Before you ship your first game, most devs underestimate how much work is involved in shipping. Instead of spending hundreds of hours getting ready for release in a panic and delaying for months, it’s best if you plan from the beginning. This presentation covers a wide range of topics you might not know about releasing a game.

1. Things you ought to know
if you be shippin’ games
A talk by @AlexRoseGames

2. So you wanna ship a game?
• Even if you aren’t, you should want to!
• Ship at least one of your games
• Even if it’s just itch.io
• But if it’s Steam/console, you’re going to need
to know some things

3. Rule #1: Descope
• I am criminally bad at this personally
• You can’t implement everything you want to,
or you will spend your whole life
Dwarf Fortress version 0.44!!!

4. I need you to keep in mind
• Even at the end of this talk once you
understand everything in front of you, you
should STILL aim to cut 25-50% of your
planned features

5. The 90 90 rule
• The first 90% of development is pretty fun
• The second 90% is not
Assume that “90% done” is actually 50% done

6. What’s the first 90%?
• Your core mechanics
• Your world/levels
• Your bosses
• Your dialogue
• All major systems implemented
• All graphics and audio complete
• basically a NES game

7. The second 90%
• All your menus. (dev tools)
• Leaderboards/Achievements
• Rigorous save + load system
• Localisation
• Metadata
• Porting
• Remappable controls
• Controller–Player sync
• Complying with TRCs
• Fixing your bug list
• Advanced audio
• Profiling
• PEGI/ESRB

8. okay so a **** tonne of stuff, great
• yeah really
• there
• is
• a
• ****
• tonne
• of
• stuff

9. What can I do about this?
There are two real routes you can take:
A. Massively, massively, massively descope and
cross that bridge when you come to it
B. Prepare yourself IMMEDIATELY. Pretend you
are already making a console game. Because
you are!

10. FIRST OF ALL
• GET ACCESS TO DEVNET OR XBOX DEVELOPER
PORTAL ASAP
• READ. THE. TRC. LIST.
• IT SOUNDS BORING
• BUT YOU NEED. TO READ. THE TRCS.

11. there are literally hundreds of them
• e.g. your UI can only be within the middle 90%
of the screen

12. you will see this everywhere

13. you need to do it too

14. this is just tiny TRC one of many

15. That one was from page 30
There are over 100 pages
you need to actually read every page of this
document and figure out which ones matter to
you
(luckily if you aren’t making
a VR or online game,
75% of them are irrelevant)

16. okay so let’s knock out some systems
• Save system! You need one anyway, stop
using.. Playerprefs or whatever you use.
Make an actual save system that writes all your
variables to a byte array and then saves that.
A byte array will work on any platform. you can
also make super small save files this way.

17. LOCALISATION
• GO HOME AND START YOUR LOC SYSTEM TODAY!
• Stop adding text into the game as strings
• make a system based on ID #s
• keep your localisation in a spreadsheet
• read it into a bunch of dictionaries for each
language
• switch the dictionary out

18. OH YOU AREN’T DONE WITH
LOCALISATION
• очевидно, существует много языков
• you need your system to work with different
fonts and switch them out
• every string in your game needs a description
for translators, and a max character count
• e.g. in Grandia HD Collection…

19. Miss

20. localisation never ends
• there are 71 kana
• there are 3,000 common hanzi
• there are 11,172 hangeul permutations
• there are 25,000 possible hanzi
• arabic is written from right to left and you will
have to redo everything
• YOU ALSO NEED TO LICENSE YOUR FONT$$$$

21. you need achievements etc.
• these are actually quite easy to add at the
end, but it helps to start tracking things early
• add an achievement class that is responsible
for these things asap

22. Input
• This is really engine specific. For those of you
who use Unity: buy Rewired and use it now
• It is compatible out of the box, it will handle
“player -> controller” matching
Make your game recognise
what controller is plugged in
and change the buttons on
screen

23. Make stuff right first time
When you’re prototyping to get funding, it’s
okay to have hacky menus
• Once you are working full time on your game,
stop using dev shortcuts, add everything into
the game
• If something is slow and tedious to do without
dev shortcuts, you need to make it easier

24. Rating
• You also need to record 30 minute demos and
submit them to get your game rated. Do this
stuff as soon as your “first 90%” is done!
• For different regions there are different
authorities
• ESRB, PEGI, CERO. These can get expensive!
• IARC for digital

25. btw it doesn’t hurt to learn git
• really doesn’t tho
• I thought it did
• branch per platform
(also doesn’t hurt to learn regex if you want to
do localisation, probably will speed things up a
lot and it only takes a day with regex
crosswords)

26. your audio person hates your engine
• they are going to want you to use FMOD or
Wwise
• weigh up the pricing
• these are external plugins so they will break
sometimes. work with your audio person
ASAP on this

27. You can save this stuff for later
• porting (fix shaders, make that shit run)
• profiling (get rid of your major bottlenecks)
• metadata (oooh boy)
• remapping
• now instead of 90% and 90%, you have the
first 140% and the second 40%.
• you won’t underestimate your work load so
much

28. BUGS
• your buglist may start at 20
bugs
• once you patch them it will
be at 100
• once you patch them it will
be at 500
• eventually you will leave
some bugs in because no
one cares and you have to
ship

29. One last thing
• Update
• your
• engine
• every
• revision
• (until right before launch)
• Platform holders FORCE you to, so don’t wait 10
revisions and have to fix 300 bugs 3 months
before launch

32. I have been Alex Rose
Ask me anything
@AlexRoseGames