How To Build Package And Export Your Game - Unreal Engine Tutorial

hey guys and welcome back to another unwrenching full tutorial in today's video i'm going to be going over how to package and export your games from unreal to then distribute to anywhere you like so it could be ichio steam just your friends and family or just for you for a uni project whatever it is that you want i'm gonna be going over how to package and export your project so let's get right into it so what we want to do first is we actually want to build the project and by that i don't mean actually creating it when you create a game you want to build it which is what this build button up here does so the main thing this is for is lighting so you'll notice over here where i've just set up some different stuff so i actually have things to build in my game you'll notice that it says preview on the wall now a lot of people ask why it says preview that's just because you've got the preview lighting you actually need to build the lighting to fix this so that's very simple we can go up to build here and you can just press build and that will then build the whole game but what i like to do is build the lighting and then build everything just because that way the lighting needs to be built before anything else anyway otherwise you'll get some errors so i just prefer to do that way so i'm going to press our drop down menu next to build go to lighting quality and you'll see it says preview now you can change this to whatever you like so it could be preview medium high or production i'm just going to go for medium again you can choose whichever you like you can go to lighting info there and you can have a look at all this and change what you want but you really don't need to mess about with that then we can just press build lighting only now you'll notice that it's building the lighting again that's why i've just put some stuff in here now this may take a little while for you depending on how good your computer is and obviously how much you have in your game however it shouldn't take too long and it's always the first time you do it it always takes a lot longer so as i've only got three lights in my level it shouldn't take too long it would be a lot quicker if i had a better pc but you can already see that it's going up fairly quickly so i will be back with you once it's finished and here we are it is now finished lighting build completed and you'll notice that the lighting has actually changed so it looks a lot nicer now and the preview text has also gone so lighting itself looks a lot lot nicer and it no longer says preview one thing to keep in mind is when you build the lighting it will most commonly get a lot darker in your level so you'll probably need to add more lights in and then obviously build it again because you've added in more lights but really you just need to mess about with it and get it perfect for you and i should also mention i said obviously the better your pc the quicker build the main thing for building is ram so the more ram you have the quicker it will be obviously the cpu does place that as well not so much the gpu cpu does but is the main thing is the ram and i currently have 16 gigabytes of ram so once you've built the lighting you can then go down and build everything else via this list here which i used to prefer to do that however nowadays i just prefer to press build after doing the lighting so we can now press build and that's going to do everything it will do the lighting again as well but again you might sometimes get some errors if you haven't built the lighting already it should fix it but you know it's always just nice to do this anyway so again same thing with the lighting it will take a little bit of time depending on the size of your project and how good your pc is so again once i finish building this for my project i'll get back to you so that should be it now done i've now built my project again because i don't really have anything else in here to build for example nav meshes geometry anything the main thing is just the lighting but again it'll be different for each project so once we've now built everything we want to set up our settings for packaging so to do that we can go to edit project settings now the first thing we want to do is go to maps and mode so we'll actually know that stuff with description so this description here you would just want to set this up to be what it is so obviously the project thumbnail description of the game project name project version all this stuff so you probably want to change the project version every time you release an update or you repackage it i'm going to leave it as one and you'll see the publishing and legal and all that stuff you'd want to set up next we'll go down to maps and modes now a lot of this stuff i imagine you will have probably already done as you're creating your game but just in case you haven't you want to set the default game mode the edit to start a map isn't important for packaging that's just the map which automatically loads when you start up the engine the game default map however is very important so this is the map which will load when you load up your game so if you have a separate main menu level you will want to put that in here if you just want it to be your level one put that in here this is a level which loads up when you start the game so this is very important to get correct as i only have one level in here i'm going to leave it as the third person example map then obviously the multiplayer in the game instance but again you'll probably change that as you've been creating your project next we'll go down to movies and you can obviously take these what you want so wait for movies to complete movies are skippable obviously make sense and start a movie so this is where you can put a splash screen at the beginning of your games when the game loads up it will play this movie here i do have separate videos going over that if you'd like to see that in more detail next the important one is packaging and this is where we're going to really be doing the majority of the work so this has changed a little bit since the last time i made the video hence why i'm doing it again so you don't really need to change any of this you can obviously read it if you want but you don't need to change it if we go under project here this is the important one the build if project has code or running a locally built editor always never if running look at build editor change that to what you want that just again means if it's going to build i personally just leave it as it is as default and that's fine the build configuration you can have is either development test or shipping now since i last did this one the test is actually new and also we've got debug sorry i missed that one the debug build configuration is what you'd think it is it's for you to be able to debug the game so you can build it like this and that way you can actually see what the bugs are see what changes you made in your code if you input a correct debug console command and all the stuff like that development is good if let's say you haven't completely finished your game yet so if it's still not fully finished it's still obviously in development phase that's what you go for and if you want to be able to use console commands in your game whether that's a player using them or you're using them in the code it will have to be development because in shipping which i'm going to soon the console command is disabled so you can no longer use it and that's both the player and the code the test configuration is the shipping configuration but with some console commands and stats so if it's not quite development but you still want the content command i'd recommend going for test and shipping is the one that's most commonly used with games that's when everything is done you no longer want the command everything is fully fleshed out so there still could be an early access version of the game but what you have so far is completely built so you'd want it to be shipping that's what i'm going to go with because again that is the most common one and it's really the best one as well that you'd want to use now the build target what you can do is you can either leave it empty right editor