Developer's Guide to Releasing a Unity Game on Google Play

if you're looking to release your game on the Google Play Store this video will help you do exactly that walk you through each step how to create an account how to configure Unity so it will build correctly so Google will accept it and walk you through the steps to get the internal releases set up so you can set up things like in-app purchases and ads as well as the steps to get the public releases working hey Chris here from Mom Academy here to help you who me yes you make your Game Dev dreams become a reality by helping you get your mobile game out the door and on the Google Play Store this is something I see a lot of posts about where people just are really confused about what do I do in unity what do I do on the Google Play side to get everything working together so if you're feeling lost you're not alone in this video we're going to walk step by step exactly what you need to do to get your mobile game onto the Google Play console and into the Google Play Store there's Chapters at the bottom of all of my videos so you can jump to the section that you're having problems with or you can just watch the whole thing and make sure that you understand the process but I'm not going to do in this video is talk about how to set up Unity ads or Unity in-app purchasing for your store Page what I will be doing is walking you through how to set up your developer account which developer account should you pick build your app correctly for the Google Play console upload a build create releases and eventually publish those releases small disclaimer there is this is how it's working today with the current version which is Unity 2021 and unity 2022 those are the LTS versions right now and the Google Play console as it is at the beginning of 2023. Google recently did an update to the Google Play console maybe like in the last year or two so most likely it's going to stay more or less this way for some time with all that said let's jump into creating our Google account the first thing we have to do is make sure that we have a Google account that's hooked up in the Google Play console you can go to play.google.com console click on go to play console and either sign in with an existing Google account or create one here once you've signed then it's going to ask you which type of account you want to create if you're really serious you should definitely have an organization if you're doing this just for fun as just a hobby project then you can use yourself making an organization requires that you do have a legal business entity which is a little bit more expensive to get set up and has other things like you have to start paying taxes at a federal and state level if you're in the US there's some setup fees and some other stuff that comes with that so that's too much and you don't care about doing all that right now you choose yourself if you already have your own organization then you can just use your organization the difference here is it's going to ask for identifiable information about the organization or personally identifiable information about yourself we're going to pick myself here on the first page is just information about you that's why it's called about you you can fill out as much or as little as you want to do here the next page the key piece is the developer account name this is what's going to be shown whenever you publish your app as who made this game so make sure it's on brand for whatever you want to have as your publisher profile before you can proceed off this page you do have to bear by your email and phone so you're not going to want to provide bogus information here the second to last page is about the apps they're just trying to get a feel for what do you know right now fill this out to the best of your information some of this like the app categories can be changed later once you get into the Google Play console you have to accept some terms so make sure to read those and click I understand then you can click the create account and pay then you have to pay 25 which is a one-time fee for your account which is very different from the apple one which is an annual fee of a hundred dollars so if you later want to create an organization you can transfer the apps that you created from the personal account over to that organizational account and you just have to pay the additional 25 for that second organization account now that we have our developer account how do we get our unity game into the Google Play console so we can publish internal releases to test the end-to-end delivery through the Google Play console step two in our process here is within Unity we want to make sure that we have the Android build Target already selected if you've just created your project and started going to town doing whatever you need to do for your project it's probably on Standalone build not the Android one I hope you already have Android selected but if not in the unity Hub you can go to installs select your current install click add modules and add the Android build support including the Android SDK ndk tools and open jdk if you don't install all of this and let Unity kind of manage all that itself then it can be a little bit painful to get it to use the right tools once that's installed in the unity editor itself you might have to restart it you're going to want to go to your build settings which is file build settings and make sure you select Android and then click switch platform switching platform can take a wild depending on how big your assets folder is how many assets you have in there textures audio files 3D models all that kind of stuff once you've switched platform successfully and you're still on the build settings go ahead and tick this box build app bundle Google play a while ago Google made it where you can't submit apks or they're like not as well supported so you're going to click this to use in what's called an aab and 7 APK and that's what Google Play console is going to want you to submit everything else on the build settings we can leave alone if you did have to switch platforms you're going to want to make sure that all your shaders still compiled properly like run your game and play it and make sure everything still looks okay there's a lot of incompatibilities between the platforms so you need to just make sure everything's working okay and address any of those issues let's jump over the project settings to look at what else you need to do over here and let's start at the bottom with What's called the publishing settings and here you'll see something called keystore manager you're going to click that create a new keystore you can say in dedicated location and place it somewhere that's secure if somebody gets a hold