16. Final Steps and Finishing Touches

Okay here we go let’s prep this game for distribution.

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Packaging Your Game for Distribution

Everything that we have done so far has been done in the debug mode. This makes things compile faster but also doesn’t use any of the optimizations that would make the game run faster.

Enabling Release Mode and Link-Time Optimization

You can run your game in Release Mode with the command cargo run --release. Try it now.

You can further optimize the game with Link Time Optimization. This can be done within the cargo.toml, with the following code.

[profile.release]
lto = "thin"

The compile will now take longer but the game will run even faster.

Distributing Your Game

Okay so we now want to build a clean version of the current release and then package it for release. cargo clean to get a clean dep tree. Next we want to run cargo build --release

Next we need to add an other directory somewhere else on the system to store the packaged game. Name it something that would look nice once it is zipped. Next we need to copy over the resources folder as a directory into the new folder.

Once you have that all together run the game with the following command while in the directory ./Game_Name

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Making the Dungeon Crawler Your Own

Here are some things that you could work on.

• Add different monsters and items, or change the existing ones.
• Change the theme to “re-skin” the game. You can radically alter the feel
of the game with different tilesets.
• Add a score mechanism.
• Maybe you don’t like turn-based games. Most of the systems can work in
a real-time game, with a bit of tweaking and some timing code similar to
what you used in Flappy Dragon.
• Review the Flappy Dragon bonus content and see if you can add some
animation to your game.
• Look into the Amethyst Engine2 and Bevy3 to provide frameworks for more
advanced games. Both are ECS-based engines and can be used to make
very impressive 2D and 3D games.

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Additional Content

What if that isn’t enough?

• Web Assembly (WASM)—publish your game to the web, playable in a
browser.
• Particle Effects—add some more interactive graphics to your game.
• Saving the Game—learn how to serialize your ECS for easy game saving
and resumption.

Wrap-Up

You did it! YOu have a completed game now let’s make some more changes. I will be working on taking this current game and making it a Roguelike RPG!!! Follow my blog to see what else it takes to make it what I want.