Publishing a Unity Game to Google Play Market in 2021

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back in this video we're going to show you how to publish a unity game to google play those of you who are not familiar with this channel and are here specifically for what the video title says publishing you can navigate directly to the respective part of the video using the progress bar below if you've been hanging out with us for a while though and are familiar with the contents on this channel this video might seem a bit random unity publishing or just made a tetris game in java didn't we if that's what you think we don't blame you and before we get to the main part of this video let me explain what's going on here game making in general and game making with unity in particular has always been in the plan for this channel and after completing the tetris video series we started thinking about the best way to transition to unity initially we thought we'd make a new video series on something simple like a puzzle or a bowling game but eventually we decided to show you how to make a mobile game in unity not too complex but good enough to get accepted to apple's app store and google play now that we've finished making the game and had it accepted to the stores we're going to start working on the video series to show you how to make that game in the same manner as we showed you how to make the tetris game you can check out the game that we made the links are in the video description and if you get interested in learning how to make that game stay tuned alright so here's the process of publishing a unity mobile game to google play to publish your game we'll have to do the following 1. create a google account and google play developer account 2. create a game listing in google play console 3. build a game in unity and upload it to google play for complete app submission and submit our game for review and 5 publish the game to play market alright so first of all we need to create a regular google account if you already have one you can skip this step but i do recommend creating a separate account for publishing your games just to keep your professional life separate from your personal life but it's up to you so here we need to fill out the registration form i'm going to enter some random info because i'm not going to use this account for the actual publishing i already have a developer account and i'm creating this one just to show you the process once we're done creating our google account we go to google play console which is the system that we will use to actually publish our game make sure you sign in with a google account you just created when you open play console for the first time google will ask you to create a new developer account by providing some more info and then hitting create account and pay which will take you to the payment page where you will be asked to pay a 25 registration fee it's a one-time payment which is quite inexpensive well relative of course apple for example charges 99 a year and step one complete all right once we're done with payment we get to the actual console i currently have one app here ready for publishing and we will publish this app together in this video in other words if you have just created your developer account you will not have any apps here so don't worry if your list of apps is empty here at the top of the page we can see a notice that google is taking more time than usual to review app submissions we'll get back to this later and now let's hit this create app button to create a new app listing here we fill out the form which is thankfully not too long for the app name i'm going to go with publishing test just because i'm not going to publish this one but do make sure you provide accurate info because this is what will be displayed in the play market here i'm going to leave the default language at english specify that my app is a game and that is a free game if you're planning to charge money for your app make sure you select paid instead here we confirm and accept and hit create app which takes us to the dashboard page of our app where we can do a lot of stuff such as testing setting up releasing the app etc before we do anything here though let's go to the publishing overview page or we can turn on the so-called managed publishing which allows us to manually release our app as opposed to google publishing it automatically you don't have to do that but it's a nice feature that for some reason is not available by default so in case you'd like to have the freedom to decide when exactly your app goes live this is what you need to do to use managed publishing we need to publish our app to a release track very helpful google thank you what is a release track and how to use it well first let's go back to the dashboard and scroll down to release your app section so these are the release tracks and currently all of them are locked because we need to complete the initial setup tasks first but before we do that let me show you how to set up testing for your app specifically close the testing that kind of makes it easier to distribute your app among a closed group of testers aka your friends and friends of friends on the left we can see three options for testing open testing closed testing and internal testing let's hit closed testing here we already have a testing track called alphabet we also can create a new track by clicking this button now if you're getting overwhelmed here i don't blame you i personally have a feeling that something about google's publishing system is just not right but trust me it's way less complicated than apple's alright let's create a new closed testing track and name it something now to the track we can add a release specify the countries and regions in which the release will be available god knows why we need to do that for a closed test and track though and invite testers let's start off with the easiest part countries and regions here we hit add country slash regions and if you have no intention to hand pick them you can just select all by