Exciting news and a personal achievement unlocked!

I released my Project Optimise Tool onto the FAB Unreal Engine marketplace: CHECK IT OUT HERE

What is the tool?

If you don’t know anything about it, it is something I have been working on over the last couple of years which I would summarise as:

A tool which helps you identify potential problems and uncover optimisation opportunities in your Unreal Engine 5 projects.

It’s split into 3 main chunks of functionality:

OPTIMISATIONS: Search for 19 different types of optimisations (Spread across 8 asset types)
BUGS: Search for 10 different types of bugs (Spread across 7 asset types)
NAMING CHECKS: Check for assets not using consistent naming conventions (Define your own prefixes)

In my previous blog post, I wrote about releasing the tool onto my itch and also a little about its 3 main stages of development over the last couple of years. You can read about that HERE.

I thought in this blog post I’d write about my experience of actually releasing the tool to the FAB marketplace!

Why The FAB Marketplace

I’d been thinking about releasing the tool to the Unreal Engine marketplace for a while, but held off for a couple of reasons:

Earlier versions of the tool were more crude and unstable (I didn’t feel comfortable selling something of that quality)
It needed more testing and feedback from people other than myself and my buddies
I do a lot of stuff and I hadn’t put a priority on the tool, so it just fell into being a backburner idea

However early in the summer of 2024, I had been using the tool more on my own projects and seeing its usefulness firsthand again. This kickstarted me to make the time to add some needed improvements and make it solid. As I said in my previous blog post, I had an older version of the tool, free on my itch.io page. I didn’t realise it when I first put it up, but this effectively became a free early-access version of the tool. The cool thing about this was that over the year it was up, I got feedback from people I didn’t know on things that could improve it.

I had been making good progress on the tool and it was feeling a lot more solid. Coincidently around the same time, Unreal Engine announced that they were launching their new store called: FAB. They were going to discontinue the original Unreal Engine marketplace and move all products over to the new store. This felt like perfect timing and a sign that I should get the tool up onto this new marketplace, so I thought let’s go!

I went through the process of setting up a store page and working out what I would need to do to pass the submission process. I still wanted to release on other platforms but FAB seemed like the most obvious and relevant place for Unreal Engine content.

WORKING ON THE TOOL

While setting up my FAB account and store page, I continued working on improving the tool and trying to make sure I met the guideline requirements for a submission. As it’s only me working on the tool, I like to plan out what I need to do by creating simple checklists. For this, I use a program called Sublime. I think of it like a more sturdy notepad which has extra functionality. The main reason I like it is because it has a nice dark mode and it constantly saves. So if your PCs crashes you don’t lose anything. Below you can see an example of one of my smaller checklists for when I was getting closer to launch.

Overall experience

I looked into the FAB marketplace before actually signing up etc and I found some sellers seemed unhappy with the new FAB store experience (nobody really likes change). As I have no experience with selling on the Unreal marketplace previously I can’t really comment on that. My personal experience was pretty good though. I think the main thing I had an issue with was that when I was doing it (Nov 2024) the marketplace was split between the old system and transitioning to the new FAB system. This meant things felt a bit split between the two different systems. Something I’m sure they will phase out over time.

USefull links for getting started

If you want to sell your own products on the FAB store, here are a few links which I think you will find useful:

What was the process like to get accepted?

I had a pretty smooth experience in submitting my tool to the marketplace. I set up my store page, added separate versions of the tool for the different engine versions and then hit the submit button. Overall it took around a week and a half to get the store page setup and my tool accepted through the submission process.

It generally took around 24 hours to get a response to a submission. The main issues I encountered with my own product submissions were:

Missing Naming Conventions - I wasn’t using A_ for audio files (wavs). This is kind of funny because my tool has a mode to help you find bad naming conventions, I should have run it on itself.
File Included That Was Not In Use Anywhere - I had a wav file included in the project which I was no longer using and so could be deleted.
Store Page Screenshot Inconsistencies - Some of the store page screenshots showed the file pathing to the plugin version of the tool. However, the FAB marketplace is a content folder version of the tool. So I just needed to upload the correct images.
Issues With My Example Map - My example map doesn’t contain asset examples, instead contains a UI which runs when you play the map and explains step-by-step how to use the tool. I updated these explainer slides to be more detailed and also added a little note to the FAB team when re-submitting the tool. Something along the lines of: I can’t include example assets with problems as I would have to include bad/broken assets to my submission but the tool can be tested by adding the starter content to the project and running the different searches on that.

4th Times The Charm

Overall it took me 4 attempts to get accepted but I finally got an email confirming that the tool had successfully passed! If I were to apply again with a new product I think I would be able to get through with fewer attempts, now that I know the whole process better.

When you submit for review there are 2 types of submission you can choose from:

Auto Publish - The changes will be pushed directly to the store when accepted
Manual Publish - You need to manually trigger the store update after being accepted

For this first launch, I chose to manually trigger the update, so I could be there to test and make sure everything was working correctly.

LAUNCH ISSUES

When my tool first launched, I encountered a couple of ‘Issues’ which got my heart beating a bit faster ha. I think they would be useful for you to know about in advance of launching your own products:

1) I Couldn’t See My Tool On The FAB Store: - Even though the backend seller portal said that my product was live, I wasn’t able to see or access it even when searching its name directly in the search bar. I thought this might be a browser caching issue so tried searching on different devices but this was the same everywhere. I contacted support but it actually resolved after a couple of hours. I’m guessing that even though it was live it can take a while to update on the store (likely because it was my first submission as well).

2) I Couldn't See The Tool In My Epic Games Launcher Library: - I had this problem at the same time as the one above. Even though it said I owned the tool it didn’t show up in the launcher so I couldn’t add it to my project. I thought this was a bad one as people might buy it and then not actually be able to use it. I mentioned this at the same time in the email to support and they let me know this was a known problem that they were working on, but it should only affect me as the owner of the product.

POST Launch updates

I’ve updated the store page/product a couple of times since I first launched it and it’s been a very simple process. I’ve used the auto-publish setting meaning that as soon as it gets accepted it goes live. Here are the updates I have done so far:

Store Page Spelling Mistake - The day after I launched I noticed a spelling mistake on my store page. So I fixed it and submitted it. They accepted the change in less than 24 hours.
Released A UE5.5 Version Of The Tool - Literally a week after I first launched the tool on FAB, Unreal Engine version 5.5 officially launched (came out of preview). So I spent a couple of days porting the tool over and giving it a good test. It seemed good and I submitted the new version and again it got accepted very quickly.

GOING FORWARD

I’m interested to see how the platform develops and from my personal experience so far there are a couple of areas that I think could use some attention (I’m sure Epic are already working away on this stuff):

Discoverability - Discoverability seems a bit tough at the moment as there aren’t as many ways to be highlighted e.g, no new releases section.
Analytics - From a seller’s point of view it be useful to have more analytical information exposed: such as knowing how many people are visiting your page so you can workout click-through rates and stuff like that.

Overall the whole process was pretty simple and easy to do and I am glad I did it! I will continue to update the tool as I add new functionality to it and as new engine versions get released. Go Checkout The Project Optimise Tool Over On FAB HERE

I also have a couple of other ideas for tools that I’d like to explore in the future, so watch this space!