Shipping a game

To share your game, you need a binary that runs on the player’s machine without Roc, and you need your builds to stay the same over time. rocco helps with both. Each release gives a bundle for the platform and for each bundled package, and each bundle has a fixed URL. Your game names those URLs in its header, and roc downloads them, so Roc is all you need to build. The binary you build holds the engine and your game together.

If you read this page on GitHub, the bundle URLs and the Roc nightly show as markers in double braces. You can find the values in the notes of the latest release.

The header

This header names every bundle and the Roc nightly:

app [init, launch, loaded, step, view] { cam: "https://github.com/Pixelsprout/rocco-engine/releases/download/v0.6.0/camera-QiJqL4WFPQGUbBCMZ5bzjdLHhgRz7BiUw1ngwxWwHtP.tar.zst", linalg: "https://github.com/Pixelsprout/rocco-engine/releases/download/v0.6.0/linalg-4N62Pw77Sky6ba8RiBfvULjHuAQeQiqHbUor7qSeor7F.tar.zst", mesh: "https://github.com/Pixelsprout/rocco-engine/releases/download/v0.6.0/mesh-5Fmg6uFHADmSBmZxNWDg25VStK6mU7YqhkWEXHjMEGNP.tar.zst", pf: platform "https://github.com/Pixelsprout/rocco-engine/releases/download/v0.6.0/platform-2gvPTPztQ7D8yQsMvRTD4rBKS8VmSwMCPZ432eWzNNtJ.tar.zst", roc: "nightly-2026-10-11-7d256b9", ui: "https://github.com/Pixelsprout/rocco-engine/releases/download/v0.6.0/ui-5msrKWjNRwuEBomX2R1CBFRycCCjrQCPjhEvJXtwWbU6.tar.zst" }

Name only the packages that your game imports:

Each URL ends with a hash of the bundle. Roc checks the hash, so the files behind a URL cannot change. Take all of the URLs from one release. The ui package copies the UI types of the platform, so URLs from two releases can have types that don’t match.

The Roc nightly

Roc changes from one nightly to the next. The roc field of the header names the nightly that the release was built with, so install that nightly and run roc version to check it. To move to a new release, change the nightly and all of the URLs at the same time.

Build for each target

Roc builds for the OS that it runs on, so build your game on each OS that you ship to. rocco does not test a build for one OS made on a different OS.

A few things to watch for:

• On Linux, always give --target. Without it, roc build picks a static musl target, and the platform has no musl target.
• roc build uses --opt=speed by default. The binary is fast, but the build is slower than a roc run.
• If your game imports the mesh package, roc build warns about the dbg in Mesh.resolve. Roc then exits with code 2, but it still writes the binary.
• On Windows, run roc in a shell where LIB is not set.

What to ship

Ship these files together:

• the binary,
• the assets/ folder, next to the binary.

When the player starts the binary by a path, such as ./my-game, it finds assets/ in its own folder.

The binary loads some libraries of the OS when it starts: