Game Development and Linux aren’t something you’d hear in the same sentence historically, but it is becoming increasingly common. More games offer Linux support, as does Steam as a platform, and using Linux as an operating system for development is becoming the preference of most developers worldwide.
The Unity and Unreal engines have options to recompile your games for Linux compatibility as well as a Linux Editor. The Unity engine is much easier to deploy than the Unreal engine so we will cover that in this article, but for Unreal fans you can use this link to see how to deploy Unreal on a Linux distro.
Unity offers an Editor specifically designed for Linux, using cutting-edge technology known as Universal Base Images (UBI). We can easily set it up on almost any Linux distribution including Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is configured to run using AppImage technologies (also UBI).
This is why we recommend using the Unity Engine, because of the nature of UBI you can install it on practically any Linux or Unix-like system – including Macs. It is also far more stable and secure because the UBI install is ‘sandboxed’.
As a Red Hat Business Partner we are of course a big fan of their portfolio and the potential it brings to developers large and small. We work closely with Ansible to design the most efficient, scalable and secure ways to run our client’s estates, and we get see a lot of nifty ways to deploy apps at scale such as with AppImage.
With increasingly disparate workforces the industry needs to be able to create development environments where the compute is offloaded to a different system from the client device. Unity’s Linux Editor and the Unity Build Server (on-prem or fully Cloud) are excellent tools to create a scalable, remotely accessible infrastructure and goes hand-in-hand with Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s reputation for stability and its unparalleled 10-year life cycle.
Typically we would set out how to get started with our own documentation however as both Unity and Unreal are moving so quickly to develop their offering in the Linux space anything we write would shortly become redundant after publishing.
Get in touch and we will be more than happy to run through the most current steps necessary to set up your studio to do Game Development on Linux, and run through the benefits of the long-term stability your studio can enjoy in doing so.
