Under the Hood: Building a Build Pipeline

October 6, 2013

We’ve been slowly working towards a build pipeline. The code below expects that you have your project organized in a specific way.

With this build pipeline setup, you’ll get:

  • Per-store build options, with automatic preprocessor defines based on the store names.
  • Build versioning, with that version included in the project resources to use at runtime.
  • Post-build file copying, at a per-store, per-platform level.
  • Zipping of projects to names based on their version for easy distribution.
  • The ability to copy and archive your builds in Dropbox for distribution. (Old builds are automatically moved to an “Archive” folder when a new version for that platform is copied in.)

Note: Someone pointed out on Reddit that this is Pro-only. (I’ve always been a Pro-user, so I wasn’t keen to look out for those things. I’ll try to do that more in the future.)

Setting up the Pipeline

Import ZapdotBuildTools.unitypackage to get started.

For most of this to work, my scripts expect the folder hierarchy to mimic what is described here. (Mainly that BuildTools and Unity exist in the same folder.)

  • If you’re running in Windows, you need to unzip the command line version of 7zip so that it exists in PROJECTFOLDER/BuildTools/7zip/7za.exe.
  • In AppInfo.cs, change companyName, longName, shortName, appleAppId, appleBundleId, and steamAppId to match your information. shortName is used for bundle identifiers and filenames, so keep it alphanumeric, with no spaces.
  • In Build.cs, change scenes to match the scenes in your game. The first scene in the array is the one that Unity loads first, and these paths are relative to your Unity project directory.
  • If you want any post-build file copying to be done, simply create a BuildIncludes folder at your main project directory (Same folder depth as BuildTools) and mimic the Store/Platform folder hierarchy to whatever depth you want. The file copy operation will overwrite the destination with whatever you place in the BuildIncludes folder.
  • If you want to use the Push to Dropbox feature, it should automatically work on Windows, but for Mac users, you need to edit line 203 on FileTools.cs to include your Dropbox path. This assumes, of course, that you’ve installed and linked Dropbox to your account.
    • Tip: Grab the share link to the top-level folder for game builds in Dropbox, and create a shortlink for it, so you can then simply share something like bit.ly/MyGameBuilds.

See it in action!