This is a copy and paste of the explanation I wrote for my reddit post about the Build And Play Manager asset I created for the Unity engine to help with multiplayer development. Hope you enjoy!

As of writing this, I am still #1961 in the Unity Asset store queue. So if after reading everything I'm writing here, you feel this asset sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on itch.io: https://goldendonkey.itch.io/build-and-play-manager (There is currently a 50% off sale on!)

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To begin with, I have been using Unity for over 8 years. In this time I have created many different games, and meddled a lot inside of the engine. I have also worked on a few multiplayer games, the most recent being a game called "bugorant" which can also be found on my itch.io page!

One of the major omissions inside of the unity engine is the lack of multiplayer support in general. However, this is often made up significantly by third party assets like photon or mirror. Unfortunately, these only handle the code side and don't really help us in editor, so I decided to take a look at fixing a small part of that.

It's been common place that the recommendations on forums for years now has been to CTRL+B and build and run your game and then run in editor everytime you wanted to test a small little change to the multiplayer in your game. I often found this approach tedious and annoying, having to go into the file explorer and do a bunch of double clicking every time I wanted to test a new build.

Then I realised it could be a very simple solution inside the unity editor to just load the most recent build and run the app!

A little EditorWindow, some extra features like version and resolution management and some general polish later, here we are! I'll be using this tool in every multiplayer game I make inside of Unity for the foreseeable future. The audience for it is a bit of a niche of a niche, but hopefully some of you out there might find some use for it!

I haven't worked on an asset that I have published before this so I'm greatly interested to hear and feedback on what I've created! This was a greatly enjoyable process (apart from dealing with the unity asset store) and I'm definitely interested in working on more assets in the future!