Packaging gotchas

You have your game running fine in the editor, and you finally come to start testing it on a platform. Life is good and surely you must be ready to deploy; sadly, this is just the point where your next journey begins.

Actually, shipping your title brings to light a whole raft of new challenges. What follows is a list of tips, tricks, and gotchas I've encountered while working with many different teams and events:

Just because it runs in the editor DOES NOT mean it will run on a platform

I've come across too many teams that finish their game in the editor without even trying to run it on at least one target platform. This can cause serious rework later on as you may find that the code will simply not run on some platforms. Another issue that can sometimes rear its head is when you have written code that depends on the editor but you have not placed it in the Editor folder. When you run it in the editor, it will work fine, but on a platform it will either crash...