How to Publish a VR Game to App Lab

let's get our game published to applab if you don't know what app lab is it's actually an offering from meta itself that allows you to publish games kinda like on sidequest and applab games are even on sidequest the only difference is the app lab games can also be downloaded using the Oculus application on your phone kicking things off let's make sure we have the right modules installed here I have this version of unity so I'm going to come over to installs I'm going to click this Cog here add modules you just want to make sure you have the Android build support open jdk and also Android SDK and ndk tools with that let's open up the project and check a few more things I am a bit paranoid so I always like to make sure my controller settings are correct so I go to Project settings come down here I'm using open XR so I like to go over to the Android tab and make sure I'm using open XR come over here and also make sure I have the Oculus touch controller profile a few things you might want to consider when publishing if you come over to player if you come down here we can also customize our icons our res solution and this is the splash screen so if you want to have a virtual splash screen you know kind of like when Mighty coconut loads up when you're playing a mini golf well that's where you put that slash screen right there now a few things we really want to make sure we have since we're publishing specifically to meta slash Oculus we're going to set this to linear I'm going to use open GLE S3 also come down here yes multi-threaded rendering static batching yes yes and then come down here even further I want to make sure that I'm using at least Android 10. set this to automatic and then we want scripting back end to be il2 CPP now I'll point out the version numbers here as well so you can see here I am up to version five doing all these tutorials and so whenever you upload a new thing to the app lab you're gonna have to increase this bundle version code and also this version code that way app lab knows that this is a totally different thing you're uploading it will deny it if you do not update that another thing we need to make sure we're adding is the key store so if we scroll down even further publishing settings this is the keystore manager if you do not have a keystore you can just click here and then go to create new and put it in a dedicated location now you want to make sure you do not lose this so put this in a safe spot I've already made one so I'm not going to create another one but you would just save this to a file that you know you're not going to lose or delete and even consider backing up actually definitely consider backing up once you've done that you would come back here and you would type in this information your Alias I'm a shrimp that's my name type in your password do not forget the password either and then once you've filled out all this information you click add key and that would add it to your project now if you've already created a key store you could just go to browse like I have and I have not put mine in the best location let's see I think I just put it on my desktop tutorial keys and I would select it here and I would edit the project I've already entered my password here and so that will allow me to build every time you build if you do not have your password and keystore it will lock you just as an example I'm going to go ahead and delete these and then later when I go to build it it's not going to work so I'm going to exit out of here one thing we'll actually need to add before we're allowed to submit to the app lab or Oculus applab is the Oculus integration or more specifically we need its capability to create a store Friendly Android manifest so if we go to package manager and if we go over to my assets if you haven't already added this to your assets you can simply go to the website for Unity and go to the asset store and you'll see here that it's free you just add this to your account and hop back here and when you look it up Oculus integration this will pop up and you'll probably have to download it and you click import now I've done this a few times so it probably won't pop up for me but it might ask you to restart Unity Hub and update a few things just click yes yes update and then that should be imported and here's an example see it's asking if it should update one of these plugins I'll say upgrade and then it's going to ask me restart and so you'll see now it's imported I should be good but you know I'm getting this little warning here that I'm gonna check out says go to edit project settings and Oculus for more information I'm gonna check that and you'll see that I have this red one here Oculus must be added to the XR plugin active loader so I'm gonna just click fix and that should fix it you'll notice here they actually have some pretty cool things little warnings that say like you shouldn't do this so my project actually stopped working and it was because I did not use the Oculus XR and I was using unity's open XR as I pointed out at the beginning of the video down here right here open XR so if we come back here and we click fix it should allow us to work again but yeah I don't know why it doesn't let you use unity's openxr it's kind of funny now once that's been fixed if you come over to XR plugin you'll see it just swapped this to Oculus and also on the PC side it switched to Oculus and if we click here yep you can see well it's all Oculus now so there that is and we'll come back here to Oculus and generate our Android manifest and you'll see here an Android manifest file is required and I can click apply here and it should generate it but where is it and you'll see it right here this is the Android