Introduction to building

When you create a build of your application, you create a Player. A Player is the platform-specific runtime application that Unity builds from your project. This is also known as a project build, which is the workflow of building a project from the Unity Editor into an application that runs on a target platform.

Building a Player for a target platform requires the platform-specific build support module for the target platform. You can add build support for a target platform when you install Unity, or add it when you create a Build Profile.

Unity uses the scenes you define in the Build ProfilesA set of customizable configuration settings to use when creating a build for your target platform. More info
See in Glossary window or the BuildPipeline API to create a build of a Player. For more information, refer to Manage scenes in a build.

Build modes

Unity has different build modes, as follows:

• Release build: Includes only what’s necessary to run the application. This is the default build type.
• Development build: Includes the ProfilerA window that helps you to optimize your game. It shows how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent rendering, animating, or in your game logic. More info
  See in Glossary and assertions by default. To include additional diagnostics or debug symbols, select the appropriate managed code variant. You can enable development builds in the Build Profiles window, which allows you to set further options such as deep profiling support and script debugging. You can also use the BuildOptions.Development property to set a development build.

Once you select a build mode, you can select options to build different variations of the Player application for different hardware architectures and scripting backendsA framework that powers scripting in Unity. Unity supports three different scripting backends depending on target platform: Mono, .NET and IL2CPP. Universal Windows Platform, however, supports only two: .NET and IL2CPP. More info
See in Glossary. You can also build with different managed code variants, to include different levels of additional code paths or metadata to support debugging and profiling.

You can customize these variations through the build settings, Player settingsSettings that let you set various player-specific options for the final game built by Unity. More info
See in Glossary, or command-line flags. For more information on managed code variants, refer to Adding diagnostics to C# code.

Incremental build pipeline

Unity uses an incremental build pipeline that only rebuilds the parts of your application that have changed since the last build, which helps speed up development iteration time. This build process includes build steps such as content building, code compilation, data compression, and signing.

By default, Unity uses the incremental build pipeline for both development and release builds. You can use the options in the Build Profiles window, or use the BuildOptions.CleanBuildCache API to create a non-incremental build, also known as a clean build. For more information, refer to Creating clean builds.

Note: AssetBundles don’t use the incremental build pipeline and have separate mechanisms for caching and reusing the results from previous builds. For more information, refer to Build assets into an AssetBundle.

Additional resources

• Build Profiles
• Create a Build Profile
• Build Profiles window reference
• Player settings
• Create a clean build