Game Build Types in Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon Lumberyard lets you create different types of game builds for each step in your development process:

Profile mode builds for game developers, designers, and artists

• Provides an optimized build meant for game development.
• Contains performance instrumentation and debugging output.
• Compiles shaders at run time, which may require the remote shader compiler.
• Communicates with Asset Processor and compiles as needed.
• Has logging, crash reporting, metrics, and other troubleshooting features.

Debug mode builds for programmers

• Provides a non-optimized version of the game engine that provides the same features as the profile version.
• Has additional memory checks and tests.
• Provides step-by-step code that programmers can use to debug the execution.

Release mode builds for customer previews, demos, and launches

• Loads assets and data only from .pak files.
• Loads shaders from .pak files for better performance but may compile shaders for DirectX at run time if a shader is not found in the .pak files.
• Can’t use virtual file system (VFS) or remote asset access.
• Doesn’t communicate with Asset Processor because Asset Processor doesn’t ship with the game.
• Removes most logging, instrumentation, profiling, and other measurement metrics.
• Removes all game developer and programmer features such as console usage, cheat commands, command line parsing, and batch mode processing.
• Combines everything into a single executable file instead of DLLs.

To learn how to perform each type of build and about build configuration, see Waf Commands and Options