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 Profiles window or the BuildPipeline API to create a build of a Player. For more information, refer to Manage scenes in a build.
Unity has different build modes, as follows:
BuildOptions.Development property to set a development build.Both build modes provide options to build different variations of the Player application for different hardware architectures and scripting backends. You can customize these variations through the build settings, Player settings, or command-line flags.
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.