client or server and that will give you different options similar to the build configuration so leaving it as empty we'll just do it in a normal standalone version of the project editor allows you to obviously see all the code changes reflected which is good for the debugging configuration the client is obviously a multiplayer game where you're the client and server is multiplayer as the server now i believe this is just for testing though so you will not need to do that if you are actually creating a multiplayer game because obviously then you need to ship out different versions of the game to different people so really you don't need to worry about that the station directory is obviously the directory to which the package project will be copied so if you want to be somewhere different just put that in there by clicking these three dots there full rebuild is just if you want to rebuild the game as you're packaging it which we've already done we've already built it again i prefer to build it before packaging just in case there's any areas you already have it sorted before you try to package for distribution it's again the shipping thing we did up here so obviously if we hover over it it will say a distribution build will be created and the shipping configuration will be used if disabled at development will be created so again it's essentially just a build configuration here so i'm going to tick for distribution include debug files again it's important if you're doing debug so if that's what you're going for if this is just to debug the game obviously include those files then there's nothing really else important on the main selections we need to do here however under packaging if we press this little arrow here to show the advanced we do want to change some stuff here so you've got the languages you've got loads of different options but the main one we're going for is we're going to cook only maps take that and that will just make it a lot quicker and more efficient especially for the lighting and all that great stuff so that'll be quicker packaging times quicker loading times and all that great stuff which you'd want and if you do click that what you want to do is you want to make sure you do actually include them in the list of maps to include in a package build so if we hit the plus or element there press the three dots and we can now locate this map so it should already take you to your projects folder and then just locate the map so for me that's third person vp maps third person example map and you want to do the dot umap not the dot you asset so don't do the build data do the map and you can see we now have the map included there again i obviously only have one map to include but just do all the ones which you have and if you also have movies you want to make sure you include them in the specific movies to package otherwise they won't be in the game and that's the main things we need to do here next we'll go down to supported platforms and you can tick which platform you want this to be on so i don't want to be on all platforms i only want it to be on windows and i'm just going to go with windows 64 bit not 32. you can obviously choose which ones you'd prefer to use again previously when i did this video it was just windows not 3264. so they've now changed it so i'm just going with 64-bit then the target hardware is obviously this is kind of what you use when you first created the project i still want it to be desktop console and i still want to be maximum quality next we're going to go scroll all the way down until we see platforms and you can just change the settings for the platforms which you chose so you can do android ios all this stuff but i only chose windows so you can change these settings in here now i don't actually have anything i do want to change the main thing in here which you might want is just the splash screen and the icon so the splash screen is different to what i mentioned earlier when i mentioned earlier i meant the video which plays up this is the kind of the loading thing which comes up so you'll notice it especially when you start up the editor so you can change this to custom icons here and especially the game icon too so that will appear at the bottom as you can see here all these different icons would be different for this game icon so i do have a separate video going over creating these perfectly and importing them in and using them and all that great stuff so if you want to watch that i'll leave a link to it in the description down below and that is all you need to do for the settings so you can obviously read through all these if you want but those are the main ones which you're going to need to change so we'll close this and now we'll actually export it so i'm just going to save my project first then go to file package project you'll notice the exclamation mark here because it's not targeted towards those platforms so we're going to go to windows 64 bit and we're just going to package it now you can see this is where we're going to choose to package it i'm just going to do it here this is just the main folder for my project so i'm going to select folder and it is now packaging now as with the building this will take a while especially on the first run again dependent on the project size and your computer but it always takes a lot longer on the first go through so in one of my previous game jam games i made which obviously it's a game jam so it's fairly small however it took about 10 minutes to package the first time round then every time after that i packaged it it always did it within less than a minute as you can see there it is just finished i did not cut there but again it takes a lot longer the first time then every time after that it's a lot lot quicker so don't worry if it takes ages the next time it shouldn't take as long but you'll notice we've now exported it so if i were to open this up you should see we now have a package game working perfectly so let me just find this and open it up so you'll notice here i'm in my project folder and you'll see we now have windows no editor and packaging.exe obviously i didn't change the name of it i didn't change the icon but that is where it would be for you so if we open this up straight away here we should see is we now have our game which we can load up as an actual game instead of an engine project here we are it's loaded up and you can see this is what we just had so we've got our boxes over here with the lights no preview text none of that obviously nvidia geforce has come up because it's detected this as an actual game now and so obviously anything you would have done in your game would be in here i haven't changed anything at all other than this little thing over here in the corner but the changes would be here as we now have a properly packaged game and this is in the shipping configuration so if you press the tilt key you'll notice the console command isn't coming up so i think that'll be it for this video if you don't ever want to do what we've done is we've gone over how to package and export your games with all the correct settings how to build it and all that great stuff so sorry if this is a bit of a lengthy video it is a very quick and easy topic to go over however i did want to just go over in full detail and kind of explain all the different things which can which you can change especially for the most efficient way to do this so thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you found it helpful and if you did make sure to like subscribe down below so thanks so much for watching and i'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Matt Aspland

Views: 51,981

Keywords: ue4, unreal engine 4, unreal engine, tutorial, ue4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, how to make a game, how to, 3d modelling, blender, unity, games design, graphic designer, package, packaging, export, exporting, settings, project, change, changing, perfect, build, building, lighting, failed, failing, error, game, jam, quick, quickly, best, way, efficient, efficiently, how to package game, ue4 package, how to export, how to package, export ue4, ue4 export, package game ue4, export game ue4, u4 export

Id: O2PKihXmejw

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022