Throughout this book, you’ve learned how to program various games within Unity, but the crucial last step has been missing so far: deploying those games to players. Until a game is playable outside the Unity editor, it’s of little interest to anyone other than the developer. Unity shines at this last step, with the ability to build applications for a huge variety of gaming platforms. This final chapter covers how to build games for these various platforms.
When I speak of “building” for a platform, I’m referring to generating an application package that will run on that platform. On each platform (Windows, iOS, and so on), the exact form of a built application differs, but once the executable has been generated, that app package can be played without Unity and can be distributed to players. A single Unity project can be deployed to any platform without needing to be redone for each one.