game in a way that is visually interesting.

Game trailers have two purposes. One is to convey information about what the game is and what it’s like to play it. The other purpose is to persuade viewers that the game is interesting. 

The first part of the assignment is to watch some game trailers carefully and take some quick notes about what they’re doing. Choose trailers for games that are more about mechanics than story, since a story trailer is different from a mechanics trailer. Try to find trailers for games whose mechanics are similar to yours. 

When and how often does the camera change? Does that make it feel fast-paced or reflective? Does that pace match the game itself? 

What kind of shots does the trailer use? That is, close-ups, long shots, panning across horizontally or vertically, zooming in or out? Does the trailer only use the game camera or does it alternate gameplay with other kinds of visuals? For example, the camera might fly through a level from high above even though the player’s character never leaves the ground in the game. 

Does the trailer use words? Are they text on screen, voiceover or both? If it’s on-screen text, does it appear between shots or on top of them? 

The next step is to think about what you want to show in your trailer. It’s perfectly fine for this purpose if you just show a title screen and then a single long shot (say 10-15 seconds) of gameplay. Give some thought to what the best 10-15 seconds would be though – it’s not necessarily the first few seconds of your game. 

If you want to make something a little fancier, you’ll start by thinking about the story you want to tell. Is your game exciting? Mysterious? Contemplative? Are there moments in it that are surprising or funny? How can you combine shots to tell this story? What kind of background music would help set the tone? 

What you’re doing is actually making a little film, so you’ll use the tools and techniques of film- making to plan and assemble the final product. See the resources in the next section for videos that introduce the basics of storyboarding and editing. 

Once you’ve decided what you want to capture from your game, you’ll need software that actually records the footage. Look below for a few options. Two important tips for recording: 

1. If you’re planning to use background music in your trailer (recommended), turn off the background music in your game before you begin recording. Keep the in-game sound effects on if you plan to use them in the trailer. 

2. Be aware that video capture may create enormous files on your hard drive, particularly at high resolutions. Try a couple of sample captures to check how big the files are and tweak the settings to something reasonable. 

Once you’ve captured your footage, you’ll need to bring it into a video editing program to assemble it with your title screen and background music. The resources in the next section include a list of free and low-cost options for video editing. 

When you are finished, post your trailer online (on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and put the link in the gallery. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsvhq28sOI  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAH0MoAv2CI

http://heidigrover.blogspot.com/2014/01/like-for-like-storyboard.html 

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-screen-recorders-for-windows-mac-android-and- ios 

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-screen-recorder 

https://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/the-best-free-video-editor-1330136 

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanSumo/20170825/304497/A_Quick_Guide_to_Making_ Indie_Game_Trailers.php 

1. Make a trailer using the step-by-step instructions above. For your reference, the instructions are also provided in the Tutorial Materials.

2. Upload your trailer to YouTube, Vimeo, or another video hosting site.

The postmortem is a time-honored tradition among game developers at all experience levels.

Each time you make a game you’ll learn and get better at it, just like anything else you do. But you can accelerate the process significantly – get better much faster – by looking back and consciously extracting lessons from each project.

This assignment should take you about ten minutes to do well – you're just collecting your thoughts, not writing a paper.

The traditional format for a post-mortem covers three questions:

You can address anything at all in your answers. Some examples:

If you had trouble finding uninterrupted time to work on the game

How you worked through a problem with the game design

A particular bug that tormented you for weeks

How you incorporated feedback from your classmates

Times when you felt discouraged, and how you got through them

Things that you wish you’d thought of when making your asset list

There’s no standard length for a post-mortem – you might have more to say about a short project than a long one, or more to say about a solo project than one involving dozens of people. But as a rough guideline, aim to identify two-three topics for each of the three sections (what went wrong, what went right, what you learned).

Next, write a sentence or two on the goals you set for yourself for this course, back in the first week. Did you meet them? If not, did you make progress?

And finally, in a couple of sentences, talk about your future making games. Are you finished with this project or will you come back to it? Do you already have a concept for your next game? What will you do to develop your skills after this course?

Share your postmortem here along with the link to your final build, and to your trailer if you made one. We also strongly encourage you to post it on Unity Connect, Gamasutra or itch.io as well. A good postmortem will help other game makers just like you.

How to Release your Game

1. About Alpha

2. Release Like a Pro

3. Assignment: Release your Game

4. Optional Assignment: Make a Trailer

5. Assignment: Release your Game and Postmortem

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