I’m struggling at the moment due to some bad experiences with Unity, when I first tried Unity I thought it would be impossible to make anything half decent, I spent a lot of time on a game and now I can’t seem to have the game working when it is built and I send to my friends.
After spending £4-500, on assets over the last 5 months and working day and night I’m really at a loss and I wanted this to be a part of trying to make a living. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t have any issues making the game and playing it. I’m so devastated.
I’ve done tech support in the past and done my best to help testers out. My assumption was that when a game is built it would play like the game being made in Unity. But, with reported issues such as not even being able to get to the main menu without crashing I’m completely locked out of how I can even begin to understand why that’s happening, It’s not what I expected.
I really need some advice, I’m completely lost as to what to do.
it’s probably not as big a deal as you think to solve the problems in build. You should try.
couple notes:
you should build early and often
should try to get full game loop playable in build before spending big money on art content
you should not expect to make a living from your first game (or first handful of games)
you should put in lots of debug code that aids you in figuring out what is going wrong in builds - i dunno unity specifics but anybody having a crash should be alble to send a crash log, and it should provide at least some clues as to why there was a crash
I suspect you are probably missing the folder that should be included or something when distributing builds. If it’s an APK it should work on modern ES3+ capable phones, assuming yours is similar.
But most of the problems of the nature of “it works on mine but not others” is usually going to be memory or compatibility for mobiles, or simply leaving out the folder and sending them just the exe if it’s desktop.
Or they aren’t unpacking the zip file fully before running it, that sort of affair.
When I build the game I put in to a folder all the content that was built. I was using option send to compressed folder before, but when it unpacked on my other computer it said there was permission problems. I since used 7zip and that fixed the issue I had. I feel like there’s possibly a build issue, but I can’t figure out how to sort it as Unity builds the game and then it should work to some degree for everyone else as long as they have a pc that can run 3-D games quite well.
It’s super difficult to even begin to troubleshoot why the builds aren’t working out, especially as all game scenes are in there. It should be a non issue. So it’s really difficult as I spent a decent amount of money recommended by Unity on the store and I can barely get games running for people I share with, and that’s really upsetting.
Well the fact is you just find someone you know in real life and go to their place and check it. Sounds to me though, as it’s for PC, that you are packing it wrong or they are unpacking it wrong.
Do you have their hardware details? Particularly the operating system as well.
Do you have the ability for them to send you the crash log or dump?
best place to look it player.log file, if someone would be willing to send you one after crash
there’s also unity analytics, it might help to collect device stats remotely. (maybe it can get log files too, i dont know)
and have seen asset store plugins that can be used to submit bug reports (and it can include log files),
but of course if whole application crashes then that wouldnt work…
As for the packing thing: try making an installer (there’s free tools for that). I know that Windows ZIP can sometimes cause issues, or users just unpacking ZIPs flat (no subdirs, and not necessarily their fault).
Also, be sure to make development builds that you send out and instruct them to send you the logs back.
I suggest you add some form of remote crash log collection. This will let you remotely see stacktrace and logging from your players when they run into issues with your game.
I have released unity games in the past I never had issues like you are having. Sounds like maybe all the poor quality / poorly understood asset store code may be messing with you.
First step first… can you build it, package it, copy the package to a different place on your own computer, unpack it, and run the unpacked version? It sounds like you had one issue doing that and fixed it, but I’m unclear on whether you made it fully work locally. If it doesn’t work for you it won’t work for anyone else, and doing it on your own computer is the fastest way to test.
Next, you mentioned having another computer you were testing on (great!), get it working there, too.
Only after I have something working on more than one machine of my own will I send it to anyone else. I still do that check after 20 years making software.
Other issues I’ve had:
Windows threat detection showing a warning. You may well need to tell users how to bypass the warning, which looks different on different versions of Windows.
The UI is set up for a specific screen resolution, and players have a different screen resolution.
People don’t know how to unzip and run it. This will depend a lot on your target audience.
It is in fact working, but players don’t know how to make it go.