manifest and I actually have two of them so with the Android manifest here and set to go let's get to building I'm gonna clear this out make sure I know what new errors come through and if we go to build settings you want to make sure that you're switched over to the Android side again if you're not on it you'll see switch platform when you click here and also just make sure you have all the scenes that you want in your game here if you have a title screen you want to make it sure it's at position at zero so you can drag and drop this there we go there we go uh but right I'm gonna go to build and if we come over here I'm going to go back to build Android builds and then you'll see I have an app lab build folder and I already have one here because I've been doing this tutorial a few times but I'm gonna make a new one yes I'm gonna replace it I don't have my password to fix that if you ever run into that error you just come back over here I think you'll remember the key stores are going to hide under player settings scroll here here's the keystore manager and then I am going to select my key store and put it somewhere not good don't follow that example there we go so I've selected it I'm going to type in my password now all right let's see if it works now and there you go so if you're ever having that password error it just means that you have a key store associated with the project and you need to make sure you're linking up both the keystore and using the right password once our build is complete we'll need the metaquest developer Hub to upload it and I'll make sure to put this in the description below you just download this and once it's installed we will be greeted with this and this is the metaquest developer Hub this is a nice little hub for us to use to test different things with our device see new news but right now we are creating a new app so if we go to app distribution and create new app it's going to tell us to go to the manager developer Center so if we click that it opens up this web page and you might see something like this like create new app it's probably going to ask you to log in if you're not logged in but one thing that's changed is if we click verification you'll see here that actually starting just at the end of last month May 31st we have to verify in one of these ways so simply choose which one best applies to you if you have a business submit the information if you have a driver's license just go with that otherwise it's not going to let us submit a game to applab I'm going to let you do this on your own I'm assuming you know how to fill these kind of things out and I'm going to move on to creating a new app after you've been verified it can take up to two days but once you're done with that you come over here we can type in whatever our name is and then we're going to either choose which one we're applying to I'm going to say applab and we can see here we have quite a few things to look over if you want to have different versions and test things out this is kind of going to be your hub for that if we click here you'll see that it has no build so we can upload a new build and as you can see the web upload has been deprecated so we can no longer upload here the only way we can upload now is through the meta developer Hub so why they deprecated this I don't know but I guess we're going to go back to the hub coming back to the hub if we click on create a new app again it just tells you to go to the manage developer Center so you have to create the app on the website but you can't upload it there you have to upload it here and you'll see that the VR sickness lab is now ready to upload here it seems a little tedious and it is but that's what we're working with so let's go for it now here we have a few options we have production we have RC beta and Alpha if you wanted to just test things out and send invite codes out to testers you could upload to Alpha and my understanding is that won't actually have to go through the process of being reviewed by meta so it could take a few minutes maybe hours but the production one that's the one that will take a few weeks for meta to go over and say okay we'll let your app on applab and well I'm just gonna upload it to production because well why not so to upload I'm just going to click upload here click this and I've already saved the path to my APK file and I'm gonna click open hit next and here gives you a bit of information this is going to be the app ID release options where your APK is coming from you can type in some notes here about this launch hit next we also have a bunch of optional things that we can add here but I'll let you read through those if you'd like and hit upload and now it is uploading all right and once it has successfully uploaded you'll see that it comes up here you might have to refresh this page just by clicking off it but it's not finished yet we're actually not active on the app lab it takes a few weeks again for it to properly upload and let me pop this up and show you what I'm talking about now you'll see that the tests are completed here it might take a few minutes when you first submit it and says it's running some tests here and you'll see submission started so I can hit start submission we can give a name to this so this is not visible to the public this is just our unique submission we can determine if we want to release a prawn approval add a contact email once it's approved and we can also see that it's requiring me to do two different things here I have to confirm my app sharing preferences and also agree to the Oculus developer distribution agreement that should be pretty easy sure why not they can have all that and also this agreement yeah I agree oh let me read it really quick