of this they can start publishing basically under your profile it's not good so once you have this keep it secret keep it secure don't share with people who shouldn't have it provide a password confirm the password give an alias I just call it signing usually give that Alias a password as well then provide your first and last name organizational unit organization City locality State Province and country code Unity has some documentation about what each of these means pretty self-explanatory organizational units is kind of the weird one you can put something like game development here or something and then say add key [Music] then under project keystore you can click custom key store and select this one make sure you have the password filled out now every time you build you're going to want to use this keystore and make sure that password is provided if you close a Unity editor and you bring it back up it's going to complain whenever you try to build it you didn't provide the password and you're gonna have to come over here and fill it in again this is different and if you've been building before already on the Android platform and you didn't have custom keystore Unity was using a debug key store and if you built the app only using that using the default one that Unity is going to sign it with Google can tell that that's like a debug keystore and it won't let you publish the build with that that's why we have to make our own custom one here signed by us for the time being you can leave everything else there alone and we can come into the other settings a couple of really important notes Here is under identification you're going to want to start maintaining this version and this bundle version code you cannot submit two builds with the same version and bundle version code if you do it will complain at you and tell you hey this already exists and you have a slow internet connection you're uploading like 200 Meg aab file that's really annoying because it doesn't tell you until after you've uploaded everything just to find out that you forgot to increment this one of my very first videos actually was to automatically increment this build version code so every time you actually do a build it will increment this value so you never run into that problem on any platform I got a link to that video in the description and a card on the screen right now the other two things right here in identification are minimum API level and Target API level right now 33 is the most recent one but depending on when you watch this it'll change in Google's requirements will change as well that you have a minimum API and a Target API level of X now that you're a developer account you'll get emails periodically from them telling you hey you need to upgrade and start targeting Version Y it's usually around the time that the new Android comes out they'll tell you you need to start using that newest version which is for any new updates any existing ones can stay as they are but anytime you push a new update they'll tell you you have to start targeting the newest version if we go down just a little bit from there to configuration most likely your scripting back end was set to Mono that results in faster build times and is a little bit easier for you to work with and debug you cannot submit builds to Google play at least that'll be released that use the mono backend so go ahead change the scripting back end to il-2 CPP make sure to see post plus compiler configuration is released and for the Target architectures arm V7 is really not supported on Google Play anymore you need to build a 64-bit one so go ahead and check that one as well if we scroll down a little bit more and find managed stripping level we want to set that to minimal later on you can play with this to reduce your build size further but it can also introduce some weird issues into your game so I recommend you start with minimal and then work your way up later when you're working on the optimization of your build size that's the last really important thing now go ahead and build your app for this Google bundle you'll make an aab file and it'll probably take longer than you've normally dealt with it building because it's now going to do the il-2 CPP thing which converts your c-sharp code into C plus code basically once that's built we can go back to our Google Play console there's really two things that we want to talk about here one is how do you get this up and running as quickly as possible so you can have things like IAP which require that you have your bundle on the Google Play console so you can start adding in that purchase items requires you have at least one build there already we're gonna do that first and the second one is how can I start working towards a production release because these are a little bit different if you don't already have an app created you can click create app fill out the app name default language as English choose that's a game and select either free or paid if you make it paid you can later change it to be free but if you make it free you cannot later change it to be paid you need to agree to these two declarations and then you can click create app to just get up and running as quickly as possible in the Google Play console go to release testing internal testing create release and then upload your aib get a version like 0.0.1 something like that for the name and the internal testing is exactly that is for internal so they have a little bit less requirements about what you have to do to make this work and go and you can kind of skip some of the safety checks that if you're going to actually put it on the Google Play console that they would normally run once you click review release you'll probably see an error relating to advertising ID or something like that since we're targeting API level 33 we have to at least declare that we are or are not tracking the user if you are you need to make sure you fill out this form properly reporting everything that you do use for tracking if you're not you can just say no since this is the internal track we can skip that and say yeah don't worry about it and proceed you can create that release and now you have a build on the Google Play console you can start working with the IAP setup for now if you want to do a real release usually you want to start with closed testing so you can use the alpha track that exists or you can create your own like closed testing private something like that and you're basically going to follow the exact same process since you've already uploaded an aab we can select it from our library you're going to give it a name give it some release notes click review and then see some errors if this is your first build ever you're going to see probably several errors