Day 129 — Publishing to the Google Play Store

Hey and welcome!

Here’s the last article on this project and it’s all about the process of getting a game published on the Google Play Store! One thing you’ll need to note though is that if you want to create an account you need to pay a one off 25$ USD fee.

First things first if you click on the following link it should redirect you to a terms of service for you to sign if you haven’t created an account before:

If you’re coming across issues then Googling “Play Store Console” should also direct you to where you need to go. Read through those terms and accept them if you’re happy and you’ll be directed to the signup page:

Enter in your relevant details and then pay using the Create account and pay option and your account should be all set up now and ready for you to submit an app to the Play Store.

Next up we’ll need to get the build ready so that it will be compatible with the Play Store. Head into unity and go into your build settings and make sure that it’s currently set to Android and switch it to that if you need to do. If that’s all good then head into your Player Settings next. Go ahead and set your company and game name in here and drag and drop a 128 x 128 image into the Default Icon option.

Now we need to do an important security step, open up the Publishing Settings tab and then select the Keystore Manager option to open up this little window:

Click on the dropdown in the top left here and choose the create new option and save this to somewhere secure, ideally in a dropbox folder or external drive as this is what lets the Play Store know that it’s you making the changes here.

When you’ve done that you can finish up by entering in all the details here making sure you’re using a very secure password and that the Validity is set to 99.

Once you’re happy with all of your settings here you can head back over to your build settings and click on the Build option which will create the APK for your game that you can upload to the Play Store, if you get asked to update your SDK go ahead and choose the highest installed option.

If you head back over to your Google Play Console you should see an option to “Publish an Android App on Google Play” that you can click on and upload your APK file of your game to.

At this point you’ll be prompted to answer multiple questions and fill in quite a few fields on your game such as the description, the target market for your game, promo images etc so you can go ahead and work through this. It does a pretty good job of explaining everything here so there shouldn’t be anything that will trip you up that I can think of currently.

When you have all the details in place and saved you’ll get the option to edit your release which will let you review your game/app and proceed with the rollout option to get in live on the Play Store which can take up to 48 hours.

With that you’re all done here and should hopefully have a successful game/app ready for the world to see! I may look into adding a more detailed description for the Google Play Console part but that may end up needing its own article just to cover it!