there we go and it looks like the contact email is actually not optional so I'm going to add that and right here it says it's still looking for an attached binary so if we go over to build what it wants us to do is attach a binary so we drop this down and that is the version I want to use for this I'm going to save changes now again before we're allowed to submit it is going to say we need to complete all the app metadata and so that's going to be this little tab over here this is where we put the name the description what specs we have in for it other details publish your website what assets we want so this is what's going to display inside of the game store and then content rating to add a certificate you just put your email address in here and then it'll allow you to add a certificate here I'll give you an example and so if I click add it can I can request a new one and this is just the rating is your game violent is it not violent that's all that is and it'll just take you to a different web page to do that not too hard to do and then finally the pricing so I'm going to let you do all these on your own because I think they're pretty self-explanatory and if we come over to submissions there's one last thing now you'll see here that it says we are using record audio permissions and they don't like that unless we're actually using it in game so if you are using it for the game like say voice recognition to interact with different characters in your game then you would write that explanation here and they might approve it but if your game doesn't use anything like that and you try to submit it's likely gonna get denied so how do we fix this we didn't even add this in here well the reason it's added is because in unity if there's any reference to record audio in any of the scripts then it is automatically going to add that to the Android manifest when it constructs the Android manifest when we build it and you have to be asking yourself well what added it and I'm going to show you so if we come in here oddly enough the thing that adds it is the Oculus integration so if I hit microphone uh let's see you'll see these scripts here that come with the Oculus integration for microphone use and this since it's in the project is going to say well uh you have a microphone we're going to ask for audio permission to record audio so what's the solution if we don't need this but the scripts are here well we could look for every reference in this project from the Oculus integration and delete all the microphone scripts but that seems a little clunky instead I have a better solution that I worked out after many hours and this is what it is we're going to go over to the Android manifest in these Android manifests aren't actually the end product this is not what the Manifest is what the Android manifest is is when you press build it's going to take a hodgepodge of these two things together telling it what to do to build the Manifest and so the one we're looking for here is this one which is called Android manifest not this OVR submission so I'm going to double click here and I'm going to highlight the things that I've added to it to fix this audio problem so inside manifest if you come all the way over here I've added this little bit inside these brackets and you want to make sure that you add this too so this xmlns tools equals well you can read the rest now the reason we need to reference the tools is because we need to add another line here uses permissions Android name Android permission record audio and node remove so essentially we're removing the node that asks for the permission to record audio and so when this builds it up it's going to say oh we don't want that and so it will no longer ask for that and that should fix it but due to that we have to to come over here again we're going to go into edit project settings now you have to think we're uploading a another version or have to do another version so I'm going to come over here and I've done this a few times to fix this bug and now I'm on version four up from Two and so if you were incrementing from two you could go three and three or I mean honestly do whatever you want since I'm doing this again for an example I'll do five there we go and then I'm gonna come over here go again to build settings hit build I am going to decide to replace this one cool and so once your newer version is done building again you just come in here you would upload it again it'll take a few minutes like before but then we can hop back over to the website and since version four was the one that worked for me last I know I just built version five but hey we're doing examples here so if I come over here you'll see I have version four which is the one that I finally got working correctly and my bad gotta save it first and come over to submissions you'll see that warning's gone so hooray all I have to do now is add the metadata and I'd be able to submit it and that is it I know it was a long video but I hope you learned a lot and liking and subscribing is the best way to support me at this time and I'll see you in the next one bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Fist Full of Shrimp

Views: 42,641

Keywords: xr interaction toolkit, unity xr, vr unity optimization, unity vr beginners quest 2, unity xr toolkit App Lab, vr tutorial sidequest, oculus unity App Lab, quest unity vr, vr optimization, unity optimization tips, quest 2, oculus quest 2, Quest 2 Development, unity tutorial, how to publish a vr game to Itch.io, vr publish game App Lab, oculus quest, Unity Itch.io, game development, game development course, vr development unity App Lab, Meta App Lab, Oculus App Lab

Id: X37aYvHn5TE

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023