Unity to Steam – Part 2 – Steamworks

Introduction

For the first stage of our Unity to Steam journey, we will begin with the end : Steam.

Steam is to day the major distribution platform when we talk about PC games. It was then obvious to use it for our game Silicon City.

Steam provide many tools to upload the latest build of your game, DLC, asset… to their system. However, in order to make the process completely automatic, we needed to adapt a little bit the configuration in Steamworks. Let’s see what we have to do here.

Prerequisite

We will not cover here the setup of your Steamworks environment. We consider that you’ve already gone through this process and that your first app is publish (not necessarily publicly).

You must have:

• an app with an appid
• one first depot (the default one)

If you want to discover the Steamworks environment, there are plenty of good resources on the Internet (especially the Valve’s tutorials):

• Steamworks Tutorial #1 – Building Your Content in Steampipe – YouTube
• Getting Started (Steamworks Documentation) (steamgames.com)

Create the branches

Connect to your Steamworks account.

Go through App & Packages > All Applications:

On your application, click on Steamworks Admin on the right:

Note here the App ID of your game, we will use it later. In this example, my game Death Star have the AppID 1000.

.

Go to SteamPipe > Build:

You shoudl see here all the branch available for your game. By default, only the… default branch is created. I will use it as the production branch. Now let’s create the beta and develop one.

Click on Create new app branch

Fill the field with the according information:

• App branch: name of the branch.

Stick carefully to the plan I described at the beginning of this tutorial. The name of the branches will be used by the bash script.

• Description: this text will be visible by the player if the branch is public
• Password: setup a password of you want this branch to be private. We usually set a password for development builds

You should end up with something like this:

Collect info about the Depots

Go to SteamPipe > Depots:

You will see here the depot you already created. Usually we have one for each OS.

Note here the Depot ID of your game, we will use it later. In this example, my game Death Star have 3 depots:
– 1001 for Windows
– 1002 for Linux
– 1003 for MacOS

Conclusion

You gathered and noted the following information:
– AppID (1000 for this example)
– DepotID (x3) (1001 for windows, 1002 for Linux and 1003 for MacOS for this example)