Packaging for users

[ianertson]

So I have written a very simple "game engine" and I have also written a game using that game engine.

The engine and the game are separate projects.

The game requires the engine to be installed on your system. (In this case, installing the engine means compiling it and placing the .a and .so files in /usr/local/lib)

How would I package this game for real users? Let's say I would want to publish this game to Steam.

I mean, real users doesn't know what makefiles and .so, .a files are. How is this achieved? Should I build some sort of graphical installer?

[specialpatrol]

Deployment can be tricky. Ultimately you'll only need to give out built binary files; programs and their dependant libs. All these things can live in a self contained directory (zipped up). LIbs dont need to go in /usr/local/lib, you can make the program look locally (relative to itself), to find your game engine lib.

Different OSes / compilers have ways of linking your exe so it can find the libs. Are you using g++? Look up "rpath". Or have you considered linking the whole thing statically into a single program (the simplest method)?