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Game Development vocabulary · Production, QA & Playtesting

Build

Meaning in game development, with examples

/bɪld/nounCore term

In game development, build means: A playable version of the game produced from the project's current code and assets at a certain moment, for example for testing, a demo or a release.

In Turkish: build, derleme, sürüm

How it is used

Teams talk about the latest, nightly, debug, release or broken build. You make, submit or send a build, and to break the build means to cause it to fail. Builds have numbers, so bug reports say which build a problem appeared in.

Example sentences

  1. Can you send the latest build to the publisher before Friday?

  2. Someone broke the build last night, so QA couldn't test anything this morning.

Common collocations

  • latest build
  • nightly build
  • release build
  • break the build
  • make a build
  • bugA mistake in the game that makes it behave in a way it should not, such as a crash, a character falling through the floor or a quest that cannot be finished.
  • QAShort for quality assurance: testing a game to find, document and check bugs before and after release, and also the team that does this work.
  • milestoneAn agreed point in development when specific work must be delivered and reviewed, such as a playable demo, alpha or beta; publishers often pay the studio per milestone.
  • certificationThe process in which a console maker tests a game against its technical rules before allowing it to be released on its platform.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Production, QA & Playtesting

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