if you haven't gone through the Google Play console and set up everything already I got like eight online right so I'm going to do let's just skip the first one since that says go to dashboard go to government apps this is not develop on behalf of government say yes if you are done back to closed testing foreign errors remain go to privacy policy if you're not tracking the user or collecting any information about the user you probably can have a very simple privacy policy if you're targeting children under 13 you need to follow the guidelines they gave you here at the user data policy and Google has more information about what should you put into a privacy policy so you do want to make sure that this is really accurate and reflects what you're actually doing we can go to ads and say Yes mine does or doesn't foreign access you need to have some test accounts that Google can use to validate all those areas of your app if you do not have anything restricted where you need like a special account or something like that you just say all functionality is available without special access so this is because Google does play your game and checks out some stuff to make sure it works and that's just not some of my core boat performance so you do need to provide them instructions on how to access those accounts if you have some restricted functionality next up is content rating answer all of these questions honestly my app has none of these right now because it's literally just a menu and they'll give you some kind of rating if you answer those incorrectly they will pull your app off from the Google Play Store so make sure you really review all those and answer them honestly if something changes you can always submit a new questionnaire and update these ratings foreign [Music] target age make sure you answer this honestly who is your Target demographic [Music] you need to specify whether you're a news app or not which most likely for your game you're not [Music] if you track stuff about covid you can say yes I am or no I'm not again most likely for your game you're not next this one about Dallas AP is very important and is relatively new on the Google Play console make sure you read through this and fill it out accurately if you do not collect anything it's very short you just say no and you're done if you have Unity ads probably are collecting some information even if you're not aware of it so make sure you review what this Unity ads collect and make sure you answer this appropriately now that I've submitted all those let's check out the closed testing we'll see almost all these are resolved the rack is a dashboard you'll see that here we have nine of 11 steps complete so let's just go ahead and do those last two here select your app category you're going to want to fill all of this out accurately with real data you're going to want to make sure that you have all that and you fill it out and provide that in these fields same here on the descriptions you're going to want to make sure that you have a real description from a real app name because whatever you display here is going to be exactly what's shown on the Google Play Store you also have to provide some graphics so make sure you spend some time creating all of these things we'll see that one of those sections is completed so we can go down to release my app select countries and regions [Music] down here at the bottom area of countries and regions we can click add countries regions you can select all of them or Target specific countries based on the language they speak and how you've internationalized and added translations for your game if we click edit release now review and release and we'll see that now I can start roll out the closed testing because it's going to be published on the Google Play Store it does get reviewed by Google in some capacity and usually the way I do this is I'll start with something in closed testing where only I have access to download it so I can run this on a couple different phones make sure it's running correctly there's no weird il-2 CPP conversion errors make sure there's no weird random build errors and once I've successfully done that I can promote it into open testing or full production that seemed like it was a lot right there's quite a few steps to get it up and running in the first pass once you have that first release done subsequent releases are much easier it's just a matter of incrementing that build which I have that video about how you can automatically do so you have to ever worry about it create a new release upload that new built aab and click rollout release Google will do a little validation on your aab maybe they'll run it maybe not once that's approved you can start rolling it out to the next tier so once you've set up everything it's really fast to create the next releases it's just the initial setup that there's a lot of steps a lot of room to make errors and a little bit time consuming to do as well you're going to want to take this and iterate and refine your store Page before you do that full release these are just the minimal steps required to get your build up and running on the Google Play console there's a lot more things you can do in here like setting up in-app purchases making sure your ads are properly configured and doing things like app store optimization which sometimes you'll hear people just say ASO or App Store optimization depending on when you're watching this I might have another video with a card on the screen and at the end screen where we'll look at some of those topics but before we get to that end screen make sure you've liked and subscribed to help the channel grow reach more people and add value to more people this new video is posted every tutorial Tuesday and if you want to support this channel you go to patreon.comacademy get your name up here on the screen get a voice shout out starting at the awesome tier speaking of those awesome supporters there's Gerald Anderson Autumn K Matt Parkin and Ivan ruin and Paul Berry and iffy Obelisk and at the tremendous tier there's Bruno bozich and at the phenomenal tier there's Andrew Bowen and Andrew Albright thank you all for your support I am incredibly grateful

Channel: LlamAcademy

Views: 14,232

Keywords: Unity, Tutorial, How to, How to unity, unity how to, llamacademy, llama academy, google play, google play console, android development, video game development, gamedev, gamedevelopment, android app publishing, unity game publishing, publish game unity, publish android game unity, publish unity game to android, publish unity game google play, android, unity google play, unity android, unity android publishing, unity publish to google play

Id: GTaXWgKz0e8

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023