checking this box and clicking add country slash regions all right so now we will assign testers which we can do by creating an email list and adding emails to it i already have a list so i'm going to create a fake one just to show you how to do that something like this all right so we're pretty much done here the rest is optional so we can hit save changes unless you want to provide a feedback url or email address and now let's go to the main part which is creating a release first of all we need to specify who's going to handle app signing the easiest way especially if you're not planning to distribute your apps outside of google play is to let google do that for you and that's what we're going to do by clicking this continue button next we need to provide a name for a release and release notes and now we need to upload our game and add the bold to this release but before we switch to unity to build our game let's save the changes here and step two complete all right so now we're going to build a game in unity to do that we go file build settings here make sure you have android selected as your target platform you should see this unity icon right next to android if that's not the case click on android to see the caption on this button change to switch platform and click it once you're done with that go to player settings here we fill out the company name [Music] app name and version i'm going to leave the version at 1.0 we also need to set the app icon which should be in your project next we go to the other settings and scroll down to the identification section here we can specify the bundle version code ever build your upload must have a unique bundle version code in other words next time you make a build you should increment the version code from 1 to 2 then to 3 and so on note that the version and bundle version code are not the same and do not have to be identical version is what's shown to users and you can have multiple builds of the same version while version code is used for internal purposes and must be unique next we need to enable the arm 64 architecture but we can't do that with mono selected as a script and back end so we change it to il2 cpp and now we can check arm 64. then we scroll down to the publishing settings or we need to set the signing key keys are placed in key stores meaning to a key store you can add multiple keys and you can have different keys for different projects stored in the same key store since this is the first build that we upload to google play we create a new key by pressing this key store manager button and choosing to create a new key store that will be stored anywhere which allows us to specify the location in our computer you can choose any location i'm going to choose the builds folder inside the unity project folder in the builds folder i already have another folder named android and this will be the location for my key so i hit save now that you will need this key to upload new builds to the same release so make sure you don't delete it next we need to set a password for the keystore name our key i'm going to give it a name that matches the name of the google play listing and after setting a password for the key itself we hit add key unity will ask whether we want to use the key we've just created and we hit yes which automatically fills out these fields lastly we need to minify our build by checking release here this tells unity to generate a file that we'll need to upload to google play together with a build all right now we can close the project settings window and in the build settings window we check build app bundle currently google accepts both apks and app bundles but this is going to change from august 2021 new apps will have to be uploaded in app bundles we also need unity to generate a symbols.zip that we will upload together with the app bundle now make sure you have development build unchecked press build choose the folder for the build i'm going to choose the folder that already contains the sign-in key and hit save and when the building process is complete unity will open the folder that we chose to build too the folder we can see the key and three other files one of them is the app bundle whose name ends in aab another file is the symbols.zip that we ask tuned to create and lastly we have a mapping file that we got by minifying our build and these are the files that we will upload to google play but before we do that i'd like to tell you that step 3 complete alright let's go back to play console and drag the dot aab file here to upload it and when the uploading is done we will see our build info here now before we upload the remaining two files let's hit save just in case all right to upload the remaining files we click this three dot button and choose which file we want to upload let's start with a retrace mapping file and drag the dxt file here now let's do the same for the zip file which is not going to work because the file is too big to fix this let's open the folder that contains the file and unzip it on the mac you just double click on the file on windows you right click on the zip file and choose extract all when unzipping is complete we will see a folder that matches the name of the zip file let's open it what we're going to do is we're going to zip the contents of the folder again to reduce its size to do that we select both folders here then right click on them and on a mac we choose compress on windows we go send to and choose compressed folder and when the zipping is done we get a new zip file whose size is less than one third of the original file this happens because unity doesn't really compress the content so we have to do it manually next what we need to do is we need to give the resultant zip file the name of the original zip file but before we're allowed to do that we need to rename the original file and now we can upload the new zip file and when it's done we hit save to see the review release button become active so let's click it to see that we now have two errors this happens because there is more to do to make our game available for