Create an Installer for your Game
Objective: Distribute your game with ease
Problem: Distributing your game can be as simple as zipping up the build folder and making it available for your playtesters but they will need to extract the files, move it somewhere they like, create a shortcut, or manually at it to the Start menu and when done, remove from Start Menu and folder. That doesn’t sound like a good user experience.
In this article, we will package our game into a standalone installer that will allow the user to specify where they want to install the game, build a Desktop icon and give the ability to uninstall the game. Unity will not do this for us, we need third-party software to do this and we will use Inno Setup.
Download and Install Innos Setup
Go to https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php and download the setup file and install it.
Launch the application and you will be presented with the Welcome page. Select Create a new script file using the Script Wizard.
On the Welcome page for the wizard, select Next.
Populate the Application Name, version, publisher name, and website and Click Next.
On the Application Folder page, keep the defaults and press Next.
On the next page, we specify which files we want to install. Firstly, browse to your build folder where the game’s exe is.
We now need to also include the data folders. This part gets a little tricky. Before we can add the necessary folders, we need to create a parent folder to hold the original folder otherwise, the installer will only install the files in the folder and not the folder.
When adding the two folders, we need to add the top-level folder that we created earlier.
Click Yes to install the files in the subfolders.
Add the two folders and press Next.
Now we can add two other files. Click Add files and add the following two files.
On the Application File Association page, press Next.
On the Application Shortcuts page, press Next.
On the Application Documentation page, press Next.
On the Setup Install Mode page, press Next.
On the Setup Languages page, press Next.
On the Compiler Settings, create an Installer folder where you want to build the installer. Give the installer a name and where you want to save the script file. You can make any changes to the script file or save it and the application builds out the installer.
Navigate to the installer folder and you now have the installer executable file.
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