testing so let's go to dashboard and set up our app by specifying its access restrictions whether it contains ads and its age rating please note that this is not a universal instruction and you should make sure you provide information specific to your app then we specify the target audience for the game here to save myself some extra work adding a privacy policy i'm just gonna go with 13 plus here if you answer yes your game might get a not designed for children label on google play and if you answer no and google disagrees with you you won't be able to update your app make sure you give this question a thought before answering and i'm going to go with no since i'm not going to publish this one anyway and we hit save here some more questions that we should give an accurate answer to and some more info to provide we already specified that our app is a game now we need to specify its category since the game i'm going to publish is an 8-ball pool game i'm going to go with the sports category to optimize your store listing you can add additional tags that describe your app but i'm going to skip it here lastly we enter our email address that will be displayed in the store listing and hit save now it's time to complete our store listing by providing a short description a full description an app icon a feature graphic and screenshots here even though the 7 inch and 10 inch tablet screenshots are marked with an asterisk you are not required to provide those screenshots but it's not a bad idea to provide them anyway also keep in mind that we're providing this info not just for closed testing this is our future app listing so it's not a good idea to just enter random stuff alright here we hit save again and now if we go back to the closed testing page but we'll see no errors so we can now hit the start rollout button which makes our game available for the people we assigned as testers those people will get an email invitation to download your app now assuming that we're done with all the testing and fixed all the issues let's move on to publishing our game please note that most of what we just did to set up close testing we would have had to do for publishing anyway meaning because we did set up testing we have less work to do for the publishing itself alright if we now go to the publishing overview page we will see that we can now enable managed publishing which will give us the freedom to decide when to publish to do that we click this manage button and turn manage publishing on now that we got that freedom let's do the actual publishing to do that we go to the production page where we need to create a new release similar to what we just did for closed testing oh and by the way this is also the button to press when you release an update for your app here we need to specify the build that we want to publish since we've already uploaded one for testing we can use it for publishing as well to do that we click this add from library button select our build and click add to release fill out release details and hit save now if we press review release we will see that there is an error we need to select countries or regions where we want our app to be available similar to what we did for closed testing but this time we need to do that for publishing to do that we go back to the production page click country slash regions and add the countries and regions where we want our app to be publicly available now we press this edit release button and review release here to see now errors which means we can now press the start rollout to production button to submit our app to google for review i'm not going to do that because i already have this game approved for public release here this one and before we move on you might be interested to know that step four is complete now let's get back to google's announcement that they're experiencing longer than usual review times basically it might take google several days to review your app until then you just wait for us it took about four days and we got rejected because a ramp description contained quote unquote improper formatting specifically because of the smiley in the full description apple for instance didn't have any issue with this or maybe they just didn't notice anyways we deleted the smiley and our app got approved the moral of the story is this because it takes google days to review your app make sure your app listing is in order before you submit for review otherwise it might take ages for you to get approved now remember the one-time 25 registration fee and that is way cheaper than apple's 99 a year for comparison it took apple less than 24 hours to review our submission another annoying thing about google is that they did send an email notifying us that our app was rejected but when we fixed the app description and resubmitted the app there was no email in about 5 days eventually we opened play console to see our app was approved the moral of this story is that while waiting for an app to get approved by google make sure you check its status and play console don't just wait for an email all right when your app has finally been approved by google and you're ready to publish it given that you did enable managed publishing as was shown in this video earlier we open the app and play console go to publishing overview and hit this review and publish button and publish our app and now if we go to the dashboard page we'll see that our production is active and we can go to the google play listing of our app by clicking this link congratulations the game is now live all right before we wrap up this video again we're currently working on a video series to show you the entire process of making the game we've just published in this video you can check out the game the links are in the video description and if you get interested in learning how to make that game stay tuned and this is it for this video see you in the next one bye you

Channel: MrM Programming

Views: 5,798

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Id: vVAbx7KuWng

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021